Before Spring

A very early effort; sub-D.H. Lawrence before I had read D.H. Lawrence. The poem is unfinished: I think I abandoned it because it threatened to go on for ever.

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            Up on the Common the things hold back,
            Waiting, each daring the other for the first
            Bold plunge into Spring; everything watches
            The reckless stain as a few small plants
            Appear, but unconvinced they wait
            For a larger gesture, so that soon –
            It seems in a night – all will be here
            And we’ll look and exclaim, “Oh Spring!” Colours
            Will scintillate, the air will quaver with a fresh
            Sharp taste to the mouth – its cool chill
            Will be felt in our nostrils, thrilling them wide.

Yet who would think that life could come from this:

This dreary vacuum which stifles the mind into
A sleepy blank, from which as it wanders the Common
It wakes perfunctorily to details floating by...

Here, before you reach the trees and their undulating ground,

Feel the flat sandwich made of the levelled grass
And the low overcast of the sky – feel its gloomy
Weight. The grass and bushes spent, their dun
Dry humps cowered to the ground in mouldy pockmarks,
Sunk like a broken graveyard. The light is hidden;
The cloud like a thin wash of steel-black,
Faintly hued with a sun’s coating of powdered
Copper – a matt uniform dust, it seems
As brittle as the dust of the paths. The air is dry,
Unsatisfactory, flaccid – it leaves you feeling
Breathless, you need another gulp of the grey stuff.
When will anything come to relieve this expectancy?
So solemn, lost in a hopeless dream – perhaps
There is only dying here, no moment that will unloose a catch...                  

A few evergreens, disdainful, stand apart from the other trees:

Their huge black swelling self-sufficient, firm
On a broad central stalk. Dark, brooding into
Themselves, they repulse what’s outside. Dank and unmoving,       
They sleep like sullen hamlets in the deep of night.

The rest, the scorned poor neighbours, stand gaunt like a banked

Upsticking of brushwood. In amongst their sprawl see them lost
In nakedness, miserable with indignity, immobile whilst they suffer.
A dried scale, like milky-green emulsion, flakes
On their whitened bark; where it’s peeled the flesh shows nicotined
By the air. The ground is flecked with a rubbish of bramble,
Blackened nettle stubs, and crumbling white-grey
Shreds of straw.
                            Leaves bleakly fill the hollows
And dips, their tired dust colours merging in streaks.
Scuffed to the side of the path, munched under feet,
They limply twist and curl, broken into each other.

Something slips across the mind. Waking, it grasps for the sound.

There. And again. A scattered bird-song sharping
The air sporadically. The few birds are hidden, higher
Now where the spaces are open again, their calls
Questioning, as if to reassure themselves that others
Are there. The plaintive snatches quickly fade.

A dull rumbling undertone – the distant sounds of traffic

On a major road; but faint, irrelevant, with no
Urgency, as if they too were awaiting a revelation.

Through meagre sounds, a deep silence. Through slight

Sullen movements, a deep stillness. Felt.
Pressing against you; intense as grieving. Everything
Is held within this bowl of silent waiting.

A few people stroll. Their faces empty they wander,

Hands behind backs, their heads aimlessly turning.
Dogs gambol, but leap through vacuums and sense it. They quieten.

Stillness. Stillness. A landscape devoid; waiting

Through aeons of time for its transmutation into different   
Life; lost in itself. Is there nothing which stirs?

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© 1969-1972