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.

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© 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.

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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.

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© 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.

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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.

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© October 2015