Utopia

Reading about Utopia,
that edifice of Moore and Swift –
I wonder how they metered out
such certainties.
I’m sure that if I had the chance,
I’d conjure up Utopia
not in the pages of a book
but here on EARTH.

Art is a fallacy, were we
to look closely at the painting,
or deep enough
into some gothic pile,
we’d find pure logic, or at least –
how it appeared in the craftsman’s brain.

Life also, the tapestry of chance –
consider well the myriad fate of men,
some silently toward a baleful night
descend, under heaven’s watchful glare;

others, a long and placid vista watch
their world rotate upon its ambient course;
mummers and clowns perform life’s travesties –
a sublime mirror to reality.

A siren beckons us to promised shores,
more beguiling than the gorgon’s stare,
or twinkling diamonds in the veil of night –
our saviour and our bane, Utopia.