Monday 4 April 2011

Charon

weary
leaned and rowed
and the boat
struck out
across the space
and through the floods
of time
- fifty souls upon the bank
each and every night -

but then the gods were restless
and the numbers of those souls
increased to a nightly thousand

and Charon
weary leaned and rowed
and the boat
struck out
across the space
and through the floods
of time
- the thousand souls upon the bank
each and every night -

then none

then one

a ghostly
shivery
shadow
soul

and Charon
weary
leaned and rowed
and the boat
struck out
across the space
and through the floods
of time
to Dis
where the shadow stepped onto the shore
and turned and said
I am the last

and weary
Charon softly smiled
and put away the oars

and wept

_____
gw2011

12 comments:

  1. Nice ending - a loverly kick-in-the-guts

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  2. Too beautiful a poem, Gwilym :)

    wishes,
    devika

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  3. Wonderful ferryman verse. Thankyou.

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  4. Great number, Gwilym ... thanks for sharin' Charon!

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  5. nice. wonder of an ending.

    lovecraft predicted Charon (not by name, but by saying Pluto had a moon). he also predicted strange creatures lived there, but I don't have the energy to Google it.

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  6. Gedle, "a kick in the guts" yes, the world need precisely that!

    Devika, Gerry, Gordon, John, Clowncar, many thanks.

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  7. You are not perhaps beginning to revise the sentiments expressed in your earlier doomsday denying posts?

    I hear the mayan calendar is due to wind up in the next year or so...

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  8. Hello Gedle,

    I just heard that the ozone hole over the ozone hole is now bigger than ever, and when I predicted this would happen a couple of years ago I was told by the 'experts' that I was wrong and that the hole was in fact shrinking.

    Regarding the Mayan calendar my intuitive feeling is that it is the period of the calendar is the length of the orbit of a comet we are yet to see. Maybe there will be some preliminary fireworks when we pass through the present oncoming comet's tail in October 2011?

    I hope you are all looking after yourselves in NZ and keeping an eye on what's going on around Fiji - lot of seismic activity. Have you had any more whale strandings, such as preceeded the Christchurch quake?

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  9. "the ozone hole over the ozone hole"??? :) , that's me - drunk again!

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  10. Damn ozone hole... I thought once they did away with CFCs in the flyspray we'd all be ok. Sunburn down here's a much more serious issue than it is for you english roses.

    Haven't been paying much attention to earthquakes in the pacifc except to note that the are happening. The aftershock sequence in Christchurch has died down for the moment - if our nation's much vilified astrolo-meteorolo-geologist Ken Ring is at all correct there'll be a slight increase in strength and frequency around the 20th of this month. Ruapehu however, (one of a trio of volcanoes in our north island is currently doing things our geologists haven't seen it do before - they assure us there is no immediate danger.

    Comet you say? I have a book in my shelf by one Graham Phillips. Apparently he does TV documentaries. I go through cycles of being amazed and then dusgusted by this book. The length of the cycle is approximately the length of time it takes for me to forget that I looked his references up last time I read the book and found they were all made up. Still, to be so convincing there must be some truth under it all.
    He talks about a comet that visited some few thousand years ago and whose appearance coincided with the advent of monotheism in Egypt (the Aten cult?) and numerous other religious upheavals worldwide includiong South America.

    Would this be the same one?

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  11. Hello Gedle, The comet generating all the hype (and much nonsense) is Comet Elenin. Best place to go is www.spaceobs.org which is in Russian but there's an English translate button if you need it.

    That's interesting about Ruapehu. I'll take a look.
    I think it's possible something could happen in the Mediterranean area before long as there have been numerous small earthquakes in the 2, 3, and 4 range - a lot of them near Sicily, Greece, and Turkey.

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