Bag O'Guts

This obviously worries at the same theme as my poem "Bowel on Legs," posted recently on 26 November 2023. The Biblical allusions in the final stanza are to Ezekiel 37: 1-14 and 1 Thess. 4:15-16.

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   All beauty, fineness, gloss of mind,
   Great thoughts, great passions, every kind,
   Boil down to reams of gastric lights,
   A’slivered, greasy, greys and whites,
   The womb of life, no ifs, no buts,
   A loathsome mobile bag o’ guts.

   My true love with a look so sweet
Cried, “Yes and yes, and let our bodies meet,”
   But her guts fell out and swung to her knees,
   Hanging like vines beneath the trees.

   The savant with his glass-clear eyes
Wrote wisdom’s books, compendious as the skies,
   But his guts fell out in sheeny ropes
   Which strangled all his careful tropes.

   The mother and her new-born child
An each-loved Eden crooned, so pure, so mild,
   But their guts fell out and swamped the cot
   With oily snakes which drowned the tot.

   Heads of state a’scheming late
Disposed of rivals, never governing straight,
   But their guts fell out all looped in grins,
   Purple-rotting like eels in gins.

   O Son of man, can these guts live,
   Their stinking heapings in a sieve,
   What mid-air fiat might save this flesh
   That’s soul and mind and tripes in mesh,
   How can wet guts, their ducts and folds,
   Be divinized to gems and golds?

===============
© July 2021

Pride: Skeltonics

I have not closely read John Skelton but should because there is much more to him than the disorganized rhymester we tend to think him. Obviously the poem below plays with that caricature. It is an exercise on one rhyme. I did the same thing with "At Seventy," posted on 15 August 2022 and linked here and "Admonished," posted on 26 September 2019 and linked here. I think I have now worked out that particular vein!

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That which damns a man is pride;
All sins lead from and to its side:
The one who spryed,
The one who shied,
And he who spied,
And who was snide;
With self’s glamour plied,
All scale and context fied,
Surely all such to date have fried,
Joining Satan in his fiery bide.
They screech, they screech, “I tried
“All rules and guidings to abide;
“But, oh, I lusted after another’s bride,
“And easily I lied,
“With a practised sidestepped slide
“I pocketed what I descried,

“And when wants and wills collide
“Is it too much to ensure my foeman died?”
Ho! now they know that Justice, wide,
May glide,
May stride,
And then condignly chide.
Elide
Who will the facts of pride,
By it good will is dried,
Is mummified,
And each bon that’s cried
Is blackened, dyed,
Suborned to hide
Or on its heels has hied,
An absconded guide.
A man’s left pied,
Black-white, his sins unpryed,
And the Tempter’s streetcar required to ride;
And if he sighed
For Truth that’s skied,
But did so in pride,
It’s trumps he’ll drown in God’s wrath’s tide.

===============
© July 2021

"If You Want To Know What Sea Is..."

This poem is written as a single long sentence. Note: it refers to a storm and not to a gale. Anybody who knows the Beaufort Scale knows they are two very different things (at sea in a small boat it's the difference between terrifying and horrifically terrifying). Unfortunately, in their infantile efforts to be "relevant" the Met Office and others appear to treat the words interchangeably - searching for "the human angle" rather than simply giving the facts.

   For those who like such things I've given an "also-ran" ending at the bottom.

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

If you want to know what sea is
   You’ll come to far Penwith,
Where the land makes up four portions

   And the sea always a fifth;

Look north, look south, look west,
   Even south-east a’ways,
From high ground the sea’s all-present
   Like a plain of wind-roughed baize;
In fine times its blue’s kohl-deep,
   In rain it’s grey as lead,
In cloud it’s a fishpaste green,
   The colour of flesh long dead;
But down on beach or in bay,
   That’s the place to be
When a storm ten hell sweeps in,
   Upending the pliant sea:
Ah, it’s dark as a devil’s cave,
   And the clouds stream like smoke from a pan,
The wind screeches in a top-speed rush,
   Punching stronger than a man;
Crouch behind rock or wall,
   Bulleted by the frenzied rain,
Cautiously peer round an edge
   At sight of the sane gone insane:
Huge flint-faced rollers rear,
   Lashed with cords of spume,
Upended by the granite shore
   They explode in a maelstromed plume;
The beach becomes a sump,
   Waist-deep, of raging brine,
With a backwash strong to drag men
   To a death where the fish will dine;
Cape Cornwall’s drenched in rack,
   And offshore the Brisons rock
As combers erupt with a crump
   Felt inland like a shivered shock;
Mousehole’s gone black under hail,
   Its harbour wall near breached
As creamers chainsaw its rampart
   With a thunder that’s chaos speeched;
And across Mounts Bay, Porthleven,
   Smack in the path of the storm,
Shoulders against its pummelling
   And the wind’s rasp like a shawm;
Here two thousand-miled breakers,
   Delegged by the offshore shoals,
Surge like clouds of frogspawn
   Dousing the town in its scrolls;

Bowel on Legs

   “All’s dung in, dung out,” cried Bowel on Legs.
If there’s no meaning, if no final One
Which as the Omega is meaning’s meaning,
If all just happens then one day is done,
   Then be it gruel and a sop, or foie gras and champagne,
   Nothing is pitiful, nothing is vain:
   “All’s dung in, dung out,” cried Bowel on Legs.

I made eyes at the girl in the grocery store,
She smiled then flared into a pus-filled sore.

I soothed a weeping abandoned child,
It clawed me like a spitting bear-cub riled.

Through webchats and podcasts I signed up for the good,
But the conveners turned devils and cavorted in blood.

   “And all’s dung in, dung out,” cried Bowel on Legs.
If from birth’s moment we’re dropped to our dying,
Stranded with physics where we longed for meaning,
If half are lying and the rest are crying,
   Then each slow day’s a defecation
   Never to be a deification:
   “And all’s dung in, dung out,” cried Bowel on Legs.

===============
© June 2021

Gale at Sea

An effort to catch something of what it is like to be caught in a full gale at sea. Not pleasant, is an understatement. The poem was meant to be contemporary but became anachronistic as it went on: but not inaccurate - a full gale faced at sea in a sailing ship is a damned sight worse than being in a well-found vessel under power, although Joseph Conrad's "Typhoon" and Richard Hughes' "In Hazard" convey the full horror of being caught in extreme weather in a steam ship. For poetic comparison see Robert Louis Stevenson's marvellous poem, "Christmas at Sea."

   Here's a link to "A Wild Penzance Night," conveying something of what it's like when a gale hits land in the far south-west. The poem was posted on this blog on 11 June 2018.

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Have you felt, man, a force nine gale in your face,
Like being scoured with rivets in every place,
Trying to stand steady against the screaming howl
Of a wind that shrieks then mocks in a growl,
A scrap of sail up which hums like a wire
Strained taut to splitting in the half-light mire:
The combers are crowding the staggering hull
As she forces to windward like a baffled bull;
Spume streaks in ropes the black-hurled waves
Which rear and thunder like stone-roaring caves:
Ah those crests which leap and collapse on the deck,
Choking the scuppers with a foaming beck!
The deck gear and davits have all been smashed,
And nothing’s steady that’s not been lashed;
Like blackout curtains the wave-sweeping clouds
Flinder to rags among the screeching shrouds;
Two helmsmen, drenched, are lashed to the wheel,
The ship’s bucking, tottering, and showing her keel;
The captain and first mate are crouched at the rail
Wrapped in a dodger that cracks like a flail;
The raging scud is a slap in the eyes,
Flaring in the gloom with wails and sighs;
Thrown across deck as the ship rolls in a trough,
It’s freezing, soaking, terror-struck stuff:
And many’s the oath in this death-brinked hell
That land-won safely in a harbour’s dell,
It’s farewell briny, find a girl’s love,
Take to factory work that’s snug as a glove,
Have a rose-filled garden, a babe on the knee,
An allotment for vegetables – cabbage and pea ...
Fast lads, she’s backing, she’s digging her bow,
The sea’s thick on the decks, it’s never or now,
Strain on the braces, fetch her head round,
If she founders we’re done for, we’re all of us drowned –
Can’t breathe, the spray is dense in the wind,
It’s banshee-bellowing, and it’s got me pinned! –
Salt-soaked, exhausted, we worked that ship
As she laboured the curlers like a waterlogged chip:
And what matter my dreams, my promises to self,
Don’t I know that just like a ball on a shelf,
If I settled ashore with all a man longs,
I’d roll off that shelf like a child in its songs
As quick as I heard the hiring gun,
That a ship was crewing, and a wage to be won?

====================
© May 2021

Cornish Gorse

"Artics" is trade slang for articulated lorries; "scrans" is/are foodstuffs; "Castle Chûn" is really Chûn Castle but rhythm required a reverse; if you choose your spot on Penwith moors you can see the sea to north, south and west. "Q-C" is "Q" - pseudonym of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose home was in Fowey, which he immortalized as "Troy Town" in a number of hugely readable novels and stories. "Q-C" was required for the rhythm.

   By way of comparison, here is a link to my 1979 free verse poem "The Ridgeway Above Wroughton" posted on this blog on 18 April 2012.

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

What is Cornwall but gorse in flower,
   Frothing in sud-clouds hour by hour,
Yellow as butter in honey dipped,
   Come April when the sun’s wide-lipped
And now-hot smile prompts all that lives
   To a vying grapple – one grabs, one gives –
As growth and propagation surge
   And fledglings, flowers and crops emerge?
The moors and heaths are a cloth of gold
   Billowing to tors by the West Wind strolled,
Rising steep above the slatey towns
   Which gaggle their skirts, all greys and browns;
The Western Highway, curved or straight,
   Shadows their contour, always in spate
With artics, cars and tradesmen’s vans
   Packed with goods or tackle or scrans;
They turn off to the pre-fabbed trading parks
   Speared by the rail line with its rushing barques,
Homing on Redruth, Hayle, Penzance,
   As granite-solid as a Scottish manse.
And always pressing is the Western Sea,
   Never distant, especially
At Castle Chûn, high on the droop
   Of Penwith’s toe, where merlins stoop:
Spring-warm blue or gale-scrubbed green,
   Two Channels’ waters leap and preen,
Hugging the land, that south or north,
   From the gorsy heights, you might plunge forth,
Wind-held, and headlong down to dash
   Like Icarus in those waters’ plash.
That gorse in thicket, bush and clump,
   Spiny, dusty, green of rump,
Rears six-foot tall, packing its flanks
   With two-inch spikes: behind their shanks
The chats and linnets, crimson and pink,
   Dodge shadowily, all flutter and jink,
And later, airborne, unstoppable, qweep
   Their twittered water-notes, springs then neap.

The Final Watershed

Two other lyrics about the approach of death are "In the Dark of Night," posted on 9 August 2018 and linked here, and "There Is Nothing More Louche," posted on 19 October 2021, linked here.

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

   His fifties come and gone
   He noticed little change,
Élan and appetite were good;
   Daily the days were long,
   And graft was fair exchange,
Done handily because he could.

   Then after sixty-three,
   So soon, a clutch of pains
Gave aching hint that all decays;
   A seep in energy,
   Sore hip, raw cuts and sprains,
Were frank that flesh must lose its glaze.

   And now at seventy-one
   Sleep bushwacks every day,
His prostate stings, heart fakes a beat,
   Eyes drip in wind or sun;
   His geist withered to clay,
What’s left but thoughts, some shreds of heat?

   Once, life’s packed call, arms-wide,
   Was goal; now, deathwards, he
Drifts coldly from the rousing young:
   A watershed has dried,
   Its desert holds the key:
At end he will be seed or dung.

===============
© February 2021

"There's Snow Inland but on the Coast Just Frost..."

Between 2019 and 2022 I was writing a series of twelve long poems about the sea and littoral (in fact there's one still to finish) linked to the months of the year. This short piece is an out-take from the poem about January.

   In the first part of my poetic "career," roughly 1973 to 1985 I was very much a city man and cannot recollect a single poem about or related to the sea except "Nightfall at Pagham Rife," written in 1978 and revised in May 2012 to remove much blather, (it was a time when I was greatly impressed by Ted Hughes. No longer!) Pagham is a small village to the west of Bognor Regis; the small streams and rivers about it are called "rifes." I posted the poem on 10 May 2012: it is linked here.

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

There’s snow inland but on the coast just frost,
Though freezing’s freezing, birds know to their cost:
Pre-dawn there’s frost like paste a’gleam on walls,
Dead silence, not a gull nor cat that calls,
The moon’s pall shimmers, polishing the ice,
All’s paralysed and breath-held in a vice;
But then a blackbird through the silent stun
Risks half-heart fluting, faint and then it’s done,
And next a robin as if cracking sticks
Stut-stutters with its geiger counter ticks;
The gulls, though, wary, wait for light’s first hint
Which shims the rooftops in a blue-black glint,
And then they’ll quarrel, though with sotto-screams,
And launch and circle in the town-light gleams;
For fourteen hours they’ve crouched in ice-crust cold,
Their bellies void, whilst winds have hissed and tolled,
Now, starved, they wing like ghosts, beachward to feed,
Fighting for sandworms or wet shreds of weed.

===============
© January 2021

Bad Day Blues

This was written during the covid lockdowns - what disastrously misguided decisions they were! - and reflects my frustrated amazement as men's minds went mad. Joseph de Maistre wrote against the atheist and murderous French Revolution and is often bracketed with our own Edmund Burke (and how we can do with a revival of his thought!)

   Another poem written in the same vein - which some might denounce as sour but others would recognize as clear-eyed if despairing - is "On Having an Evelyn Waugh Moment," written in December 2014 and posted here on 17 January 2019.

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

I woke in the morning feeling weird,
My God, was it covid? I scratched my beard:
    And suddenly I hated unconscious bias,
    And loathed all thought of the appallingly white;
    Death to racists! Castration for sexists!
    Patriarchy and capitalism were things of the night.
        Oh no, it was beyond a joke,
        I’d become woke!

I woke in the morning feeling strange,
My God, was it covid? Or a midlife change?
    For my wrist was limp, and my voice it minced,
    I ached for a toyboy with pecs like rumps,
    And my jeans were tight, and my crotch it bulged,
    My toupee was bouncy and I swished in pumps!
        Oh Lord, what could I say?
        I was gay!

I woke in the morning feeling faint,
My God, was it covid or some other complaint?
    Softly warbling about gendered autonomy,
    I stretched for my bra, suspenders and knickers,
    Then I shaved, did my makeup and anguished about dresses –
    I was meeting my group, “BoyzNowGirlz” (most of them vicars).
        Oh curses, despite lacking a fanny,
        I’d become a trannie!

I woke in the morning feeling off,
My God, was it covid? I had no cough,
    Instead, snarl-faced and bulging-eyed vain,
    I dreamt I was marching, chanting “Humans not Whores,”
    And “Wages due Housework” before texting home
    To check the au pair had swept all the floors.
        Oh rats, I could have been a terrorist,
        Instead I was a feminist!

I woke in the morning feeling ill,
My God, was it covid? I was hot then chill.
    I checked my phone: the cities were fired,
    Arson, looting and frenzy swirled in the streets,
    Obese, fleck-mouthed zombies, blaming oppression,
    Smashed their own neighbourhoods, exulting in tweets.
        What the hell, with a clatter
        I took the knee, screeching “Black Lives Matter!”

                Dear reader, de Maistre was right:
                Renouncing the Truth to dig a sump
                Darkens day to night –
                Where all will jump.

===============
© September 2020

"Strong Currents, Deep Water"

During my years in London I used to walk along the river bank from Kingston Upon Thames to Richmond - you  could convince yourself it was semi-rural. There was a sign on a slightly skewiff post planted just off the river bank, "Strong Currents, Deep Water." I made a note and put it in my jacket pocket where it lay forgotten for years until, disposing of the jacket, I finally found it. Hence this poem.

   An early poem along the same half-light, half-serious lines of a disabused man ruefully reflecting was "February 1981," written in the same month and year of the title and posted here on 16 February 2012. A more recent poem is "Well Met in Dorking," written in August 2013 and posted here on 18 July 2015.

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

There’s barely a day without its fight,
   The bills backed up, the children foul,
Reproaches hurtling left and right,
   The woman scornful like a big-eyed owl;
Oh marriage, commitments, are all very well
But they light up a path to a freezing hell,
Where two are pinioned flank to flank
      And shackled with bricks and mortar:
   I know a sign on the river bank –
      “Strong currents. Deep water.”

And workplace assessments are soul-damning trash,
   “Yes-ing” and “no-ing” in a conference call,
Make a poor showing and your job’s gone smash,
   Future and pension thrown to the wall;
The Director of Colleagues was coolly phlegmatic,
More Mephistopheles than wisely Socratic,
He was permed, silk-suited and suavely swank,
      But his nod sent lambs to slaughter:
   I know a sign on the river bank –
      “Strong currents. Deep water.”

Oh, at night when the sky is black as a cloak
   And the bedclothes dank with fear’s own sweat,
I tug and tear at this cosmic joke,
   Finding mere molecules clumped and ill-met;
What justifies, confides a meaning,
To the human animal coiled and keening?
Will the solar wind, unconscious, blank,
      Scatter us, quarter to quarter?
   I know a sign on the river bank –
      “Strong currents. Deep water.”

===============
© June 2020

Spring Rondel

Experimenting with forms I wrote "Three Triolets" and posted them here on 11 June 2019. And here's a jeu d'esprit, "What is the Use of Grinning," written in April 1980.

---------

Peaceable pigeons patrol the promenade,
Salut Sir Sun who shines in daylong sear,
Water’s whispering wavelets weft in the ear.

Intellect’s inklings inch to an insight warm-starred,
Fulsomely fondling formulae which fable the year:
Peaceable pigeons patrol the promenade,
Salut Sir Sun who shines in daylong sear.

Guard though! Grim the garçon who gurns his aubade,
Huckstering hopes to handstand too near, too here –
Trailblaze trapezing will only trip to a tear.
Peaceable pigeons patrol the promenade,
Salut Sir Sun who shines in daylong sear,
Water’s whispering wavelets weft in the ear.

====================
© May 2020

The Thrush

I've written quite a number of bird poems, especially including my mates the gulls. The bird world, behaviour and consciousness are ever fascinating. Here's a link to "Goldfinch" posted on 4 September 2017 and here's a link to "Robin and Leaf" posted on 10 August 2017.

---------

“Tirra lirra,” sang the thrush,
   Very loud then very hush,

Courting mates or chasing foe,
   Scolding off the chancy crow;

Proudly spotted, all a’gush,
   Fluting, whistling, tutting “tush;”

Cracking shells or tugging worms,
   Frankly killing on its terms;

Hen-bespread sans doubts or blush
   Yields a clutch of eggs, blue-plush,

Which on twig-thin legs it guards,
   Hop-skip anxious, running yards;

But it’s odds a cat will rush,
   Tearing it to bloody mush:

Killer killed is Nature’s law,
   Red in purpose, tooth and claw;

“Tirra lirra,” sang the thrush,
   Overflowing, full and lush.

====================
© April 2020

In Age in Garden Bowers

In age in garden bowers a man must wait,
Then a lesion bursts and the groundsman locks the gate.

====================
© April 2020

Heigh-Ho

Two earlier poems along (sort of) similar lines are "Forfending Every Fable" posted here on 11 December 2019 and (written about fifty years ago) "My Living" posted here on 3 September 2013.

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

How long is life in living,
How short it is when’s gone,
That blossom, swell and setting,
Is soonest blown and dun;
The girl that flings her tresses,
The boy that leaps in health,
Both mourn their shrivelled faces,
Time-decayed by stealth.

So hey for the springtime footings,
For the summer’s growth and hugs,
For autumn’s lap-filled gettings,
Even winter’s ice and fogs;
But loath the skin in tatters,
The hand at rest that shakes,
For men are nature’s debtors,
And must pay for all that breaks.

====================
© March 2020

Then and Now

The final stanza makes an obvious nod to Tennyson's mighty poem, 'Ulysses' - " 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world,/ Push off, and sitting well in order smite/ The sounding furrows..."

   Other poems about Penzance - the granite jewel of the west! - are 'A Penzance Ballad' posted on 2 March 2015 (link here), 'A Wild Penzance Night' posted on 11 June 2018 (link here), and 'John Davidson and I' posted on 23 September 2021 (link here).

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

   Long years ago on Sunday afternoons
   I’d see an old-time fellow taking air,
      Limping the chill and granite streets
   Of old Penzance, a small and short-legged dog
Wrapped in a body blanket shuffling at his heels;
      His loves and any workplace feats
Now past, his look said life was cold, his days repeats.

   Young and in health, I barely spared him thought;
   Stiffly he walked a course from Penare Terrace,
      Down Barwis Hill to Caldwells Road,
   And then, who knows? Years later now, enraged
To find myself an old-time fellow taking air,
      I walk with pains from Caldwells Road,
Up Barwis Hill to Penare Terrace, pant and slowed,

   (Claiming no dog) on Sunday afternoons,
   Saddened my life is cold, my days repeats.
      These January days there’s few
   To stroll and all seem blatant in their youth –
Loose-dressed, hot-skinned, fluent of step and frank in knowing
      Their tide’s in flood; a glance or two
They spare then, mind-blanked, pass to what they have to do.

   Thereby they prove the truth: those things you did
   To others will be done to you. So be it.
      That man must long be in his grave,
   Perhaps the crowded ground on Madron Road
(Its pets yard burying his dog if death called first);
      How long then shall I spurn his wave,
Being past all loves and works, the shortlived joys they gave?

   From Penare Terrace, blocked between the houses,
   Downhill, the distant sea is grey; it’s waiting
      The west wind’s arbitrary slap;
   But I, Ulysses of the drab, will seek
No final jaunt, my boat’s oars chasing the full moon;
      For me mere housework, then a nap,
And last, coffined at Madron Road, the earth my cap.

====================
© February 2020

"I Feel it Deeply..."

Other very short poems of a similar sort are 'A Siren Calling in the Night,' written in December 1980 and posted here on 12 December 2012; 'July Days,' written July 1980, posted here on 14 July 2012, and 'Who Can Interpret a Broken Branch,' written in March 1980 and posted here on 6 February 2013.

   Turning 74 later this year, and beginning to feel the aches and woes of age, I marvel at the likes of Thomas Hardy who made it to 88, and even more remarkably Thomas Hobbes who made it to 91 back in the seventeenth century: both of them without any serious aid from medical science. I'm not aware I've written anything on Hardy but here's a link to 'Thomas Hobbes' written in June 1980 and posted on 9 August 2012.

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

I feel it deeply and it hurts to say
That the hard-nosed Bible must have its way:
   At seventy we pass a border,
   And after that all’s out of order.

Cling on to eighty if your body can,
Pretending you’re whole as when you first began:
   But then the Gate Man crooks a finger,
   And none may any longer linger.

====================
© January 2020

Boils

The child was myself and I still carry the skin scars to this day: not surprisingly, the plague of boils launched against Pharaoh (Exodus 9:8-12) came to mind when writing this poem. Whilst we're on the personal, here's a poem about the early death of my father, "A Memory," written in May 2013 and posted here on 23 December 2014. And "The Self-Condemned," about a marriage breakup, written in August 1983 and posted here on 20 May 2013.

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

A child, he suffered from a plague of boils,
The doctor puzzled, parents at a loss;
They ached and hardened to a throbbing eye
Which, squeezed, would puke its pus. To the child’s cry

The mother soothed, dabbing the hot wound dry.
Boils pimped his face – eyebrows and temples, cheeks,
His arms and chest, his shoulders, neck and back:
Each evening bathed till ripe, his mother’s knack

Of mounding the boil was a fear’s cold rack
She’d squeeze and split in pain the pus-taut head
To sick its greeny muck. Those months of boils
Were spent aggrieved, patchworked with ointments, oils –

Like a rashed fellah grubbing Egypt’s soils,
At odds to know why fate had pused his hide.
Well, plagues must pass, and many years have fled,
Though gristled still on brows, his trunk and head,

He bears the scars. Body’s an A to Z:
What if disease has ends? Those boils a prompt;
Like Hebrews desert-trekked for a life’s age,
Seeking the Goading in a sort of rage?

====================
© November 2019

The Staggering Fox

The first part of the poem describes my own experience when I inadvertently surprised the sickest fox I've ever seen in my seaside backyard. The second part contains my ponderings thereon. I seem to attract dead or dying foxes: see my poem "A Dead Fox" written in January 2015 and posted here on 12 March 2019. And, again, "Dawn Fox" written August 2013 and posted here on 16 October 2015. By way of contrast is "A Dead Hedgehog" written way back in January 1981 and posted here on 20 November 2011.

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1.
Rue for the creatures! Rue the staggering fox! –
That trembling swagster sinking on its legs.
Post-noon, in a yard chill with April’s damp,
It stood despairingly, then slumped to haunch,
Head-sagged with effort, panting: young but old,
Made so by its unstopping tooth-fight with
The weathered world, it shivered, staring dully.
Mange-rotted, thinned to bones, its fur a’clot
With scabs and crusted with the scourings of
The street; its flanks clawed black and bald, its tail
A pizzled cabbage stalk near stripped of brush,
Bitten and bloodied by the itch, lethargic
It hunched. But man’s disturbing and a door
Thrown open prised it to its feet; it stood
And swayed reluctant to foreclose its brief
Fur-nuzzled rest. A man strode from the door.
Instinct gave strength. That fox in turn and leap
Scrabbled on top a four-foot fence, its legs
Clutching like arms. Then, shaking, glaring back,
It launched across a chasm, flinging limbs
To grab the ivy-hanging eight-foot lip
Of an outhouse’s next-door roof, that starved
And rib-chined body flailing to gain foothold –
The crashing of the ivy, screeching of
Its claws on brick, was like a wave’s explosion
Thrashing the shingle banks at the far beach.
Dragging itself across a parapet
It lingered, peering through the ivy’s tangle
Into the man’s unquiet eyes. That sick
Quivering snout and harsh eyes flamed with fever,
Yet frank, utterly frank, about life, death!
It turned, staggering from sight, most likely soon
To die, stretched in some ditch, eyes whitely glazed,
Tongue blotched on teeth, retching its final gasps.

The Wind-Bent Hawthorn Trees

All five poems record my close observation of a particular bunch of hawthorn trees and their environment through a year's cycle. They use a similar format and half-rhyme in the even-numbered lines. Note: "lurched" in line three of the first poem is not a verb: it describes position and posture. The fifth poem makes reference to William Golding's extraordinary novel, Pincher Martin, and its even more extraordinary closing pages describing Pincher Martin's death.

   Two of my early poems based on, relatively, close observation were "A Bowl of Chrysanthemums" (written in October 1979 and posted here on 12 November 2011), and "Ashford Stream" (written in September 1979 and posted here on 18 April 2012). Both were in free verse which I long ago abandoned. Two of my more recent poems about a "closely looked at" tree are "The Magnolia Tree" (written in December 2014 and posted here on 2 November 2019), and "Magnolia Tree: November" (written in December 2015 and posted here on 15 September 2020).

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i.
In mid-December, All Souls done, and dark
   St Lucy’s Day so soon to break,
The wind-bent hawthorn trees, lurched on their hill,
   Were scourged by the wind’s rain-shot freak.
Below, the sea smashed white-haired grey-gut rollers
   On shrieking shingle, and the gulls,
Flung in the brute-drum wind and swamping pour,
   Fled under clouds as black as hells.
Groaning, those trees rocked in the chilling blast,
   Twisted prone to the mud-sunk grass;
Fallen of leaf, arthritic-branched, their bark
   Was scabbed, tumoured with rain-black moss.
Bullied, they stretched shook fingers, grasping east,
   But pounded by the gales’ dark fists,
Like sick-faced crones, palsied at the grave’s edge,
   They slumped, mind-gone and numb, death’s guests.

   So sink all in the western wind.

ii.
Come March, Annunciation springs the sap
   Though grey-mist dawn humps down on frost;
The wind-bent hawthorn trees fruited with dew
   Stiffly awake in the air’s must.
Tide out, the sea is lumpen, brownly-dense:
   The gulls, gut-urged to dance and nest,
With dirge howls wring the sands in hungered flight,
   Food and soon hatchlings their sole lust.
Like youths greedy to do, but crabbed by wind,
   Thralled by the land’s puce heath and granite,
The trees haggle to growth: tight whorls of leaves
   Like bursting acne rash their branches;
Those whorls cup pustules, eager in their swelling –
   Broken, they’ll flare to cloudburst flower.
The lichen, daubed like salve on the trees’ bark,
   Crustily soothes their silent clamour.

   So swell all in the western wind.

iii.
And June, blazed by sun and the Sacred Heart,
   The fields loud-hummed with urgency,
The wind-bent hawthorn trees, freighted with leaf,
   Flexed branches in the blue-paned sky.
The full sea, light-flashed, huffing wave-slumped sighs,
   Bore gulls at rest, though hot to squabble
For wave-beached sops, then crop-full fleeting back
   To females at nest, eggs at coddle.
Corralled like crop-head convicts, berry beads
   In work gangs mobbed the trees’ crank limbs,
Half-blushed and sourly-green like Cox’s Pippins;
   Young growth like salad leaves glanced gleams,
Though cramped by older leafage, calloused, torn,
   But tautly bending to the sun’s
Hot swipe. Polished and stealthy to commit
   A wound, thorns grin, glinting like tines.

   So gleam all in the western wind.

iv.
September, mild and balmed by Holy Cross,
   The sky washed mauve, the hills clipped lean,
The wind-bent hawthorn trees, crisped by the sun,
   Thin out in wastage, their haws blood-brown.
The sea, dusty and still, flops kelp in swathes,
   And the year’s fledge scamper the sands,
Jostling and wolfing mud worms: moulting, glum,
   The adult gulls thieve crusts and rinds.
Death-browned at edge, the trees’ frail leafage shrinks
   Like flesh parting from ragged bones,
Those mildewed bark-flaked fingers, lumped with fruits,
   Soon to be frenzied by winds, rains.
Darkly-glowing, lusciously-globed, a’wait
   For seizure by the starveling birds,
The crab-red berries, dandled by the breeze,
   Lift and fall like a froth of curds.

   So wait all in the western wind.

v.
All months, that primal urge: go on, go on:
   Harsh matter’s will-less drive to be!
The wind-bent hawthorn trees, machines of cells,
   Take and discard on the hill’s knee.
At foot, the sea retreats, returns, its fecund
   Uncaution sculpting habitat
Which gulls, chancers of the scoured beach, make do
   Within, though prowled by death, for meat.
All has its ages – new to cankered old;
   Time’s footprint limps to the cliff’s lip;
Like Pincher Martin gripped on his soused rock
   Life sinks to claws, then dies to shape.
What’s left but context, mind-known, greater than
   Its parts, teased out by thought, by prayer?
What grows dies; in death meaning is its task,
   An ache that consequence be here.

   So pray all in the western wind.

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© December 2018 – October 2019

The Disused Railway Shed

By way of comparison, I posted another poem about a shed, "Toolbox and Shed" (written in 2015) on 15 November 2019. It is linked here.

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Like an old tramp slumped beside a rubbished path,
   The disused railway shed, adump
In bushes, harried by the sea-mew’s laugh,
   Endured, seeming to grieve its fate,
The hot and clanging times now past. Autumn’s
   Chaste mornings, cold, pure-aired, astound
The sky in silence, flimsy blue, which tautens
   When a crow caarks and wing-slaps to
The distant sun-tinged sea. Its brickwork tarred
   With oil and smut, splintered by frost
And scurfed with rotted mortar; windows barred
   By wire but stone-smashed; gutters hanging
Dirt-green with lichen, charred by rust; and roof
   Stove in, its fractured beams like fingers
Sootily clutching sky; the shed’s a proof
   That time wrecks all. Its walls are sunk
In blackened trash: old sleepers, clouts of rail,
   Fouled ballast; briars clogged with bindweed
And sprawling buddleia, brown-coned and frail:
   All’s summed in the tendon-tightened limbs
Of fossiled ivy, delta-splayed across
   Those walls like ropes lashed upon corpses.
It’s years gone since trooping the frosty moss
   The workmen bunched at dawn, then lit
A brazier, brewing tea, and fell to toil,
   Clattering wagons, heating rivets,
Lifting a chassis by brawn, block and haul,
   The air a stink of sweat and smoke;
And they in waistcoats, roll-armed flannel shirts
   And knee-tied corduroy. At home
Their women laboured likewise – hitching skirts
   For washing, cooking, back-bent in
The kitchen garden, balked by squabbling children.
   Stocky and watchful, town-edge folk,
They drudged long hours, their lusts and good deeds hidden,
   One slip from poverty but fierce
To jib if heavy-handed charity
   Besmirched their self-reliance or
Tattled their good name.
                                        Copse-hid, a gantry
   Is lifting plate-glass facings for
Exclusive flats (with porterage) being piled
   Beside the station: “London living –
A gym and pool, a terraced restaurant styled
   Upon artisanal cuisine –
But coastal ambience with a frequent, fast
   Connection to the capital!”
In heaven, who’s the blessed? The first are last
   We’re told. Perhaps those workmen with
Their kin, who lived with little, died still young
   Of fevers, lung disease, or saw
Their children cranked with rickets, all woe done
   And blissed in Justice’ final state,
Were shocked to find the “quality,” buff-nailed,
   Well-thicked in flesh, designer-dressed,
(Who, on completion, lived and then exhaled
   In those apartments), if allowed
Admittance to the Final Land, imprest
   To serve their which-way fancies like
Some chivvied chamber maid, so that bereft
   Of “three per cents” and trust fund cash
They’d find too grimly what it was to work –
   To rise pre-dawn and tug on boots,
Then, scarfed, to slither through the frozen murk
   To lay the fires and tables at
The “House,” or stumble to the railway shed
   Where, grateful, tea and baccy waited,
And then with curse and laugh to brace unfed
   To ten hours labour, man and boy.

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© September 2019

Of Self

Apart from being St Paul's Hebrew name, Saul was, of course, the name of the first Hebrew king - a "great one." Paul, by contrast, means small or humble. I wrote another small poem on a name, in this case my own - John, which in Hebrew means "God is gracious" - in 1981 and posted it on this site on 31 December 2011. It is linked here.

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Ha, ha! I sought to be a great one – like Saul.
Whereas I ended up a small one – like Paul.
The difference being he was great in small.
   And I? I wallowed small in small.

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© August 2019

Knapped Flints

By way of comparison, here is a link to the poem "The Old Stone Wall, Honey-Red..." which I wrote forty years ago in July 1979. I posted it here on 25 April 2012.

   The Lob in line 33 is the quintessential English countryman, wonderfully memorialized in Edward Thomas's poem, "Lob."

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In a lane on August afternoons of heat
And stillness, wandering to see what’s seen
But often not, pausing beside a wall
Grown stooped and crocked beneath its ancient sheen
Of lichened dust, I’d cast a clout at time
To tell what steps or stumbles might upend
My feet that twelve months gone, back-bent and lame,
I’d limp a gaffer before that wall, unmend
And cored by age, but time did not oblige.
The starlings, tits and goldfinch at their chatter,
The wall’s-foot vetch and purple knapweed, dosed
By sun, all shrugged that this was not their matter:
But the wall, a dusty glow of flints, though mute,
Blinked out a challenge from its eyes of flint.
Those flints! Obsidian-black, beer brown, mist white,
Some blotched like fat in sausage, some with a glint
Like blood-dark liver, some deep-clouded like
Piled clotted cream: white pudding, bran-thick dough,
Stained hearts of fresh-felled oak! Lens-smooth though creased
By ridges left when they were flaked by a blow,
They’re knife-edge sharp to blood an unwise finger –
That drying smear across the flints’ flat gleam
Hinting at depths of man and history:
The struggling on, the deaths, the flesh-torn teem
Of war; deeper again, blindly in the flints’
Unyielding stare, rock-strut geology’s
Ungraspable regress to ages where
Stark dust and stone, unconscious, warred the seas.
Oh, it’s like plunging through unbounded cloud,
Particularity, all human goods,
Depersonalized to chemistry’s chance bond –
Chiaroscuro unfooting men in its voids.
No, better far to run a poor Lob’s hand
Across the wall’s warm mortar, pit and stibbled
By hueless lichens, drained by sun, the mortar
Like parchment of an old man’s fist gone gribbled
By years, friendly to the palm as a hunch of bread.
What though am I, at Bible age, but one
Who waits his desiccation, strewn as dust
In some nearby field, there with water and sun
To nourish woundwort, spurge or yellow oxlip?
Well, time will turn its back and fate will yawn,
Although the flints, insolent in their glance,
A-glim in sunlight like a window thrown,
Stir up regret at what I cannot do
But would: their clumped resolve that though all things
Decay, swept up into the world’s piled rubble,
They’ll flash, as when at dusk a last bird sings.

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© July 2019

Rolling Down From Calvary O

This "theme" (to speak almost disrespectfully) has cropped up several times in my work through the years. Here are two other treatments written in December 1979: "Four Last Things," posted on 26 April 2013 and linked here; and "Now Barabbas," posted on 27 March 2013 and linked here.

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Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the springtime of the year,
Saw you the three loons slumped on the cross
   Like wheat dead in the ear?
One looked bad and one looked bold,
   One looked like a fate foretold:
Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the springtime of the year.

Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the summer heats of the year,
Saw you the three lags racked on the cross
   Like meat stewed on a bier?
One with a Fagin rattling screech
   Plunged down to hell like a maggoty peach:
Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the summer heats of the year.

Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the autumn mists of the year,
Saw you the three roughs stretched on the cross
   Like a blood and skin-flayed smear?
One with a heart-gasp croaking plea
   Saw heaven’s gate flash at his “Remember Me!”
Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the autumn mists of the year.

Rolling down from Calvary O
In the winter ice of the year,
Saw you the three rogues broke on the cross
And one of them hoist with a spear?
Oh, but His eyes pinned me like fire,
He smiled, He knew I was a cheat and a liar!
Sneaking down from Calvary O
In the winter ice of the year.

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© June 2019

The World's Colour

After a six month gap in posting due to catching Covid and then an operation followed by old man's lethargy, I return. This poem was written in three stints: Oct - Nov 2016, Dec - Jan 2017 and after a gap occasioned by "life" May 2019. The entire thing was then revised in January 2023. It struck me that returning to the poem in May 2019 I did not manage the same intensity and, perhaps, the thought was cruder. Hence, for no other reason, I have separated out the final part by a section break.
   The poem is written in rhyming couplets of alternating alexandrines and pentameters - the old Greek elegiac metre. I have used it previously for more personal poems: "Washington Square Revisited", here, and "A Dream", here. It was also meant to have masculine line endings throughout but feminine endings slipped through, embarrassingly early, in lines 21/22, so, in a weird attempt at symmetry, I allowed one couplet in the second part to have feminine endings - lines 191/192. The poem is 226 lines in length.

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Despite the larch tree’s glitter in the summer sun
The standfast colour of the world is dun,
Yes, even in the tropics where the light is fat
The heavy dust and leathern leaves are matt.
On well-groomed beaches or expensive skiing slopes
Where belles wear little or their beaux’ fur copes,
Unnoticed at the root of all that has a gleam
A shadow tempers, dulling gloss to cream;
For all that glitters in the dancing hard-drilled light
Is metaphor for man’s deflecting rite,
That rubric of insouciant self-accorded praise
Confecting lard-thick flesh and cocksure ways
To sacraments of money, health, good looks and youth,
Matter-impounded and the prime of truth,
So that success, flip happiness and game show fun
Define the essence of a life well won.
Ignored but present like the soot which darks the fire
Death drabs this partying and chokes the lyre;
For merest quizzing of the dawn-cold world which squats
In misted twilight east of Eden’s plots
Bodes forth the grindstones of existence turned by beings
Embodied in their huntings, trappings, fleeings,
The creatures gnawing blood-drenched meat from screaming prey –
Perhaps the haloed lion, keen to slay,
The sneaking fox which tears apart a new-born calf,
Or scooping bear which chews a fish in half;
As well the rock-and-water littoral where towns
Are roasted when volcanoes rent their gowns,
And storms with howling basalt waves a building high
Capsize a ship and drown each deckhand’s cry;
Inland, the deserts parch; a camel’s ribs are stripped
By famishing hyenas, gobbet-lipped;
In cities of the plain a high-speed train derails
And abdomens and skulls are crushed like pails.
O Calvary of creatures! All organic things
Despoil in death; nor that which flies nor clings
Remains, engrounded but ignored by dust and stones;
For inorganic being weeps no moans
However much it shapeshifts for its nature stays
Untouched, and that which never dies nor greys
Can ache no thought for hapless trees or wind-thrown scrub,
For wasps, for sharks, bacterium or grub,
And self-harm man – all suds which daily writhe and die,
Dung to the earth and apple of no eye.
And so the world is dun because it’s death-embraced,
And man the thinking molecule, shock-faced,
Must thread the matrices, the mesh of things in time,
Like Theseus aghast in bloody grime,
Tasting the consequence of carbon’s helter growth,
Body-moulding and dying, blank in both.
Hence, blatantly at sunrise when the light enfoils
The purple hills with gold and steams the moils,
Again at sunset as the coal-thick sea of night
Engulfs all conning sense of width or height,
The measure which gives meaning to these own-lawed states
Is human death, and whether at the gates
In rich-robed judgement or entailed in flint-strewn fields
Man takes from death whatever hope he wields.
His value, consciously and fully lived in will,
Impassibly corralled by death’s blank sill,
Must stretch its legs and fill its lungs in daily view
Of time’s encircling cloudbank with its hue
Of leaden depth, unsearchable and like a noose
Which in its bounding, boding as the deuce,
Creates man’s meaning by obliging him to live
Aware of self’s demise in death’s dank sieve.