Monday 11 June 2018

A Wild Penzance Night

This poem is in syllabics with a count of eight and ten. All lines have four stresses, the pattern being variable. All line endings are masculine, except the couplet at lines 23/24 - why, I don't know; I must have failed to pay attention. Of course, syllabic poems with even counts run the risk of being read as uneven tetrameters, pentameters or whatever. Many of these problems were explored by Elizabeth Daryush, a sadly-neglected poet now, in her fascinating syllabic poems. She even wrote syllabic rhyming sonnets in ten syllable lines - that really does stretch things a bit.
   Often when a full gale hits the British Isles the effect is illustrated on TV and in newspapers by shots of the London-bound Intercity train pulling away from Penzance station. The line runs on an embankment right next to the sea (when the tide's in); the train can be engulfed - spectacularly - by breaking waves.
   I posted another poem about Penzance wind and rain on 2 March 2015 - 'A Penzance Ballad'; there's a link here.

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Walking the streets of Penzance town
As the sea wind growls and the dusk dips brown,
The rain clatters on granite flags
And the wind flurries my trousers to rags;
Out in the bay the black sea toils
And the spray on the prom hurtles in coils;
The rocking street lamps wetly gleam,
The glistening gulls maraud through their beam;
Later, roosting on streaming eaves,
They groaningly doze as the big wind heaves.
Down at the bayside station, lights,
Sodium-red, are all glitters and brights,
Bustled by brute gusts whilst the train
For London creeps on the tracks through the rain.
At Eastern Green on the town’s edge,
On top of the rock bank shivered with sedge,
The train’s ensoused by breaking waves
Which thunder against it like men with staves;
Only then does it quit the shore,
Weaving inland under the wind’s hoarse roar.
Back in the town that wind rebounds
From corner to corner like packs of hounds,
Rushing with howls in rough chases,
Leaping at midriffs, snapping in faces.
The last of twilight singes clouds,
Dragging their rusty petticoats like dowds;
The circling hills, by day matt-green,
Erased in gloom have abandoned the scene.
In Mounts Bay with deck lamps ablaze,
A trawler staggers its way through the craze
Of breakers and spume, striving for
Harboured safety and the rain-sopping shore.
Frantic in the bay, Low Lee buoy,
Its light flashing like a child’s broken toy,
Toboggans waves, flounders in troughs,
Whilst the wind batters it, whistles and coughs.
Such is the scene this autumn-time
In a salt-wet town of granite and grime,
Where the gulls catwalk, scream and fight,
Unsettled in the gale-washed Penzance night.

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© August 2014

 

Monday 4 June 2018

In Summer

   How I dislike rank summer’s growth,
   The fetid blooms and cankered leaves,
The gross sun’s steaming of a treacled broth,
Foliage piling in thick-cabled sheaves,
   And creatures killing so that blood
   In torn throats may be lapped as food.

   Yet billions of seeds decay
   Ungerminate, and tumid males
Dissipate their sperm like a drunkard’s spray;
By banks the waters froth in yeast-thick trails,
   Begetting larvae, fish fry, weed,
   Fusing carbon at breakneck speed.

   How sobering, that so much flesh
   So fleetly must enmould and die;
The young, though, raptured by becoming’s flash
Are too unresting to fear tragedy,
   Building, scheming, confecting treason,
   Secretion-driven, blind to reason.

   Not so the old, the disabused:
   Summer’s blitzkrieg growth, grabbing land,
Raping, devouring, flesh and freshness bruised,
Flings up victors’ bounty which hollowed hands
   Refuse, dismayed to have such choice,
   Bound to choose ill and draw the deuce.

   For eyes from which the scales are snatched
   Know well through loss the truth of things,
That fullness always falters, what is hatched
Falls dying in the mulch with broken wings;
   And off some beach man wades in sins
   From which a scapegoat wave begins.

   Summer currents propel that wave,
   Vaunt across oceans, gaining knots,
Until it smack some headland with a heave,
Pulling down rock stacks, homesteads, all in bits,
   And men may mourn that rubbled rent
   But, sun-hot, leap to argument.

   Old men should be explorers, says
   The sage, recklessly stirred by blue
Fresh skies and August sea swells’ dazzling glaze;
But paltry legs urge care: what end is true
   If men throw blows then, seized of breath,
   With naught to show fall down to death?

   No, deal me autumn, winter’s cold,
   When frost and blanching nights creep in –
Vistas of being all bedimmed by mould,
October’s sun become a scrap of tin,
   And January’s marble snows
   Lock purpose and response in floes.

   And yet I know that ramping death
   One night will pummel me in bed,
A clutched thrombosis, gasp and grinding teeth
Will crumb my ligaments and bones like bread;
   But hush, let winter torpid lie,
   And like a mouse or flea sneak by.

   Chill stasis, freeze me at your breast,
   A loath chewer of summer’s broil –
The bawling puke and faeces of the nest,
Microbes and sepsis leeching flesh to oil;
   Energy, being, screeching-mad,
   Panting, feeding and killing-glad:

Raw-scented bucks disdain my careful tread,
Doff, then bully past, buffeting my head.
 
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© August 2014