Faces WA Marseilian plage, 1 March 2019
Earth
I laid flat,
Prostrate,
My head against yours,
That face so familiar
So cherished
Retreated now
Into clouds,
Into distant memories.
I saw that line, remember
That wrinkle, a tinkle
In your eyes or a nose
Screwed up in distaste
A curry too hot, a spice
You did not like but
Surreptitiously I kept
Slipping in.
Now, the rain
Repeats its patter
Small drops leave
My face, mingle
With my tears and fall
To the ground
Where you lay
Beneath, beneath
The resin, the glass,
Underground.
Your lips whisper, voice
Words I cannot hear,
Soft raspberries of
Another time, another
Space when I could
Lay in your arms, soft
Caress.
I clear the earth now,
Dig deeper, my fingers
Cling to this last memory,
A final gift. I have planted
What you loved,
You will grow with it
And I will see,
In those buds and leaves
Clear shadows of your former face.
Walls Coulobres, 2 March 2019
I saw the skin tremble, crinkle
Ashes fall to the ground
The real you formed large
Daggers in place, a gash
And a bump, a terrible sight
The killer in you, the murderous glance.
I ran now, far away,
A nightmare released
But the further I strayed,
The closer you came,
Dark breath sweeping
Behind, obscuring my way
I could not cut it nor wipe it
It enveloped me totally.
For how long?
Other faces leapt up now,
Out of the depths, out of
Those mires of memories
Of pain, of indescribable pain
Into walls of photographs
All the same, a never ending
Gallery of portraits, of children,
Of men, of women, young or old
So many countries can commemorate
A holocaust or a genocide,
A killer betrayed, a killer released.
I scrutinise, search for a clue
Something familiar to link me back
To humanity, a smile, something warm,
A gesture to reconcile the hurt,
The destruction, the death on the wall.
It seeps through, permeates the picture
Gloss, no sheen, no shine can stop.
Others stare, I look at their faces,
See tears swell up and shoulders shake,
The pain, the pain, it is too much to take.
We know them all, we knew them then,
We remember them, we cannot forget.
Their faces carry on haunting me
Throughout this endless night.
I still cannot walk past an empty wall.
Emmanuel Levinas
Edouard Glissant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Levinas
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-face-that-launch-d-a-thousand-ships/
Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Christopher Marlow
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58715/faces-56d23d573ca88
I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that was but a single countenance as if held in a mould.
I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful it was.
I have seen an old face much lined with nothing, and a smooth face in which all things were graven.
I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.
https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1856/poems/27
27 — Poem of Faces.
SAUNTERING the pavement or riding the
country by-road, here then are faces!
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity,
ideality,
The spiritual prescient face—the always welcome,
common, benevolent face,
The face of the singing of music—the grand faces
of natural lawyers and judges, broad at the
back-top,
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the
brows—the shaved blanched faces of ortho-
dox citizens,
The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist's
face,
The ugly face of some beautiful soul, the hand-
some detested or despised face,
The sacred faces of infants, the illuminated face
of the mother of many children,
The face of an amour, the face of veneration,
The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile
rock,
Walt Whitman
And so it goes on for several pages