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