Sprout Kale, or, Cake Month

World's End, South Africa

"Who’s a-feär’d?"

—Thomas Hardy’s motto for the Society of Dorset Men

Here now is chaos once again,

Primeval mud, cold stones and rain.

Here flesh decays and blood drips red,

And the Cow’s dead, the old Cow’s dead.

—Robert Graves, “Dead Cow Farm” (1918)

I know a thing I ought not put in verse

But should descend with me into the earth,

For I’m half Saxon—quarter Dorset man,

Another quarter from old Saxony.

Like my model master, Thomas Hardy,

I harbor notions that ought not be read.

The old Saxons favored inhumation—

Up in Anglia, tribals burned their dead.

From around Wimborne, George Bailey ferried

Past Meadow Stream, now the river Allen,

In February, or Sprout Kale—Cake Month,*

At length to Africa. There, grandchildren

Mingled their seed with that of many tribes,

And, there born, by right there, too, were buried.

♮♮♮

Drough day sheen for how many years

The geäte ha’ now a-swung

Behind the veet o’ vull-grown men

And vootsteps of the young,

Drough years o’ days it swung to us

Behind each little shoe,

As we tripped lightly on avore

The geäte a-vallèn to.

 —William Barnes, “The gate a-fallen to”†

*The Anglo-Saxons called February “Cake Month,” inasmuch as cakes were offered to the gods then, or “Sprout Kale,” since their cabbages sprouted in that month.

†“The gate a-fallen to,” or shut—which is to say, death—was the last poem of the Dorset dialect poet and philologist William Barnes (1801–86).

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Weird: An Anglo-Saxon Week

The Anglo-Saxon god Tiw, or Týr, for whom Tuesday is named.

Gæð a wyrd swa hio scel! / Weird does as she will!—Beowulf (sometime before 1025 CE)

Saturn's Saturday's deity—and god of old age, where I am now.

Sunday and Monday speak for themselves,

Tiw, Woden, Thunor, and Friga for the other days.

Eostre named your Easter for you.

But there's no special day or time set aside for Wyrd;

Fortuna imperatrix mundi, she rules the lesser gods!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4U9QJ1nzrg

Sæternesdæġ, Mensis Februarius 8, 2025

At Gorillaspoort

At Gorillaspoort in the Great Karoo

I one day watched a monkey on a chain

climb up a pole to the little kennel

in an old Boer’s backyard, in which it lived.

The sun beat upon a solitary pepper tree,

from which an evaporation cool box hung.

There never could have been gorillas

there, within a thousand miles, at any rate,

so why then had they called it “Gorilla Gate”?

Carthaginian Hanno saw some on the Gabon coast—or perhaps Mount Cameroon—

two and a half thousand years ago.

The natives taught him their word for these:

Γόριλλαι (gorillai), preserved for us in Greek.*

The Carthaginians naturally couldn't speak

to them or capture any of the mighty males,

but the Punic sailors killed three females,

whose skins were taken back to Carthage, where they lay in a temple museum—at best

until, centuries later, the Romans burned it down: Carthago delenda est!

At Gorillaspoort, the monkey shook its chain.

(What was I doing there? Just on a ride.)

How near the forehead to the wrinkled brain!

How close to thinking the close-fitting hide

that shelters it, though neither long abide.

We’ve all of us some kind of skin outside.

How like to difference the everlasting same.

How comparable a feeling to a pain.

So why, then, did they call it Gorilla Gate?

No one could say, or even thought it odd.

No monkey there would ever meet a mate—

no more did I, at that distant date.

“Doggone it!” politely means “Goddamn!”

One (maybe?) does the best one can.

No one can say what makes a poem good.

No one would tell me—especially if they could.

The Qu’ran denies it's poetry—it’s more than that:

The Word of God, delivered by His deed.

Yet it’s poetic, it appears, in Arabic

—which I, confounded ape, can't read.

What gates have to do with gorillas I don't know. / Evolution must have made it so. /

Even viruses and bacteria apparently have social lives. / Our world's a singularity. It thrives.

*Carthaginian troops, mercenaries who spoke many different languages, were commonly commanded in koinē Greek, the elite lingua franca of that era.

February 10, 2025