THE AGE OF STEEL

The Age of Steel is a collection of lyrical and complex poems in the English language by Rudi Matić, an author of Soviet and East European extraction.  Five selections from the book appear below.

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    WAR IN THE AGE OF INTELLIGENT MACHINES

    Sprawl of automata, bereft of tongue;
    All that we see will surely disappear
    In winterfall, slung wholly in that silence;
    A lid of moths and after-wings. Endlösung,
    Somnambulant ambience of close of day;
    Whose nearness soon is neither frontispiece
    Nor immanence, but sleep more cool than air,
    Where all the tasks of flesh are obsolete.

    Initialize.
    Process.
    Calculate.
    Execute.

    Ganglia rise in thermonuclear colors.
    The earth the sea the cities shine like fire.
    I press my fingers to the quiet stars.
    War in the age of intelligent machines.

     

    AUTUMNAL

    The gods of man: the crack in the facade.
    That morning of tomorrows fell away.
    But orders have been given, paeans bleat.
    The void remains discernible enough.

    No words. No ceremony. I set sail.
    New permutations gather, old assume
    The camouflage of days, withdrawn yet not;
    Earth, fire, water, air, I slip away,
    Winding, a slow and languorous cortège,
    Against the cramped horizons—
    Wolf Man: autumnal, liminal, assured:
    Discarding the continua of farewells;
    Embracing vacuity;
    Guttering to ash in Cheshire grins of time.

    What shadows fall between us and the world!
    The enigmatic gulls that, like ourselves,
    Are sick of man.  After victory, brightness?
    So we thought. Not so.

    The sea of words will ache forever.
    Sail homeward, wakening from everything.

     

    A WHITENESS

    As sibilant as snow, that awfulness:
    The light of Heaven on the weight of Earth;
    Consummate, absent, call it what you will,
    It does not waver, bend, but only stream
    Endless assent, in möbii of ribands
    That inlay beauty on all that they have
    Predestined us to love, and we are lost,
    Ever to mark those plays of passing light.

    Under the name of God, under its sword,
    Under the shoals of late pale fallen snow,
    Under the penitence of shadowy walls
    Whose every stone is spectral, under boughs
    Where there is no deception, lies a whiteness:
    Time’s limitless forehead, stung. The prick of thorns.

     

    THE LONG MIGRATION

    Extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.
    Biological winter. Seas and wood perdure,
    Severe and stark. The protohuman dawn.

    What pseudomorphs glissade deep underneath
    The surface of the amniotic water
    We have grown old in drinking?

    Ancestral roots dissemble. Over time,
    The faces we construct to interact
    Delusion makes our own.

    Only am I myself against
    Algol, Andromeda: far, indifferent, mute.
    The cold intolerable Absolute.

     

    MY HUMAN FORM

    Within the human day I wove
    Mythologies of war and love
    And fed my eyes on all that seems,
    To gild my shred of time with dreams.

    But time and day and all their lies
    Proved shadows only children prize.
    I tired of the shadows’ storm.
    And so I shed my human form.

    Akin to eagles on the wind
    I now roam past this mortal ken
    Into the lands you do not know,
    And keep no name nor feature more.