Ancient of Autumn Days

by Steven Stark and dedicated to G.A. Compton

The singed embers of the pear tree flicker red as Rahab's rope. 

Yet no trumpets, but whispering winds (no less mighty), announce this great fall.

The sweetgum sage waves his wand, weaving wisdom into colored stars. 

Yet the Magi must travel, and Diogenes must set down his cloak.

The youthful maple, like young Achilles in the lust of battle, is mortally wounded. 

But he laughs and holds high his banner stained with sunset blood.

The pistache contemplates her colors, golden orange and scarlet spice, knowing that the Queen of Sheba in all her glory was not arrayed as one of these.

The stoic elm fades, resigning his kind, quiet shade with one last gift -

-the graceful flaxen fall of his summer substitution, when Apollo was appeased and our frail faces were cooled.  

The great-hearted ash is weeping honeyed tears.

And a heart burns, crimson and contrite, as the wrinkles fall deeper around autumn eyes.

Theology From The Plain Courtesy of G.A. Compton

Rediscovering the poetry of my great-great uncle G.A. Compton has been a great joy over the last few years.   Many of his poems strike right at the heart of the ways I have come to think.  Here are three poems,  published in his 1950 book "Puns, Poetry and Prose", that make their way deeper and deeper into my soul everyday.  They are truly Theology From The Plain (albeit from Uncle Barry's West Virginia hills!).

Two Sermons

I went to hear a preacher.

How his lusty voice did ring!

He nomenclatured nameless Love

Just like a mundane thing.

One part of Love was vengeance,

To ablate an heired sin!

(Then, I hoped Love would be cheated

And feel a deep chagrin!)

I went to hear a robin

Help to mauve the ashy dawn,

And thought he’d burn the new leaves of

The twig he salaamed on.

Aurora flung her curtains

At the throbbing reveille,

And hallooed thru the windows,

That the preacher lied to me!

Crucibles

Without pain

Happiness

Could not be;

Heaven is 

Estimated thru

Gethsemane.

Without fear,

No stile would arise

With each stair a hope

Ending in the skies-

Pain, fear-

Finite crucibles

Purge us to merge

Into

Infinite seas.

Conformity

Just buckle on most any creed,

Like picking up a stole-

No creed was ever fitted, yet,

Exactly to each soul.

Convention says that you must wear

One o'er your sinful heart,

So put it on - but grow until

You burst the thing apart.

Over Seas by G.A. Compton

The wise men look no more toward the star;

The shepherds, all, are blinded in its light;

The herald-song is silenced by the jar

Of sudden death's triumphant scream. The blight

That will dwarf little children yet unborn,

Drops from the skies and lurks beneath the seas,

While venomed hate, this very Christmas morn,

Cankers the heart of nations, like disease.

A mockery in churches now is sung

Of Him, who taught the ways of peace, good will;

Rachel, again, is made to mourn her young

By Herods, who deny Him, as they kill--

Foul stench of war in smokes that reek and blur--

His gifts today--His frankincense and myrrh!

--December 25, 1941

Revelation by G.A. Compton

When I think of that wide expanse of Night,

And all my mind urged by my soul and heart

Peers at its opaque walls with finite sight,

And sees but doubt step forth with poisoned dart;

When I ask if death's shoals do border on

that ageless, graspless thing, Oblivion,

Or is the Lethe-sloping shore to dawn,

Soft as the touch that lulled Endymion-

Then the immortal love, my dear, that you

Have brought, lifts me above my mortal ken,

('Tho reason, with all logic, may not view

The scene confounding tongue and agile pen;)

And I look down at doubt from far above

And know there is a God, and God is Love.

Conformity

I have appreciated my great great uncle's poetry and prose for a long time, but this poem really, really reveals him as a kindred spirit. Fantastic.

Conformity

by G.A. Compton

Just buckle on most any creed,

Like picking up a stole-

No creed was ever fitted, yet,

Exactly to each soul.

Convention says that you must wear

One o'er your sinful heart,

So put it on - but grow until

You burst the thing apart.

Trees

Trees

by G.A. Compton

Wide marked with fallow graves is patient earth

Where peasants, scheming rogues and palsied kings

Crept to the teeming womb that gave them birth

To boast a brief dominion over things.

She watched them fashion crowns from her best gold;

And from her ore, hot gyves and blades of war;

She saw them scratch papyrus with the bold

And childish letters, lord and avatar.

Earth laves her wounds with rain spun from her seas,

And drops a seed upon her shrinking scars--

Then, rhythmic beauty dances to the breeze

With arms of silver waving at the stars-

Thru centuries its liquid finger mulls

Its nectar in the crater of men's skulls.

Der Fuehrer

This is one of many poems Barry wrote during WWII, when the fate of the world was still very much up in the air.

Der Fuehrer

by G.A. Compton


The world has seen great empires tumble on

The foolish heads of greater men than you:
You, with your big complex, Napoleon,
And gangster-laughter at a murdered Jew -
A painter with dead Alexander's dream;
A corporal with Caesar's lost desire;
A little Hun, with arson torch agleam,
Setting a writhing, tortured earth on fire.

Simpering, drooling kings have torn down
What saintly seers have builded thru the years;
Each ounce of gold in each barbaric crown,
Has been bought with an anguished nation's tears!
When we think of their fates we do not fear
Your foolish putty-face and clownish leer.

Avowal

Avowal

by G.A. Compton

(my great, great uncle)





When I am old and broken like a reed,
And sunsets spill no more the ruby wine
That bacchanal the birds - too spent to heed
The genesis of spring in sod and vine:
When silver tongues of maple trees are mute
To this, almost, insensate shell of me,
And April breathes upon a broken lute,
And silence fills the old affinity -

Then, as I leaf the page on fading page
Of intermittent memory, I'll live-
Despite this bold and truculent pillage-
As fully, having all that life can give-

And I vow, I swear, it shall be ever new-
My love, the old, old love, I bring to you.