Today’s Imperative

Today’s Imperative

Today’s Imperative

Others have herblife, bogland, the bird sanctuary.
Or manmade canals and urban decay.

And they have international flights of fancy too:
But wherever they go,

It all looks and sounds the same to me,
Mountains, some work, a nice sunrise that none of the other tourists sees

Or an epiphany that signals a deeper
Engagement with the local patois/native literature.

Then there are the argonauts
Who labour in the interstices of a language, or two at most;

And that crowd whose ambition is to introduce gender
To the reader who hasn’t got one on him or her:

Long warm-ups, agreed movements from a to b, and put up the shutters
With a lyrical turn or various little-known fabrics and figures,

Such as you often find in those who use family detail as glitter
To stud the rough black rock of their fictions.

And I like all this, but
It doesn’t live in me, it doesn’t wake me up in my skin at night.

I’d rather sing to you about what’s imperative,
So, listen. Take your mind off the stresses and anxiety of life

And whether you’re in a southern town
Like Cork or Montpellier, or even Washington or Rome—

Go pour yourself a glass of wine.
Now. Imagine the kind of man who trusts himself to fortune

And says: ‘Let us go wherever it takes us.
We’ve heard that a better life awaits us and we’ve seen worse.

Today, banish worry, exile it, the night’s young now
And soon we’ll be back to the grind, in fact, maybe tomorrow . . .’