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.

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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?

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© 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