I then decided to write another set, this time of shorter lyrics in various sizes, shapes and metres. I started in March 2014 and finished in February 2015. That's the order the poems are meant to be read in, March - February. I now post the complete set.
For the record, the individual poems were posted on 14 March, 13 April, 9 May, 15 June, 11 July, 8 August, 11 September, 9 October, 14 November, 12 December 2015, 10 January and 15 February 2016. Some of the postings contained a few notes to explain anything unusual in the poems.
Also, one or two of the early poems had references to the Christian year which I planned to continue throughout the sequence; unfortunately this fell by the wayside.
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MARCH
March murk done, the chilly dew
Drips from the shock-head churchyard yew,
Quicksilvers grass,
Glistens like glass,
Speckling the dusty graves anew.
Drips from the shock-head churchyard yew,
Quicksilvers grass,
Glistens like glass,
Speckling the dusty graves anew.
Freshly, the tight-fist orange sun
A cloud-tall morning blush has flung;
Daffodils prattle in the breeze,
Blue-skinned crocuses flop and sneeze;
The dip-gathered frost
Like a glint-toothed ghost
Hugs close its winter miseries.
Blue-skinned crocuses flop and sneeze;
The dip-gathered frost
Like a glint-toothed ghost
Hugs close its winter miseries.
Drumming its creaking bone-break thud,
The woodpecker, splashed with Jesu’s blood,
The year’s agonies
Shrilly cries:
Lady Day primrose lights the wood.
Shrilly cries:
Lady Day primrose lights the wood.
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APRIL
Returns on the April wind,
Long-legging the lake’s sedges;
Enthralled it spears at a find –
A tench dies in its passion
Mourned by a mist of midges.
Shroud-grey and dusty that heron
Corpse-like on parachute wings
Hangs on the lake’s black waters;
Willow flock froths up and sings,
The aspen is a white-leaved clarion,
But the heron broods on slaughters.
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MAY
The trees are leaved; even the ash
Its many-fingered crown has dressed;
Noah’s splash
Must bide a year. With tipsy cheer
The lopside stare at the bank’s crest
Whistles a leer.
Crazyhead oak with fat-leaf veils
Enswathes itself, aglim with sun;
In shadows, snails
Aboard the nettles’ spiteful bristles,
Thrush-grabbed are cracked to death among
The throstle jostled thistles.
The splay-pined larch drops seed from cones
To fruit in the earth’s spicy pall;
With tortured bones,
Christ ascended in His blood’s banner,
Hovers; will He in judgement fall
Like the wind-fanner?
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JUNE
On solstice day
The grass grows high,
Swaying, swaying;
Uncut these months to crop as hay
Like women’s hair it swells
In the dust-hot breeze;
Above in the eye-blue sky
The clouds assaying
Like merchant-men float by, float by,
And I,
Wading the rock pool depths of grass
Treading soft quilts,
Rattling the seed heads
Like sea snails’ shells,
Shrink in the skin-dry blaze of sun
Honeying the leaning leaze.
Hedgerows scorched as brass
Tick with the tuts
Of long-tailed tits
And
A cinnabar moth
Like a blood-splashed leaf
Lilts and jilts, lilts and jilts,
Drifting among the petals and shreds
Of white Anne’s lace
And knapweed’s bun
Of shock-blue threads,
Yellow yarrow and violet vetch.
Waist-high in the grasses’ butts,
Heavy with grits,
I run a dust-scent hand
Through the blond stalks
Of stiff-eared barley
And fescue like broth,
Purplish dog’s tail and tufted bent –
All pleated in suede and fawn.
Ah, it’s Barleycorn’s grief
That he’s scythed from his place
For dark malt or for breads
And in a crock to fetch;
And thumping Bible truth talks
Of wheat that must parley
And agree to be pent
In the earth’s black bourn
While shriving winter passes
That there be riot of grasses.
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JULY
Erect in the sward
Like Wells’s war-world Tripods,
Feasting on oil-hot sun,
Settlers on lank legs,
Ragwort – staggerwort –
Whiffs like dung.
Yellow as plates of yolk
Its flowers, its leaves
Like curly kale;
And all July the wold
It roves – its burnt-gold troves
A swagman’s trawl.
Each flower’s a thirteen petal
Womb coddling swags
Of yolky sacs;
But like jakes-dregs
It shakes scour-gut aches
Through uncareful cattle.
Flowering done, what’s left
Is scranched bran in a cuff
Of rusty petals; a swart
Stink in a puff –
Tart – of mare’s fart
In the noon heat adrift.
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AUGUST
Luscious as syrup | the lazy sea swelters,
Dusk descends dimly | on the viscid dull waves,
Windless, weak savours | are wearily wafted,
Harrying heat drowses | in humid hot caves.
Assumed, a full moon | makes metal the heavens,
Bronzing the bowl | of the big-arched and bruised sky,
Highlighted cloud hefts | halo the horizon,
A gimlet of gold | glows on the sea’s glint eye.
The Plough sinks softly | through a quicksand of stars,
Vivid Venus | vamps in the height of the vault,
Sleepers suffer their dreams | like sandcrabs scuttling,
Night’s heat enshrouds them, | their sweat heavy as salt.
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SEPTEMBER
In the grey-fog dawn, dank and greasy,
A jackdaw cried;
A nut-snacking squirrel, anxiously busy,
Dashed to the bushes, scorned by a cold-eyed
Michaelmas daisy.
Stewed by the mild sun a roadkill fox
Is torn by a crow;
A mid-day spider, mending the shocks
To its web, seizes a moth, silly-slow,
In the rusting hollyhocks.
Equinox night charcoals the woods,
Erasing the rooks
In their elm top roosts. Woodfloor foods
Hunt and are hunted in the silent nooks
Under bindweed roods.
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OCTOBER
A lime leaf, wind-whipped from its tree,
Switchbacked in air and plucked my wrist,
Its broad-faced green had blanched like cloth
And rust had made its edges twist;
Sick, with no remedy,
It fell like a struck moth.
October’s like the grey-backed sea,
Brutal and languid under mist,
Extracting life from summer’s growth
And crushing it as winter’s grist:
That lime leaf guilelessly
Has blundered into truth.
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NOVEMBER
Mid-morning twilight is the brightest hour
And drab is any final rot-bruised flower,
The damp-drenched air is thin to breathe,
Pricking cheek and spotting sleeve;
Slugs glisten in the mould,
Half-stunned by the wet cold.
The wagtail at the rain-brimmed ruts
Dashes forlornly, flutters, tuts;
A florid pheasant lands,
Running for the stands
Of filigree and white-bark birch now stripped
Of bile-spot leaves which all night long have dripped.
The ash trees gape above the waste
Of straw-blanched roughland grass – a paste
Of mud and water welling through its roots;
A green-dark hemlock sags beneath its fruits
Of sullen rainfall drops –
November’s bitter slops.
Mid-afternoon, a dusk like devil’s grog
Stuffs the weald’s valleys with creosote fog;
In fields and town mist climbs,
Crisps pools and glass with rimes;
Cold-thickened night solidifies:
The wagtails roost with wary eyes.
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DECEMBER
The morning air flares on the skin,
The sky is high and iceberg cold,
The crimson sun, a too-close world,
Looms over rooftops that the day begin.
An ice-lump frost like frozen milk
Plasters the grass and rigid oaks,
A crow cracks the silence with rattling croaks;
Sun-touched, the frost glistens like silk.
A split-pale fence begins to steam,
The sun’s heat creeping on its topmost bar;
Like incense drifting near and far
The frost exhales a breath-thin stream.
Wet-black the fence; and now the grass and oaks
Fume cloudily in the sun’s light;
Winter’s colours emerge from white –
Ash-greens and dunnage like turned cloaks.
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JANUARY
When Epiphany snows in the sud-white field
Icily to the snowdrops yield,
Fathers and lasses in crumping boots,
Kicking through drifts with clenching toes,
Shriek at the hedgeside snowdrop shoots
Which loll their heads with a frozen nose.
The glittering snow like jewels of Ind
Glares in the polishing skin-flail wind:
Sherbet drops ashake on stalks,
Milk teeth jangling for faeries’ pence;
Flustered snowdrops like bobbing corks
Are picked by lasses for ornaments.
Then snow-melt swamps the field to mud,
Lasses’ jeans are splashed like blood;
Loam and rain like wattle paste
Clutch the snowdrops’ slapping wands;
Petal-mired like girls disgraced
They whitely, sprightly, banter in bonds!
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FEBRUARY
Ah the foggy, foggy dawns
And misty eves which pierce the bones;
Such rat-grey gloomings
And dead-man loomings,
Fox spoor on the dew-black lawns
And wind-wisps making sudden moans:
Dusk despite all lingers later,
The ditchman, digging, stretches straighter;
Candlemas coughings quenched,
Though freezing rains bedamp,
Cherry buds like fingers clenched
Swell and fidget to untamp.
The sun like a sucked mint pales the sky,
Linnets and sparrows shout hue and cry,
Blackbirds forage straws,
Bright berries tempt the ’daws,
But should a brown-dense cloud throw cover,
All stills lest winter be not over.
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© March 2014 - February 2015
