The first part is iambic with half-rhymes. In the second part, the lines alternate between trochaic and iambic tetrameters; and there are half-rhymes in the second and fourth etc lines.
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i.
Bouquets, Easter bouquets, full-bodied, frothing;
Or deep-drift snow, bundled on tumbling fells.
Late April sun: the hawthorn trees amass
Themselves in blossom, jogged by wind-coughs roughing
Their branch-piled opulence. What pictured grace!
Thorned though, like life, by shards beneath their swells.
ii.
Brazen, puerile, urchins cheeking
Though poised to dash, this hawthorn blossom,
Clout by April’s winds, is fragile
Like street boys thin and hunger-lissom.
Begging hands, five-fingered petals,
Accost, cupped palms whited for alms;
Bees will trample, nectar-dizzy,
Grappling the cressy stamens’ combs,
Meting pollen onto stigmas’
Lank finger, bobbed with a fecund head,
Poised to fuse. Like waifs it stews
A scent, half gutter-smirch, half plied
Muskings of the young on heat,
Lewdly accoutred by the leaves’
Phthisic veilings, panders to
The season’s fruiting. Cluttered troves!
Ramp with spring’s few-moment tinture:
Skin-white, quease-green, lips’ fleshy mauve,
Sulphur yellow, pale as gruel:
This blossom orphans’-lust, to live.
====================
© April 2019
Monday 15 August 2022
At Seventy
I wrote this morsel on a single rhyme six months before the great event. Presumably I was looking forward to it. What a mistake!
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We all to the grave must dash,
Whip, pizzle and lash,
Some fraught with cash,
Some having made a hash,
Some who in business were brash,
Some who simply went smash.
Some gone bald with a ’tash
Who feared to propose then crash,
Those who never had a pash –
They tried but turned it all to ash:
Ah, passion’s lovely tinkling plash!
(What are wrists for but to slash?)
Some there were who loved to clash,
Some there were who couldna fash,
And some who in a murderous flash
Did something very rash.
There’s some who scribbled balderdash,
And those content to rehash,
Some whose work was a toppling stash
But never much more than trash.
There’s some (ah, grief) who forced Pandora’s cache,
Fracturing the world with a livid gash.
All done, some will wear an angel’s sash
At the Father’s blissful Zion bash,
But many will howl and gnash,
Drowned in the devil’s gall-and-splash.
====================
© April 2019
--------
We all to the grave must dash,
Whip, pizzle and lash,
Some fraught with cash,
Some having made a hash,
Some who in business were brash,
Some who simply went smash.
Some gone bald with a ’tash
Who feared to propose then crash,
Those who never had a pash –
They tried but turned it all to ash:
Ah, passion’s lovely tinkling plash!
(What are wrists for but to slash?)
Some there were who loved to clash,
Some there were who couldna fash,
And some who in a murderous flash
Did something very rash.
There’s some who scribbled balderdash,
And those content to rehash,
Some whose work was a toppling stash
But never much more than trash.
There’s some (ah, grief) who forced Pandora’s cache,
Fracturing the world with a livid gash.
All done, some will wear an angel’s sash
At the Father’s blissful Zion bash,
But many will howl and gnash,
Drowned in the devil’s gall-and-splash.
====================
© April 2019
Wren
A draggled wren upon the path
Cried, “When?
January freezes and months must pass
Till Spring shoot bud again.
“All day I creep through hedge and grass
For grubs and ticks in ken,
Goaded by hunger I shout and fuss
When startled by tramping men.
“And I’ll brashly sing to catch a lass
And get with clutch that hen –
Squabbling chicks of voice and pith,
Toughened for life en plein.
“Brute cat, cold crow and sidling kith
All prowl my hedge and fen,
I’ll face them in a scolding huff,
A three-inch bawling wren!”
====================
© March 2019
Cried, “When?
January freezes and months must pass
Till Spring shoot bud again.
“All day I creep through hedge and grass
For grubs and ticks in ken,
Goaded by hunger I shout and fuss
When startled by tramping men.
“And I’ll brashly sing to catch a lass
And get with clutch that hen –
Squabbling chicks of voice and pith,
Toughened for life en plein.
“Brute cat, cold crow and sidling kith
All prowl my hedge and fen,
I’ll face them in a scolding huff,
A three-inch bawling wren!”
====================
© March 2019
Monday 1 August 2022
The Comet I and II
The two parts of this poem were each meant to be 96 lines but I muddled the line count of Part II and it came out at 100 lines.
There was a lot of media interest in 2014 when NASA succeeded in putting a lander on the snappily-named comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The pictures the lander sent back before ‘dying’ struck me as extraordinary in showing that the physical forces at work on its landscape were precisely the same as those on earth. This led me to think and ‘The Comet’ was the result.
The poem is in blank verse, the first four lines of each part rhyme ABAB and this is repeated at the end of the part; alternate lines rhyme thereafter.
The psalm quotes at the beginning of each part are from Ps 18 v 1 and 7 (Douay-Rheims); Rough Tor (Part I lines 42 and 48) is pronounced “Rowtor”; Fred West (Part II line 27) was a particularly disgusting serial murderer.
-----------------
The Comet I
The heavens show forth the glory of God,
And the firmament declareth the work of His hands.
The Philae lander bounced from rock to clod
And grounded in a rough-toothed cleft with sands;
Crippled, it still caught images and fed
Them to the probe Rosetta standing off
The comet Sixty-Seven P which sped
In orbit, Sun to Jupiter, a sole
And frozen journeyer these millioned years.
Rosetta pulsed those images to earth,
And all at Probe Control high-fived with cheers;
At last, fire-breathing man, at great remove,
Had placed a foot on débris, solipsist
But earthlike, petrel of the solar winds.
And those tough handlers like the psalmodist
Could only sing then silence into awe
As Philae’s camera scanned the comet’s tracts,
Those cliffs, those screes, those boulder-squatted shelves,
All monochrome, though sunlit – bodied facts,
Bereft of growth, but otherwise like home!
Indeed, not luscious like the raw moraines
Of Alp or Himalaya, ever pocked
With grass or thrill-green moss – their small domains
Cowered from riotous winds or grasping ice;
Rather, the badlands, hinterlands, where eye
Might trek the strict horizons, dust to tufa
And void of plant, and feel inscapably
En-homed, despite all lack, for always present
Is natural form – those landscape starks and slopes,
The mouldings by excision and deposit,
Which, ur-familiar, become as tropes,
Beknown by instinct, us, and us of them.
Think, then, of Sixty-Seven P Churyúmov-
Gerásiménko: its drifts of dust and rubble
Clinched hard by ice, cracking to trench and cove,
Much cliffed and ledged, fractured in plates and shards;
Rotation, solar winds, bestitching patterns
Which whiplashed yards each comet day through slag,
And scattered boulder-drifts like drunken slatterns;
Those flats and inclines, caves and rugged ground,
Acquainted forms made spick in negative,
As if one stood on Bodmin’s Rough Tor, caught
In twilight on a pure-skyed day, alive
To every contour of its rock-thrown flank:
All, all, evince a sort of trustingness
So that what’s seen enlivens human ease.
And that must be: the forces, great or less,
Which fissured Rough Tor and Sixty-Seven P
Are one and same – expansion and compaction,
Full-flowed or torqued – on Bodmin, on the comet
Or any space-time point that’s under traction.
Their consequence in structure, mass and shape,
Be it in granules or the spin-flung whorl
Of deep-space galaxies, is intimate
To us, although their violence might appal.
And inheld by those forms which replicate
The switchback plein and clutter of the earth
We’d grow at one with all their one-toned strangeness.
And the firmament declareth the work of His hands.
The Philae lander bounced from rock to clod
And grounded in a rough-toothed cleft with sands;
Crippled, it still caught images and fed
Them to the probe Rosetta standing off
The comet Sixty-Seven P which sped
In orbit, Sun to Jupiter, a sole
And frozen journeyer these millioned years.
Rosetta pulsed those images to earth,
And all at Probe Control high-fived with cheers;
At last, fire-breathing man, at great remove,
Had placed a foot on débris, solipsist
But earthlike, petrel of the solar winds.
And those tough handlers like the psalmodist
Could only sing then silence into awe
As Philae’s camera scanned the comet’s tracts,
Those cliffs, those screes, those boulder-squatted shelves,
All monochrome, though sunlit – bodied facts,
Bereft of growth, but otherwise like home!
Indeed, not luscious like the raw moraines
Of Alp or Himalaya, ever pocked
With grass or thrill-green moss – their small domains
Cowered from riotous winds or grasping ice;
Rather, the badlands, hinterlands, where eye
Might trek the strict horizons, dust to tufa
And void of plant, and feel inscapably
En-homed, despite all lack, for always present
Is natural form – those landscape starks and slopes,
The mouldings by excision and deposit,
Which, ur-familiar, become as tropes,
Beknown by instinct, us, and us of them.
Think, then, of Sixty-Seven P Churyúmov-
Gerásiménko: its drifts of dust and rubble
Clinched hard by ice, cracking to trench and cove,
Much cliffed and ledged, fractured in plates and shards;
Rotation, solar winds, bestitching patterns
Which whiplashed yards each comet day through slag,
And scattered boulder-drifts like drunken slatterns;
Those flats and inclines, caves and rugged ground,
Acquainted forms made spick in negative,
As if one stood on Bodmin’s Rough Tor, caught
In twilight on a pure-skyed day, alive
To every contour of its rock-thrown flank:
All, all, evince a sort of trustingness
So that what’s seen enlivens human ease.
And that must be: the forces, great or less,
Which fissured Rough Tor and Sixty-Seven P
Are one and same – expansion and compaction,
Full-flowed or torqued – on Bodmin, on the comet
Or any space-time point that’s under traction.
Their consequence in structure, mass and shape,
Be it in granules or the spin-flung whorl
Of deep-space galaxies, is intimate
To us, although their violence might appal.
And inheld by those forms which replicate
The switchback plein and clutter of the earth
We’d grow at one with all their one-toned strangeness.
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