Forfending Every Fable...

Forfending every fable, every fad,
Reposing on right doctrine, rightly read,
Glimpsing Godly glamour which makes men glad,
Marvellous it is that merry on mind’s milk,
Hauled heavenward by heartwork and by head,
Sainted, we see truth, superfine as silk.

====================

© June 2015

Young Girls

Lines one, three, six and eight of each stanza are trochaic.

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Lively yet demure, young girls intent
   On Saturdays in supermarkets on
Urging parents that whatever’s spent
   Their chosen treat survive the checkout run,
   Have all the fresh plump glow of eight-year-olds,
Depthlike trustful eyes which none beholds
   Without a wish to take their hands and guide
Innocency through the day’s betide.
         How do I know? I had one once,
         Though now she’s gone.

Joy that integrates the self it is

   To care for them, to feed and play with them,
Read them bedtime tales and with a kiss
   Settle them down, droop-eyed, at slumber’s hem;
   Of course there’s wilfulness and small girl screams,
Tearful throes when you disrupt their schemes,
   But soon a purposed hush engulfs the house,
Screen-engaged, your miss is as a mouse.
         How do I know? I had one once,
         Though now she’s gone.

Oh, that parents part, what wickedness!

   For children, essence-merged in a safe world,
Cling to its terrain yet must confess
   A choice of parent which leaves all meaning swirled;
   Perhaps they then reject the one apart,
Distance dimming love’s unwelcome smart,
   For, truth, if love were stop-knot tight in use
Misses might prefer to slip that noose.
         How do I know? I had one once,
         And now she’s gone.

Now I scan the sea, its salt-thirst miles,

   Pining lost years of helpmeet fatherhood;
Canny girls in supermarket aisles
   Across the prom are weighing “would” and “should”
   In psychic tug with parents for their wants.
Reprobate, expunged from those vivants,
   I ache that daughters might like some gruff gull
Disavow a father’s hapless pull.
         How do I know? I had one once,
         And now she’s gone.

====================

© June 2015

 

Down to Death

Well over sixty and at life’s loose end,
On Facebook and Twitter I sought out those
Who, sunk in the chasm of time’s far wend,
Had been lovers and soul-mates though all ended in snows:
And all must go down to death in their woes,
            Down to death,
            Down to death.

There was T..., insecure though she pulled my heart’s chords,

She was neat and shapely from her hair to her toes,
But a lifetime’s smoking turned her lungs into boards;
When we met her breath creaked like a clatter of crows:
And all must go down to death in their woes,
            Down to death,
            Down to death.

Then there was Y..., the amazon type,

Abrupt and unfeeling like a storm in its throes,
Gone friendless and gaunt but still blunt as a pipe,
None could get near her without heavy blows:
And all must go down to death in their woes,
            Down to death,
            Down to death.

And L... with fraught beauty and an ill-found mind,

Ravaged by decades of highs and lows;
Re-meeting, I was chilled by that face, now lined,
Graved and roughened by a glacier’s floes:
And all must go down to death in their woes,
            Down to death,
            Down to death.

So, T..., Y... and L..., our paths will not meld,

They’re scattered with bones which long ago froze,
For time has gone cold and love’s trees have been felled;
I am old in my tears for each reaps what he sows:
And I must go down to death in my woes,
            Down to death,
            Down to death.

====================

© May 2015

May Fragment

This is what it says. By way of comparison here's a link to 'False May,' a poem I wrote 39 years ago in May 1980 and posted here on 14 March 2012. I have also written two sequences of monthly poems on the months of the year; the poem in the first sequence, 'Months: May,' is linked here and was posted on 20 April 2014; the poem in the second sequence, 'Months: Lyrics: May,' is linked here and was posted on 9 May 2015.

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Grey days of rain and wind and cold
Mock thought that May has taken hold.
The hedgerow whitebeam, barely leaved,
White-flags as by the wind it’s heaved;
The blue-graped lilac, pinned to walls,
Is battered loose by rain and falls;
Looming, roaring, the sycamore
Like racing waves from shore to shore
Eddies in a seaweed-green
Now depth-black and now pure sheen.
The red-faced goldfinch, golden-flanked,
Is flung by wind and pushed and yanked,
Its song like water in a sluice,
Trickling chimefully, sweet as juice.
The morning air with lisps of mist
Binds chilly fronds on face and wrist,
And clouds like crumpled newsprint stain
The sky’s wet-grubby lunar plain.
That sycamore which fills the view,
Soaked with rain and morning dew,
And restless as a vat at boil,
Snaps its leaves with the crack of foil.
Its hanging flowers, like forcing bags,
Marzipan-green and stuffed as swags,
Lurch crazily in the wind’s brew,
Seasicked by the tree’s twist and slew.
That medusa crown of flashing eyes,
Kerchiefs waving and wind-snatched cries,
Later, in a gush of spring-hot sun,
Will steam and crackle, drenching done,
And, placid, those hung flowers display –
Girls’ ponytails all tricked for May,
Wet-bright and butter-yellow specked,
Artfully swung to coy effect!
But roiling clouds, puce-black with rain,
Wind-tumbled, clatter past again,
Dousing the sun’s brief torch of heat
With wringing rain swathes, pleat by pleat,
So that these days of wind and cold
Mock thought that May might soon take hold.

====================

© May 2015

Sonnet: John Donne

John Donne exulted in those jack-knife spasms

Of two-backed conquest which engorged his mind;

Sweat-hot confusion, gasping over chasms,
Thrust glow-skinned glamour on gruff womankind.
Old-aged, reneging bed-lust pomps as phantasms,
Limned in a shroud, his chalk-faced carcass blind
In penance, self-denouncing hesychasms
Flung purging fire on soul and sin entwined.
Donne knew that death-aroma’d time must force
Derangement of the healthful body’s joys,
And soul-won goods in loss must find their source
As intellect splits up to its alloys;
Wit-young or prelate-old, in death’s divorce
Truth is blatant; it saves or it destroys.

====================

© May 2015

Toolbox and Shed

I suspect I adapted this long stanza form from some of the poems of Jack Clemo, the now largely forgotten but fascinating Cornish poet who combined Calvinism with the grim landscape of the St Austell china clay quarries.
   The lines are pentameters except the fifth lines are trimeters and the ninth lines are trochaic tetrameters.
---------------

My father’s toolbox like a seaman’s chest
Rests with its rusted handles on my floor;
In a blue moon I lift its lid and more
Than fifty years leap out to wrench my breast:
Those knocked and much-used tools,
The fretsaws, hammers, chisels, planes and drills,
Corroded, with split stocks and other ills,
But most that smell of putty, oil and stain,
Warm like summer-heated grease,
Recall the garden shed where deep in peace
That box through my long childhood years had lain.

The shed was rotted, sieved by breeze and rain,

Though dark and crammed with household casualties,
Cracked buckets, backless chairs, dust and dead bees,
And paint and creosote tins, a shattered pane;
The roof bore wind-spot pools
Where sags in the flat felting hinted at
Weak boards. Regardless, agile as a cat,
I would climb the roof and at my lookout gaze
Westward like Raleigh in thrall
To dreams of deep water and what might sprawl
At voyage end across the sea’s rough baize.

Now all that’s left of hope and thrill are days

And that scarred toolbox dragged at the cart’s tail;
Unsurely settled, limbs no longer hale,
I walk my garden in its May-time glaze
Unpicking memory’s wools;
A home long lost, a brother in decline,
No brash career or family to call mine:
Ah, blackbird chanting in the apple tree,
Blossomed white like the sea’s surge,
What piling cloudscape at horizon’s merge
Will rapture you but overshadow me?

====================

© May 2015

Open Ground

Garrow Tor is the second highest hill on Bodmin Moor after Brown Willy and is wonderfully harsh and elemental.
   Cape Cornwall, in the far west, is the only cape in England and Wales, and is a ferocious sight with a full gale blowing and the surf exploding over the offshore Brisons.

--------------------

I must get into open ground,
The city crushes me,
High on Bodmin to fling around
Or shout beside the sea.

Ah, the brown flanks of Garrow Tor,

Streaming under rain,
Whipped raggedly by the wind’s roar
Are to me pure gain.

And in the cove at Cornwall Cape

As the breakers leap and scream,
The slapping spray on the neck’s nape
Is like waking from a dream.

Oh, the high sky, the moorland track,

Rock, sedge and pool,
Are fresh as childhood given back
Hushed in the morning cool.

And wide-miled sands at slack of tide,

Tart with the water’s breath,
Are absence where the seagulls glide
Yelling of life and death.

====================

© April 2015

Long-Tailed Tit

April leaf-time, April sun-time,
   Squeals with the shout of the long-tailed tit;
When the oak branch greens and the blackthorn sheens
   And raindrops on nettles slide and sit,
      Then the tit, its tail longer than it,
Leaps through the holly, grabbing grubs,
Hangs in the hazel, worries through shrubs;
      Grey-white, a slick of pink,
   Its folded-fan tail well splashed with ink,
Cuffed by April’s field-boy wind,
Snapping up larvae green with juice,
Circling boughs at hide and find,
It bounces through branches, atop, behind.
      How the wide-eyed parsley gapes!
And bluebells giggle like huddled girls;
   Ah, the dandelions spill their yolks!
Hunger-sore, agog for mites,
   That tit with the red-ring eye, pokes
      At stalk base and lichen splash
That spiders will scurry in morsel-fret
For that snub bill of black jet.
Which-way like a leaf on the wind,
Crumpled as a child’s handful of wool,
Ceaseless it scuffs from branch to branch,
Its wings in a stubby blurring blanch,
   Upside down, shuttling the void,
   Greedy for the next oak’s basking ticks,
   By April’s urge, a creature joyed,
      Its song all sharps and quicks,
Unstoppable as the spring-wet year,
Here, fled, far, near.
 

====================

© April 2015

 

Me Too

This is in trochaics with alternating lines of five and four stresses. I wrote another poem about this chap, 'The Paper Seller,' and posted it on 18 July 2017. It is linked here.

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Whey-skinned, shrunken-faced, with ill-shaved cheeks,
Clothes like drabs, unchanged for weeks,
Twisted-backed by age, his eyes to ground,
Glum, the old man makes his round,
House to shop and then a rubbish bin,
Taking out and putting in,
Seeking papers which he hoards at home,
Window-piled like browning loam.
Bald on top though scarved with cobweb hair,
Temple-strung like dirty air,
Limping, sometimes groaning to himself,
Each step like a sort of stealth,
Too-short trousers flap about his shins,
And sockless ankles flash like grins...;
Busy men and mothers with their young
Shun him like a stench that’s sprung
Suddenly beneath their careful feet
From a carcass in the street.
Unaware or uncomplaining, he,
Focused on his ministry,
Last week’s papers crammed beneath his arm,
Glares at tots but means no harm.
I, his pupil by a few scant years,
Death’s droll whispers in my ears,
Drifting into that Sargasso way,
Isolate by day and day,
Stung by questings, meaning to confess,
Tropes to shape and words to dress,
Might with purposed pointlessness like him,
Tatters-hung and waste of limb,
Sift the tide-scum for a pearl of price
Though, palm-held, it melt like ice.

====================

© April 2015

 

At Edge

Estragon of town-edge accidie,
   Crux perplexed of any key,
Butt of self-horror and the world’s mocks,
   Thumb-scalded, whipped from the stocks,
Stranded in thistled sour-stench wasteland,
   Slapped often by my own hand,
Shouting “Crux, ave,” and “key, oh key,”
   Screaming “When, what, why, you, me?”

Screech you crows! You pompous magpies dance!

   Stung by briars and gorse I’ll prance.
Day and day, high day or self-harm day,
   Come and go. Moon-grinned I stay.
Crux ave! A wanderer with the key?
   Oh, cleansed lepers howl once free.
What if truth into my soul should blaze,
   Finding nothing, only days?

====================
© April 2015

Admonished

Hear it said
That when you’re dead
The pulse in your head
Lies still like lead.

Be you well-fed

Or starved on your bed,
Happily wed
Or in a hermit shed,

Blood then red,

Which once had bled,
Now ceased its tread,
Sinks black instead,

And when soul has fled

In a sweat of dread,
By angels led
To the Judge and life’s Bread,

All pleading pled

And sentence read,
The sins it bred
From A to Z,

It will hear it said

That dead is dead
And flung from the Head
You must lie in lead.

====================

© April 2015

A Cherry Blossom

   No bigger than a thumbnail
      Yet a world;
   Five petals like lawn, as white
As milkmaids’ aprons at the pail,                                 
   Glanced by the morning light
      For work unfurled.

      Yolk-topped stamens

   Like skinny saffron Brahmins
Adore their goddess pistil which looms,
   Greengage-hued, pad-headed,
   That the powdered bee be bedded
      Before it homes.

   Ah, faint as memory,

      Its scent but felt,
      Like a rain-rinsed sky
   Or sleeping child’s skin,
   Pale as a night star fading,
Seen not-seen, smelt not-smelt.

====================

© April 2015
 

To His Daughter

My dear, as you the day’s journey take,
   This world caressing,
Know my thoughts are ever with you
   With every blessing.

From mornings, at your shower and dressing,

Your work with rush and clients pressing,
To evenings with sighs and love’s guessing,
Know my thoughts are ever with you
   With every blessing.

My dear, the careless world is glib,

   All hopes compressing,
But know my thoughts are ever with you
   With every blessing.

And when love’s found with glad confessing,

And marriage with a coy congressing,
And then a family coalescing,
Know my thoughts are ever with you
   With every blessing.

My dear, at last, since all are called,

   Past convalescing,
Know I went ever thinking of you
   With every blessing.

====================
© April 2015

The Magnolia Tree

   Despite the frosts and damps of March
   Which spot the grass like scattered starch,
A magnolia tree, before a single leaf
Has spread, has flowered into a sunburst head
   Of colour, like the self-belief
Of one who, though encumbranced by the dead,
Has flung aside his cerecloths to proclaim
   His phoenix-rising in a flame.

   Firework of life! Brünhilde’s grief,

   Infolding fire of Eliot’s wreath,
Those Pentecostal flames on Peter’s brow,
Though teeming, are outshone by this display
   Which, like a fountain in the wind’s sough,
Cascaded round the bole gone wetly-grey
And damped its lichen to a seasick green
   That pre-spring flowers should have such sheen.

   Those flutes of flesh, cerise and bright,

   Flamed at the base, at top pure white,
Dimpling at pressure like a woman’s cheeks,
As luscious to the sight as moist fresh figs,
   Within held sweets which the bee seeks,
Clambering on stamens with frenzied jigs,
Those pistils like tiaras, green-gold eggs,
   The bee caresses with its legs.

   Fullness done, the flowers flop

   To star shape, then the petals drop;
Its leaves in khaki-green enclothe the tree,
A beau demobbed, now staid in middle life.
   Late autumn’s winds in smash and flee
Strip the tree whilst shrilling upon the fife,
Then winter sears its branches to an almond stain
   Like bones upon Ezekiel’s plain.

   This tree will bud again but not

   Men’s bones unless a Penteco’t
Rent Physics in a flame-fierce Second Coming
Which – fire of petals emblazoning the tree –
   Re-fleshing bones with a mighty drumming,
Summons the four winds of eternity
To fuel their senses that in bliss there be
   The colours of this magnolia tree!

====================

© April 2015

 

Villanelle: The Inscrutable

This was published on ground.org.uk website, 14 Sept 2016 (although the site now appears to be defunct).

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Exaudi Domine is my cry;

Mid-quest, the dustlands cake my lips.
I know the what but not the why.

Is God a brute who blinds our eye,

And so we fall, one drowns, one trips?
Exaudi Domine is my cry.

Or Great, but gifting liberty,

Thrusts hemlock on a child who sips?
I know the what but not the why.

Some say He’s process flowing by,

Undone when gaolers thrash their whips.
Exaudi Domine is my cry.

Others, He’s ground of sky and sty

(A pearl through ordured fingers slips).
I know the what but not the why.

What’s left but that forsaken sigh

Of One whose blood from the Cross drips?
Exaudi Domine is my cry;
I know the what but not the why.

====================

© March 2015

 

March Song

This is the last of the little poems I wrote while recovering from 'flu. "The Lenten lilies" are daffodils.

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Bedded by sickness, my every thought
Is on my body’s blowsy weakness,
My skin abuzz, gone dry and taut,
My limbs aching in fever’s bleakness.

All hot-cold March has passed me by

As in my sheets I lie unshriven,
The Lenten lilies clack and sigh,
And last year’s leaves, wind-dug, are driven.

Will April’s flush of sun-gleam growth,

Spangled with birdsong’s chatter-clatter,
Fresh me to fling off fever’s sloth
And dance with Spring’s renewing matter?

 

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© March 2015
 

Leafing Up

Damp, dank and dingy, this cold March day
Cannot stop the bushes having their way,
Leafing up in the morning gloom
Like a green mist drifting in coil and plume.

All winter, the shrubs with branches bare

Have rattled in the thumping ice-stark air,
Now, with nosegays of salad-green,
They are leafing up in a rain-crisp sheen.

Be it the hawthorn with its blood-snag spines

Or the osier willow in fingering lines,
Mintily-tinted where insects will tup,
Springward, the bushes are leafing up.

====================

© March 2015

Resignation

A sort of pastoral perhaps?

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I said to the sea, “What of me, what of me?
Whilst you go on to eternity
I age and wither, then cease to be;
Ah, think of the years not seen by me!
     Can it be?”

The sea in its thunderous winter mood,

With blackened waves and spray all skewed,
Roared, “I have no flesh nor any blood,
I need no love, I want no food;
     Like God I brood.”

And then in lisping summer swells:

“But you must flirt in sunny dells,
Exchanging vows like coloured shells,
Drawing sweet water from deep wells
     To the sound of bells.”

I said to the sea, “Ah me, ah me!

My girl has sickened, stung by a bee,
I fell at the plough and broke my knee,
Infection came laughing with the crypt’s key;
     Ah, take me to you, sea.”

====================
© March 2015

Death in Mouila

(Gabon, on the equator. From a photograph.)

A paper-thin paysan with ribs like ruts

Lies on the ground, his steel-wool hair gone grey,
His flung-out arm glows at the finger tips,
Those glossy nails the only hint of life.

A priest gives unction, sanctioning death’s putsch,

Crouching in sweaty soutane to lisp his say,
His hand on the man’s hair cancels all hopes,
Firming him for his last faint in a breath’s froth.

Outside, the equator’s sun packs down its heat

Which soon will bloat that man to gas and stench;
At crux point, limbs aching but nulled of strength,
Self-knowing hunkers in his brain, then blanks.

What is it then, a hand entrancing his feet,

A light which like a desert drink can quench,
A selfhood beyond intensity and length,
Knowing no thought or feeling, only thanks?

====================
© March 2015

 

An Abject

In February 2015, for the first time in years, I succumbed to 'flu on the cusp of a busy programme of activity. As with many aging adolescents I took out my frustration in foul language aimed at everything and everyone - including the Lord. So much for my attempts at spiritual improvement. By March I had enough strength to sit at my desk and take myself to task with this poem. When I came to the last stanza I found that by chance the first rhymes were the same as in the first lines of the first stanza and so decided to repeat all the rhymes of the first stanza in the last.
   Note: the numbering of the Psalms in the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible is different from that in Protestant Bibles.
   The preceding three little poems posted below - 'The Blackbirds,' 'In Sickness' and 'Wood Chipper' - record things seen and heard by me from my window whilst recuperating.

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Psalm 83 (Douay-Rheims)

Burning in fever, how use your little strength,

Hoarding for healthtime, or easing fever’s length?
Ah no, in cursing, foul God-demeaning oaths,
Raging in self-woe, spasming in wraths,
Trouncing the Holy Name that I should lie struck –
Blasphemous filthy words, glutinous as muck –
My sick self vomiting contempt for the All,
Though, truth, a frightened kicking babe in its shawl.

    My God, my God, all life I’ve prayed to be

    Equal to the gross burden of being,
    Neither strutting upon sorrows recklessly
    Nor cringing from hard-mouthed facts, unseeing;
    But bedded by illness, a winter’s chore,
    In few hours my self-carapace unlimbs
    And I am jointed to a foul-word boor,
    A jelly of resentful heats and megrims.

    In honey time I said, I long to be

    An abject in the Saviour’s house and shun
    The sinners’ tabernacles. And so, He
    In shivering time provided me a portion
    Of His woes, which trustingly embraced avail
    Meaning and homing to the self-mind beast,
    But no, at the first sting of fever’s nail
    I sued for safety and renounced that feast.

Burning in fever, should He renounce my strength

And strip me to my stony self, length for length,
What use then catch-up ingratiating oaths
Obfuscating insults to escape just wraths?
Frankly exiled and from understanding struck,
A writhing mealworm in torment’s sweat and muck,
Frozen by fever, dead-shouldered by the All,
I faint in sickness as in a coffin shawl.

====================

© March 2015