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LIFE CYCLE 2014

Life Cycle

"At the start of the mid-year break [in Baghdad], on 18 January 1962, we flew to Basra. In the air above Ur, sitting with my eyes closed, I received the words 'Life Cycle' and scribbled down headings for a work on a whole life and its cycle."

Nicholas Hagger, My Double Life 1: This Dark Wood, p.142

    I. Garden

    I sit in my garden in autumn sun
    Above a dozen curved, perfumed rose-beds
    Whose flagstone paths present a Union flag –
    That still holds in our dwindling, fractured time –
    Around a fountain plashing to a bowl
    And gaze past oaks and fields to the dark wood
    That inspired my view of my double life
    On this rim of the crater round seven hills,
    And muse upon the ages of my life
    And on the stages all lives pass through from 10
    Their hatching and larvae to winged flight.
    In the arbour near a camellia bush
    I look beyond the pool at buttercups
    Like those that filled my childhood fields and muse
    On my twelve seven-year ages that grew me
    And the twelve cycles that propel all growth:
    Twelve cycles like medieval labours.


    II. Reflection: Twelve Seven-Year Ages

    Birth, infancy and childhood spring and strain.
    Species, once born from womb or hatched from eggs,
    Transmogrify into their final form. 20
    Animals' life cycles metamorphose
    Through three or four stages and life cycles:
    Fish, mammals, reptiles and birds are born from
    Mothers or hatch from eggs, are young, then grow
    Into adults; amphibians like frogs,
    Which hatch from spawn into wriggling tadpoles,
    And newts metamorphose from gills to lungs,
    Breathe under water and then air on land;
    From eggs insects become wormy larvae,
    Inactive pupae, then adults that fly; 30
    Dragonflies, grasshoppers and cockroaches
    Pass from eggs into nymphs and then grow wings
    In three stages, not four; spiders have three;
    Reptilian snakes hatch from eggs as snakelets;
    Birds hatch from eggs to chicks, fish and brown bats
    Are born as pups as are all great white sharks.
    Transforming paths of metamorphosis
    Take species from three to seventy years.
    Humans waul and grow towards adulthood
    Through families and schools, strict pedagogues. 40
    I bang my high-chair tray, map on the wall
    Of Europe showing front lines in the war,
    At peace as my mother moves like a giant.
    I sit among buttercups and acorns
    In a gold field and bask in gold sunshine
    In harmony with the blue universe,
    Under the dome of the One-sheltering sky.
    But at night I cower within my bed
    As the sky fills with droning doodle-bugs
    And my father sits and reassures me 50
    And then limps off from childhood polio,
    And I shudder at transitoriness
    Beneath the enduring, sheltering heavens.
    My forebears dug, pruned trees or vines, sowed seed
    Under Aries, the ram, in the night sky,
    Symbol of Amon-Ra shown with ram's horns,
    At the start of the zodiacal year,
    The Great Year whose labours begin in March,
    And cycle of existence, spirit's birth.
    Amid my memories of lopping lime-trees 60
    And forking beds and making piles of weeds
    To prepare for growing and sprouting seeds,
    The Wheel of Life shows One revolves many.
    The Wheel of Life shows One becomes many.

    Youth, school-days. First in short trousers, then long,
    A child of the socialist Welfare State,
    I grew away from Nature under rules,
    Nightly homework and organised ball games.
    I caught tadpoles in the Strawberry Hill pond.
    I studied newts and spotted butterflies, 70
    And alone in a dark garden I gazed
    In wonder at a night sky full of stars
    And felt I was one with the universe.
    But school work closed round me, I ceased to see.
    Textbooks intruded on the mystery.
    I munched meals at the high nursery table
    In my family, worked and went to bed
    And now my path was through my school's classrooms
    And playing-fields, and not the universe.
    I had three sisters who did not survive 80
    Post-war infancy, and I lamented
    The transitory, fleeting lives we have
    Beneath the sunshine and the cloudless blue
    And the faint breeze from an eternal source.
    My ancestors planted, picked flowers, hunted
    And I recall the zodiacal bull
    As I hoed in the garden of my soul.

    Adolescence brought me my destiny.
    Nature still warmed me like a summer's day.
    I relive long grass below the first tee 90
    And clacking grasshoppers and warm sunshine
    And again blend into the universe
    And live above the buzzing of the bees.
    I see Eden sitting beside Churchill,
    Stand up for our Empire, speak on Suez
    And watch bemused as he withdraws our troops.
    And sitting on a seat on lower field
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