Crawley 1992
Videomatic Presentations
Bygones
The Voice Of The Rain
Hear the poet write, disjointed, a biography;
(Though inconsistencies beg order doubts are refused).
Step out of the shadows + into the play
Make your mark to pay them off
As you taste the audience – empty –
Applauding to a man.
(What man can stand(?))
When the brink is teetered over all there is another brink.
(Breathe deep the sterile air
And prepare for ascension, Footfruit, old friend.)
The dramas in which we play (games of chance)
can make the poorest rich.
(I contain a multitude)
Step into the shadows + out of the play
Be franc enough to pay your way
As the hounds bay at your kneecaps
+ the Last Post is recalled
Taste our polite refusal
– Upstanding (Aren’t we all?).
(Which man would leave(?))
Boy scouts searching for arrows,
As the black hat idly sits, waiting,
On the bench for words it knows.
The now sung, packed, unpacked,
Is so slow to guide him on,
His paths are gone.
(A Multitude cries out with remedies)
All that is needed is an ending to the unending,
A word to the wise.A.F. Harrold 23rd June 1993
Cover Story
The Original Cassette Releases
Germany Rhymes
Recorded in 1995 for the English school Richard was teaching at in Berlin. His sister Rebecca shares the billing playing Hamish to his Dougal.
The Voice Of The Rain
And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to Heaven, whence, vaguely formed, altogether changed, and yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn,
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, and make pure
and beautify it:
(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfillment, wandering,
Recked or unrecked, duly with love returns.)Walt Whitman