After Christmas

The days after Christmas were dull;
The sea licked the beach like a cat
Its paws, and the herring gulls hung
   In the soft damp air;
The wagtails like williwaws ran
From rain pool to rock on the sand,
And, turning, the tide slowly swung
   The pool weed like hair.
 
But nothing can halt winter’s cull;
Old men coughed to death in their beds,
Young women had seizures and died,
   And the gulls gave tongue;
They scorned carolled claims of new birth,
And fought for the left-over food;
Then virus dug claws in their side,
   And their death begun.

====================
© January 2016 

Here's an alternative ending to the second stanza for those who like variety:

They scorned the bells’ chimes of new birth,
And gorged on men’s left-over food;
Then virus dug claws in their side,
   And they, too, died young.

In December

Saint Lucy's Day is 13 December, previously considered the shortest day of the year. She was martyred with a knife on the orders of the Roman prefect for defending her virginity. She is often shown carrying a lamp and is the patron saint of the blind and of writers (how ironically appropriate!)

   Anyone who knows the cliffs around Lamorna Cove to the west of Penzance, will have thought on the disastrous consequences of a fall onto the rocks and sea below.

   For poison in the ears see Shakespeare's 'Hamlet.'

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

The years pass by, though speeding up in age;
December and the shortest day are here;
The twelve months gone have quit and claimed their wage
And left a twilight trough that’s more a bier.
Saint Lucy’s day is slow to light and soon
To dark, the hours between are brown and stale;
Like brittle leaves those hours are dead by noon
And after that the dusk is mute as braille.
An age-pained body and a mind in woe –
These things I muse on, Yeats’s “life and work,”
Both unperfected; one as cold as snow,
The other blustered up from trick and quirk.
But worse is thought of these past fifty years
In which an island culture killed itself,
Smashed its temples, poured poison in its ears,
And flung its bones upon a dusty shelf;
It thereby stole the context which might give
Meaning to my failure, and orphaned me
To stumble mud-bound, anguished how to live
In fair fields flooded by a foreign sea.
No polity survives without a creed
That’s Other-based. And yet the western church
Let slip elite and mass: the mustard seed
Become – self-stranded on a stony perch –
A thing of women and falsetto men.
And now a book-fomented angry roar
That’s bound to catechize the state again
Makes hajj through field and town and strikes the door.
Ah, where find succour in an age so foul?
Might Orthodoxy’s icons calm the brow,
Their cool-eyed staring from a martyr’s cowl
Which peace and stiff-backed piety endow?
Or might Plotinus with his trance-like thought,
Tough analyst of Truth’s economy,
Give comfort whilst the self in matter caught
Seeks flight to That whose essence is to be?
Perhaps, when standing on the split-faced cliffs
Beyond Lamorna, thundering pagan winds
Will throw me to the sea’s mad hieroglyphs
Which, frenzied, tear the flesh and life rescinds;
And then, at one with rock and sand and sea,
My scattered molecules all shared about,
The helpless questions of finality
Will hang in the wind’s laugh and the waves’ shout.
Well, Lucy’s night has fallen. With my books
And sad regrets I crouch upon a flame
And warm my fingers, their arthritic crooks,
Palsied in mind with self-deriding shame.
My window flares a moment with a lamp
As someone treks the dark like Will-o’-wisp,
Though pray it’s Lucy in the frost and damp,
Her footsteps lisping on the grasses crisp.
Her death-crowned ardency before the knife,
Prefect-defying with a maiden’s might,
Gives balm to one whose each-way-driven life
Sags like a shroud this deep December night.

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

© December 2015

" 'Tis the Year's Midnight, and It is the Day's,/ Lucy's"

The title is, of course, the first line and a bit of John Donne's great poem, 'A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day,' which traditionally was regarded as the shortest day of the year. The first and last stanzas mention Dante ("the hell-worn Guelph"). In the Divine Comedy St Lucy was asked by the Blessed Virgin to send Beatrice to instruct Virgil to guide Dante through Hell. Afterwards, St Lucy, who Dante dreams of as an eagle, carried the sleeping Dante to the gate of Purgatory to continue his journey to Paradise.

   For "Larkin's hospital" see his late poem, 'The Building.' For Mr Pontifex's farewell to the sun see the third chapter of Samuel Butler's 'The Way of All Flesh.' For Fagin, in case you didn't know, see 'Oliver Twist.'

   For "those unlifted gates" see Psalm 23 (Douay-Rheims); for Svengali see George du Maurier's 'Trilby' and for "Conrad's terse Professor" see his 'The Secret Agent.'

   By tradition, St Lucy is often depicted carrying the weapon of her martyrdom, a sword or knife.

   Note the end words of the first two lines are repeated at the ends of the last two lines of the first stanza and again at the beginning and end of the last stanza. This was serendipity as I wrote the poem but I like the effect.

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

   Saint Lucy’s day, the shortest day,
   A day of loss and sour decay,
The martyrdom of truth, Dantean echt;
Ageing, I sought insight and self-haled rest;
      Instead, maggots enfleshed
Of love, of hate, gorged with regrets and pain,
Crawled through my heart; and stark dark to the west,
At east a sallow sheen, a chill of rain,
   Announce morning of the eighth day,
   Creation limping in decay.

   The body’s pain, its weakness, tell
   With the insistence of a bell,
And twist-knife horror felt for the first time,
That I shall die, in Larkin’s hospital,
      Perhaps, its washed-rags grime,
Unblessed like Pontifex to hail the sun
“Goodbye,” and so to peaceful sleep eternal;
Rather, like Fagin, screeching as he spun
   At rope’s end, his miserly soul
   Wrenched through his mouth to pay his dole.

   Sin-eater of self, strung with weights,
   Gog-eyed at those unlifted gates,
Each deadly fault was mine in life and work:
Colleagues betrayed, Svengali to my loves,
      Assassin with a smirk
Of any kicking hope which swells a womb;
A self-hug casuist in a pair of gloves,
Like Conrad’s terse Professor with his bomb,
   Cold-shouldered, vain, I stalked the town,
   Aloof and throwing frown at frown.

   Now dog-faced dusk garrottes the day,
   Ego collapses, lies decay;
Like Ulysses in frenzy at his mast
I searched futures toothed as the shrieking fife
      And in brute sea-mist cast;
For all that shipwrecked banditry I’ve wept:
Lucy, truth’s eagle with your martyr’s knife,
Engraft in me a light, and you who swept
   The hell-worn Guelph from death to day,
   Sear my murk brain, purge its decay.

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

© December 2015

Nativity

The days before Christmas
Were listless and damp;
For us foragers
Outside the camp

The woods were wet,
The trappings few;
Half-hearted hunters,
We each one knew

That in camp the king
Spent his days in plots,
The soldiery squabbled,
The women burned pots;

And pointless abandon
Like mist on the downs
Fuddled men’s minds
To next-day frowns.

The priests ignored
In their leaking tent
Prepared for a birth
Unsure what it meant.

In the distance the sea
Rocked the boats it bore:
An army was planting
Black flags on the shore.

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

© December 2015

Intellectuals

Intellectual? Take your club
And that your principles cohere
Beat all about you, grown and child,
Until your brave new world appear.
        Make no bones.

Perhaps your donnée’s so profond
That even French penseurs are glazed,
No matter, praxis remakes fact
And whole societies are razed.
        Make no bones.

And not a stone is left unturned:
That one percent minorities –
Men in ballgowns! – should glide on top
All must attend reformatories.
        Make no bones.

But there’s a caravanserai
Lumbering through the city square
With black-print book and desert cries
Will throttle all the thinkers there.
        Make no bones.

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

© December 2015

Magnolia Tree: November

The common rhyme in line 5 of each stanza binds the stanzas together, I hope.

   I wrote a previous poem about this magnificent magnolia tree in April 2015, posted here on 2 September 2019. Here's a link.

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

   In mild November’s balmy air,
   The morning sun an orange flare,
I saw that tree and shrub had dropped their leaves
And bare and bony starkly stood resigned
   Waiting for winter’s rattling blast,
Except a squat magnolia tree, reclined
Against a fence, which like a field in sheaves
   Was stooked with buds as if harvest done
   And not the great fast scarce begun.

   Those buds, a finger-joint in length,
   And bulky in their dog’s-tooth strength,
Like sandstone votives thick upon a shrine,
Olive-yellowed and statements of intent,
   Crouched braced for what the snows might cast,
For set so soon, three months of frost and vent
Would smother them before, a breaching mine,
   Vesuvius-like they’d incandesce
   And spring and lust in flowers confess.

   But what of us in thin-boned age
   Who heart and rasping lungs assuage,
With time, loose-endedly, to mark this tree,
Will we escape the granite months’ compress,
   Come spring to glow like meadows grassed,
Or like the balding tree’s last brittle tress
Of leaves, will we in wizened agony
   Fall to the roots to rot in wet
   That these great buds bright blooms beget?

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

© December 2015

"Oh Dear, Oh Dear"

A child in woe outside a shop,

Where was safety, where was love,

At home with her mother’s offhand flop

Or here with her father’s guiding shove?

   The pavement seemed to shake; she cried,

   “Oh dear, oh dear.”

Her mother in spasmodic throes

Found time for her, but preferred to sleep;

Her father, following his nose,

Did much, but thought himself too deep.

   The pavement seemed to sink; she cried,

   “Oh dear, oh dear.”

Children need little, a bite to eat,

Some rags of clothes, a toy or two;

But those who sit in the mercy seat

Should act as if they think it true.

   The pavement seemed to shiver; she cried,

   “Oh dear, oh dear.”

Children are tough and soon grow to the full,

But do they forgive, will they forget?

There’s one who was tugged as unballed wool;

Her parents now crones, will she void their debt?

   The pavement seemed to shatter; she cried,

   “Oh dear, oh dear.”

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

© December 2015

Three Girls

Mária is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable. This sequence began as just the single poem "A Sea Shell." The actual sequence of "relationships," should anyone try and work out the chronology, is "Friendship," "The Smash Up" and "A Sea Shell." Not a glorious life achievement admittedly.

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

1. A Sea Shell: Mária

Plucked thoughtfully from her hoard of shells

This glowing whelk shell, cream and whorled,

A gift from little Mária,

Displayed by me on shelves

Though years have tolled,

Insists that now she’s grown,

Forgetful of her one-time gesture,

She’s gone to make her life her own.

So end such friendships, time takes all;

Lovers depart and take their young;

That sea shell had a rock-struck flaw:

Old Adam’s taint, that quail

Of lust, more fun

Than love but cold as rain;

Her mother fled, I never saw

Sweet eight-years Mária again.

She picked her shells on Penzance beach,

Lightly dodging the grey-mood waves,

But oh her child’s-truth plaint, “I won’t

Be seeing you so that’s

My gift;” such troves

Of pathos, harsh like salt;

And now, these twelve years gone, that hurt

Still stings, that memory, that fault.

All Passes

All passes, nothing can stay,

Time floods each stone in the way.

Live for decades, live a day,

All passes, nothing can stay.

Childhood illness, teenage fray,

Time floods each stone in the way.

Women and fame, making hay,

All passes, nothing can stay.

Great achievements, mind’s full sway,

Time floods each stone in the way.

Limping body, hair gone grey,

All passes, nothing can stay.

Rain-drenched grave, and none to pray,

Time floods each stone in the way.

Galaxies fail, space is clay,

All passes nothing can stay,

Time floods each stone in the way.

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

© November 2015

A Pint of Bitter

Barman, draw a pint of ale:
The engine flings a stir of foam
Like milk into the herdsman’s pail,
Yeast-scented, rich as fruitful loam;
The beer, malt-brown or porter-black,
Creeps up the glass and undersits
That busy head, all white and smack,
Frothing with strength like a man in wits.
As more is pumped, it shoves the head
Inch by inch to the glass’s top;
Its first-froth done, its body shed,
That cream thins out to suds and sop.
The beer keeps flowing, pull on pull,
The skim laps at the glass’s lip;
Forced over once the glass is full,
It tumbles in a weeping drip.
Helpless, those shattered shreds let go
The glass they once were lively in,
And fall to slops like melting snow,
Dishonoured in the spillage tin.
Only stray strings of froth now drift
That brown-hued pint of bitter beer;
Expelled by growth, its fate was swift:
He who has ears to hear should hear.

====================
© November 2015

Night Woods in Fog

In 2013 and 2014 I made quite a number of night walks off-path through deep woods without torch or mobile, basically to see what it was like. This resulted in two long poems, 'The Woods at Night', posted on 13 April 2016, linked here , and 'Wood Trek', posted on 21 November 2018, linked here . The intros to those poems give more information on the conditions under which the walks were made. I thought that was it, but on 1 November 2015 (All Saints Day) a monstrous thick fog descended, just like the good old London pea-soupers those of us of a certain age remember well, and I could not restrain my curiosity to find out what it would be like to trek the woods in the dark and through thickest fog: 'Night Woods in Fog' records the experience. It being All Saints Day I also wrote a short lyric which follows as an addendum at the end of the poem. 

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

Sunday 1 November 2015

November heath at twilight and the fog

Is sodden-thick, like wadding stuffed around

The looming gloom of beech and chestnut trees,

Gone vague as distant mountains; vista is

Destroyed, there’s only thick miasma, brown

As rats’ fur, clumping greasily on the grass.

Within that bulging mucous murk, made fawn

And grainy by the orange village lights,

There’s a sound of giggling girls and barking dogs

But nothing seen.

                               In minutes I’m alone,

Walking the metalled track to the incline’s lip

Which sinks into the woods. The village lights

Are distant, fading fast. A racing dog

With winking collar angles through the fog –

A shrouded walker follows with a torch;

They meld into the bilious gloom. My footsteps

Crackle and die. This mild moist night, I sweat.

    The clammy lychgate creaks; I pass into

The woods, descending into coal-black dark.

The leaf-fall crunches underfoot but makes

No difference to the swelling touch-felt silence.

Tramping the sandy bridlepath, night sight

Of sorts develops, though all it manages

Is grey mass told from dark mass; hint and squint

Are used to guess the fog crowding the crowns

Of oak and maple, tamping every fissure

With a sheeny sponge that’s matt and grubby to

The eye. And weird, at waist, outleaning mounds

Of rotting ferns define themselves as grey

And use-blanched dishcloths.

                                                   At the wood’s black depth

I leave the mud-sand path and strike into

The trees; I have the untracked route by heart

But all is changed by the cloud-thick darkness, brewed

By the bundling fog, infilling vistas used

In night sight to adjudge felt place and distance.

And since my last walk leaf drop has occurred

So that a sour-sharp mulch of birch and ash

And oak leaves, shrouding every half-hint waymark,

Has merged with trunk-trapped fog to make a screed

Of indirection that’s unreadable.

Stymied, I search that sludge-like dark for glims

Of fallen birch boughs, used to point my way;

Mole-blind, I miss them, shambling warily

In arcs to find a route; shins, knees and hands

Scour bush and bramble, flesh-stung, till at last

By hope and instinct in that flea-brown sump,

I fetch up panting on a stream’s wet bank.

    As if with cataract, I foot-feel hints

For the double plank across, now lost in leaf-pile

Which also swamps the stream; eventually,

I ease across, toe-led and darkness-blind.

On the far bank with step and step and squint,

I track the stream until the woodfloor slopes

And, thankful to respond, I turn uphill

Through tree stands clogged with solid palls of night

So that sensation is an only guide –

That instinct-memory that shifting masses

Truthfully tell the way. Short-breathed, ache-limbed,

I reach my goal at incline’s top. And stand.

November Lime Tree

   This misted November morn
The thin-top lime has blazed with fire,
Summer’s sea-green swells have shorn
To scanting leaves upon a pyre.

   Such burnt-gold radiance

And toffee hues of red and brown
Transform the yellow salience
And last-gasp green across its crown.

   The grey mist drifts in shrouds

And damps the bole and fallen leaves,
A robin sings with sharps and louds
Then shakes its wet-spot wings like sleeves.

   Such silence, nothing stirs;

My breath like worlds floats mist in mist;
A drip of drops taps on the furze
As dew glides from a leaf’s dead twist.

   What tart smell of decay! –

Of rotting boughs and frost-strung earth;
This lime will fling its leaves away
And blackly suffer winter’s mirth.

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

© November 2015

The Wild West

On 22 April 1889 a large part of central Oklahoma, 'bought' from the Creeks and Seminoles at a rock-bottom price, was opened up to settlers. In the space of twenty-four hours at least 50,000 people flooded into the area and staked every available acre. Ten more openings occurred during the next few years. The Indians were moved onto low-grade reservations with few resources where they mouldered away. The story is told in David Lavender's hugely-informative Penguin Book of the American West. Let those with eyes to read read.

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

In land rush Oklahoma, Creeks and Seminoles
Watched helpless as, bamboozled of their rights,
The “Boomers” in their thousands claimed with spade and poles
The land, each loamy inch from plain to heights.
That brute wave irresistible, the Seminoles
And Creeks were thrust aside in dead-end bights,
   And law was what the Boomers’ frowns made known,
   Self-serving, shifting, implacable like stone.

In days, huge townships, numbers strong, sprang up, complete

With schools and stores, with newspapers and fanes;
Just so, through England’s fields another rush replete
With self-sure surliness fills trains and lanes
That towns engorge and brusque-shoved natives make retreat
To hamlets or estates to mourn their pains.
   In streets Slavs’ peevish whine makes sharp the air;
   And mosques in county towns crouch still and stare.

Those Indian tribes collapsed, forced crudely from their lands,

Fair prey for gun rule, agents’ glib-hand tricks;
On grassless reservations of cold skies and sands
They mouldered, lawbound, chivvied, scarred with kicks;
Far-off, the game-horde prairies like bestowing hands
Bemourned their dust-filled blankets hung from sticks:
   Arapaho dance their Ghost Dance, though in vain,
   That hard-lost times of honour come again.

In Britain now, a thinned-out culture breathes its last,
Cities are souks, old ways do not suffice,
Millennia folk, ensnarled by laws their leaders passed,
Are crushed as land-grab masses twist the vice;
Belief and practice packed away, the Christian caste
Trades off its churches at the highest price;
   And birth-bred nuance from a tree is hung,
   Language becomes lingo and fists are swung.

What follows? No-go ghettos face off new and old,
The thought-world of old Britain is remade,
Those faiths and customs of the settlers, taking hold,
Wrestle for dominance with threat and blade;
Such Wild West dogfights favour Islam’s stubborn fold:
The British, flung out from their last stockade,
   Will, like those dancers in their hopeless tread,
   Crumble to history in the dust, their bed.

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

© October 2015

Parson Hawker

This is of course the famously eccentric Rev. Robert Hawker of Morwenstow on the fearsome North Cornish cliffs. All the details in this sonnet are true - you will find many more in Piers Brendon's very readable 1975 biography. In particular Hawker drove himself to the edge of breakdown by conscientiously collecting the corpses and body parts of sailors whose ships had been wrecked in the ferocious winter storms, burying the remains in his churchyard where the memorials can be seen to this day. He was a fine poet: his masterpiece 'The Quest of the Sangraal' was acknowledged by many, including Tennyson, as being the equal of, if not surpassing, 'The Idylls of the King.'
   Brendon's biography was reissued in 1983 by the late Anthony Mott in his magnificent 'Cornish Library' series - a cornucopia of classic titles about dear old Cornwall.

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

Such solace in a cliff-edge, self-built hut,
An opium pipe and wet-ink sprawling verses,
The gulls, those doubters, screaming “but” and “but,”
And wind cracking the blackthorn trees and furzes.

At foot, the sea, man-grinding, pulped with flesh,

Blackly restless, thrashing to bile and phlegm,
Voids gobbets, pail-collected, for a pasch
Of burial beneath a cross’s quartz-flecked gleam.

Inland, the fieldmen cough and rot, their wives

Yearly birth with toothless gasps and paps’
Thin milk; the threadbare gentry grudge their tithes;
And Hawker parches like unharvest'd grapes;

Daily he reads Matins in his rain-struck church,

Shunned by his mud-legged charges though Heaven’s porch.

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

© October 2015

And So

And so I sat me down to write:
Such fear and scorn, such bit-hard hate,
Had drilled my chest with gouge and bite
That wave-swelled anger poured in spate.

A Christian culture quite destroyed,

Invading satraps rack the land;
Displaced, my rooted life made void,
I drift the badlands’ bush and sand.

That which I was or wished to be,

Heart’s tangle with a sweet-life mate,
Were spoiled by coup, made worse by me,
Reduced to scratchings on a slate.

Now youth is gone and age conspires,

Bent bones and sweepings no one wants,
A world in self like untuned lyres
Is flung to scrap with thrones and fonts.

Oh, rage indeed whilst rage you can:

Mind-sore, these dunes my polity,
I squat in reeds and boil my bran,
Defunct beside the snarling sea.

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

© October 2015

Judgement

Decades ago I wrote a number of other short poems on similar themes. Here are links to three: "Who Can Interpret a Broken Branch" written March 1980 and posted here on 6 March 2013; "A Siren Calling in the Night" written December 1980 and posted here on 12 December 2012, and "The All" written January 1981 and posted here on 31 December 2011.

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

On such and such a night I died,
It was not sickness, it was pride,
Like Satan plunging to the sea
I leapt Your rampart and chose me.

And now in selfish coal-dust dark

I whimper like a wing-broke lark,
I scorned what You were like to do
And choosing me, made You choose You.

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

© September 2015

All Weather

He had come to the end of his tether
After years of deep wrestling with fate,
   Each morning, noon, gloaming and night,
      All weather,
   Schemes had failed and nothing gone right,
He was left in despair feeling hate
For all women and men and their blether.

Through long decades of office-trapped dither,

Little liked, charismatic as slate,
   He yearned to walk out and take flight,
      But whither?
   Weakly-dowered, fitfully-bright,
With no stomach for throwing his weight,
Lost of hope, he fumed hither and thither.

As for love and its flirt, fickle feather,

He had scoured bar and street for a mate,
   Those joustings half-lust and half-spite,
      All weather!
   But bescorned, his passions in blight,
With a child who adjudged him third-rate,
He had coarsened like bile-blackened leather.

Now at age, all that sag, all that slither!

Bitter-mouthed, shabby dressed, slouch of gait,
   All joy had sailed off like a kite,
      But whither?
   How he seethed at worldly despite!
Outside shops, children side-eyed his state
Like a street beggar striking his zither.

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

© August 2015

Spes Unica

By way of comparison here is a link to 'Three Searching Sonnets' written in January 1983 and posted here on 2 April 2012.

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

Lines 1, 5 and 9 are taken from Psalm 83 (Douay-Rheims)
 
How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!
Endraped and candled, glanced by incense mist,
In pin-drop dark, That which made peaks and coasts,
Cupped, bulks with power of its Three-love tryst.

My soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord:

On flags, limb-twisted men with breaths which hissed,
Kneeling paid homage to that niche, its hoard;
Something-in-nothing leant and each one kissed.

My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God,

Sipped the eternal in each moment’s plash
Fountained from that pyx of well-head food;
Pain is indecent, as is death’s sore gash,
But springs the sluices of the Lord’s rich Blood
In which at last we sink and, thankful, wash.

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

© August 2015
 

The Shadow

His shadow on the frosty ground
Was stark-etched by the autumn sun
And stepped before him, morning-browned,
With old man movements, lamely done;
   With shock he saw that shadow’s lines
   Crosshatch a body much reduced.

Slope-shouldered, thin and dragging-stepped,

Lacking the bulk which once it had,
Bent-legged and stiff the shadow crept
The tarmac with a crablike pad;
   Heartstruck, he scanned those bitter signs
   Of big-stride swagger now traduced.

What purpose then had life and love,

That courtship like a sweet-toned flute,
The skelter games of tease and shove,
And mid-life prize of flesh-thick fruit;
   (Life-lazing, gorged, in shade of vines,
   He dozed in heat like one seduced)?

But now the swift cloud, blue-glazed sky,

The green-piled sea and field-rich land,
Had spewed him forth; his shadow’s cry
Was look to self, time’s leaking sand,
   And fling off living, seek out shrines
   Where truth is found, by death induced.
 

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

© August 2015
 
 

The Herring Gull

   I watched a herring gull,
      A juvenile,
   Dig in the shingle pile
      At tide’s lull;
      It found a snail
   And vainly prised at it,
   That flesh in the shell’s pail
Unshifted by each shake or hit.
      Dancing-shrill,
   That gull on flung-out wings
   Rose in the salt air’s slings,
   The snail clutched in its bill,
   Then hurled it on the stones –
      I heard the “clack”;
Four times it soared in the wind’s groans
      To make attack.
      The shell split
   At last; seizing the meat,
      With a wing’s beat
   The gull veered to a spit,
   Green-weeded, running-wet,
   To gulp its prize, unmobbed
By other gulls. The wind’s fret
   Flurried, and the tide bobbed.
      That brown-flecked gull,
   Lean-young and screech of breath,
   Had parried hunger’s pull:
Daily he starves or metes out death.

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

© July 2015

Each Day

Each day is a waiting for death and a dying,

A rising, a pratfall, a tantrum, a sighing,
   In moments the stretched empty hours have passed by,
And night has descended with foul words and crying.

Oh where is that youth with his life chances nighing,

In rich clothes and posings to catch the girls’ eyeing;
   The footings and glancings all sped on the fly
Till lovers were honeymooned, laughing and thighing.

Midlife was a quagmire of cold-shouldered lying,

The children resentful and sneeringly prying,
   Redundant, remortgaged, the weight of the sky
Crushed love, hope and kindness until I stopped trying.

So, old-aged and solus, my sands are fast drying

In Chastened-by-Sea where the salt mist is hieing,
   And death with sunk life at my carcass will vie
That day when my wait is cut short with a dying.

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© July 2015

 

At the Lake in July

This poem is really a metrical exercise. It is in tetrameters and in each stanza the first line is iambic, the second dactylic, the third anapaestic and the fourth trochaic.

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   The goose-strut crow with panting beak

      Parts the fawn grass in a scavenging search;
Broiling heats of July are at afternoon’s peak;
      Moorhen grub in bankside birch.

   Those crows are dancing in a clique,

      Hounding two Canada geese and their chick;
The stout chick, grey-green fluffed, with a crop-heavy squeak
      Seeks its dam’s protecting kick.

   The dragonflies like lightning streak

      Petrol-sheen blue on the lake’s dusty face;
A lame vole drags a leg through a mud-clotted creek,
      Magpies haggle, giving chase.

   The Mallard ducks by jowl and cheek

      Doze in the feather-scorched glaze of the sun;
A white-foreheaded coot on slap feet tries to sneak
      Lakewards past dogs on the run.

   Egyptian geese rich-stained like teak

      Prowl by the water on pirate-red legs;
With patched eyes and a swagger they feed as they seek,
      Prodding the lake’s heat-spoiled dregs.

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© July 2015