(i)
Migrant sandpiper,
Both forager and winger;
Wader in between.
Cervantes, I still see you plagued with debt
And roaming Spain half-beggared by its king;
The Jews now banished, Moors are under threat,
Our Europe’s sovereigns bent on conquering.
You mock all hankering for a courtly love,
The lost and gone of tournament and lance;
Yet in your Rabelais-like push and shove
You hatch Erasmus dreams of tolerance
Between the Middles Ages and your tour
Through plots and greeds of bungling humankind.
In all the giants and windmills you must fight
For twenty years of silence you endure,
Beside flatfooted Sancho’s earthbound mind
Are you still Desiderius’s knight?
Wintering southward,
Wanting the best of both worlds;
Seasoned voyager.
Though injured in Lepanto’s hands-on fight,
Five years I languish in Algiers until
Redeemed; a score then taxman when, despite
Myself, my failures too will grind my mill.
I know the pimps and backstreets of Seville,
The canons, barbers, ladies of the night
Whose stories too I ink out with my quill
When in the end my life and work unite.
Careers that flop or somehow don’t take flight
And each false hope I never could fulfil;
As truth and fiction blend in all I write,
Like interplays of life with God’s own will,
In all the wrongs my errant Don would right,
Forgotten dreams of justice echo still.
Low over water,
Burrowing deep in the sand;
Busy dark-tipped beak.
My namesake, I admire your grit and pluck
When under threat of death you’ll hold your nerve—
How through the years of exile and ill luck,
Your honesty will neither skew nor swerve.
I marvel at such long-term cussedness,
Although you work in rival Vega’s shade,
You trust a story’s open-endedness
And history’s long-hidden accolade.
I know some lives unfold by fluke and chance—
Yet decades hoarding grain and ballasting
Your youth’s mistake and only to finance
Spain’s Philip’s overdrawn warmongering—
How could you house such thoughts of tolerance
And lose your years in propping such a king?
Remembered summer
Traversing Eurasia;
Long-distance flier.
Though sober now, I know I was obsessed
And quit the coop that I both craved and fled
To hover near an era’s watershed;
Look not for this year’s birds in last year’s nest.
Among my vagrants and my dispossessed
All arguments too easily gainsaid,
So I can cure you I amuse instead—
The truest words are spoken still in jest.
My humanist compassion was hard won
In dogged years of hurt I overwrite;
Quixote and Quixana die as one
Beside his weeping squire and acolyte.
Of course you hear what smarts behind the fun;
Cervantes too was once that saddened knight.
(ii)
Array of coverts,
Spangling flared out green-blue eyes;
A peacock’s fantail.
Are you that wanton Jack or Doctor Donne
Or both, becoming every part you play,
A lover chiding the unruly sunne
Or preacher warning all who disobey?
Are you the Catholic boy, your mother’s son
Whose people still would rather die than stray,
Or Protestant believing all are one,
That all may heare, Lord heare us, when wee pray?
The new philosopher whose sun must stay
And bid the passive earth about it runne,
Or wooer whose sun’s motions trace a day
To thwart lovemakings only just begun?
In showy puns, in each fantailed conceit,
Your actor’s role and you conspire to meet.
Cries for attention,
Black-blue flapping and gliding;
A peafowl in flight.
Why can’t you fathom all my reasons why?
My tortured brother gave his chaplain’s name,
Then ...
