In 2012-13 I wrote a series of shorter poems on the months of the year using a similar form for each poem. I posted the complete set of "Months" on 6 February 2015 and it is linked here. In 2014-15 I wrote a series of lyrics on the year's months, called "Months: Lyrics" and that series was posted on 11 March 2016. It is linked here. Between 2019 and 2024 I wrote a third "Months" series, this time concentrating on the sea and littoral and using a wide range of forms. The poems were also much longer and much more discursive. I am now posting them as I revise them. I will put some notes about each poem's form and references at the end of each post. The first poem in this sea series (for March) was posted on Friday 25 May 2025, link to it here; the poem for April was posted on 28 July 2025, link to it here.
There are four epigraphs for the entire "Months: The Sea" sequence and they are posted at the head of the March poem.
I forgot to mention in the March posting that each poem carries an ascription of the liturgical importance of the month. These ascriptions were widely used in the pre-Vatican II Church: they were yet another casualty of the destructive consequences of that foolish Council.
I do not appear to have written much else specifically about May. I've found two poems: "May Fragment," written in May 2015 and posted on 15 November 2019, is linked here, and "Spring and Meaning," written in February 2014 and posted on 21 November 2016, is linked here.
(Month of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
When the tide brims, the sea, you would think, might leap
Its broad basin; it looms over the beach strip
Like syrup taut in its own thickness, lazy
But suddenly deep.
At shore grey-green though cobalt-blue at distance,
Flashed with white horses, it slaps, plucks, the pier struts,
Gargling, and darkening the limpets and weed
Supine in its jaunts.
Post-lunch, in convoy, dinghies assay the year’s
First race – ducklings docile in the May-mild haze;
The sun, now hot, smudged to thinness, high and small,
If stared at makes tears.
Wet-suited (year-young, the water’s cold as frost),
A father teaches risk to his wave-tumbled
Daughter, otter-lithe, crowing as, upended,
She handstands like a post.
Quivering on air, gulls quarter the beach, tensed
To steal; trippers, wind-pink, incautious as lambs,
Display their sauced burgers, swag to the curt gulls
For all will be flensed.
Café society! Warmth and the skin-balm air
Tempt tables and chairs, the “quality” in high-
End casuals take coffee, lunch done, still grazing
On a fat éclair:
Croque Monsieur ou Madame, carafes of Sancerre,
Bottles of Keller Pils, and now Espresso
Or Cortado: how fine to stretch limbs, relax,
Confidingly share
The year’s project – expansion, promotion, new
Directions, travel: but voyager look north!
Over the hills, blue indeed, the clouds are thick –
Cumulus, whose hue
Of grey sobriety imposes grim forethought
That though self-sure doing, choice, enthusing of
The swarming mass, enthralled in sheer aggregate,
Lie inland – ah sought
After in spades! – so do dog eat dog treachery,
Ruthlessness, politics (tautologous?), in
Fact sin! He who stumbles is threshed by fixed-faced
Peons whose hurry
Drives anguish that life pays at piece rate except
Winner take all. Sin? Of a trice we sound depths
For sin is but Will, and who steps from his door
But that his will stept?
Yet hope in swelling May is chirp like ozone,
Mary’s May, frankest blue, though white the Church’s
(Paschaltide) and green old granddad Nature’s; hence
Gulls build nests and groan
Like un-oiled gears, thieving moss and gutter scraps
To shape their beds where blotched eggs will fructify,
Broiled by parents aquiver if unheeding
That spring’s lusts and saps
Embody promise, dependent, yes, but urged
Of fulsome being, guileless (if but moments)
Which only piety has words to express;
Thus, wrong-seeing purged,
“Ave Maris Stella” we sing, and a month’s
Length struggles to contain the truth that He who
Descended ascended, sending the Spirit
With flames to free mouths
To glorify the wonderful works of God,
Confirming, more so, that Truth is Trinity,
And in Corpus Christi lauding the gift where men
Touch His flesh and blood.
This press to create, matter’s pulse to combine
And continue, sits deep in all structures, in
Moist carbon-built systems, for sure; awareness
And force, then, align
And as foot-slipped will (hence all must choose), having
Survived our front step, we strut forth to such gains
As facts and chance allow: some will despair, some,
Like hikers waving,
Tide-trapped on the mud shoals, the waters rising,
Will be lost (pray for them), yet the contrary
Crowd – blind, vindictive, gleefully hot to kill –
Is ever surprising
A heart-sensed “Oh!” at thought of the rightness of
Things. Pile up negatives! The Danzig Buddhist
Was champ: all efforts done, he made his chosen
Nothingness a love
As positive as Rilke plucked on harp strings!
For try as might, it’s being’s words and concepts
Which govern sense, even in the negative:
Nothing never sings!
“Choose life,” the Jews say, the Greeks prosaically,
“A dog deserves its chance,” Our Lady Help of
All, “my prayers for you make peace of earth and heaven,
Therefore fare freely:”
Boon to the salt-steeped, tugging life from the dark
Sea’s rages. But now, at rest, late afternoon,
Furloughed trawler hands fish from the weed-black groyne,
A crow’s throaty “karrk!”
Dismissing their intent for whiting and dab.
The beach has emptied, cafés closed, their windbreaks
Clapping in the brisk breeze; midges have settled,
The sea has turned drab.
Later, in town, restaurants will incubate
Civility. The roof-topped gulls, patrolling
Nests, will wrangle their own sour truce: deceit or
Strength will arbitrate.
Mary’s May, frankest blue, though white the Church’s
(Paschaltide) and green old granddad Nature’s; hence
Gulls build nests and groan
Like un-oiled gears, thieving moss and gutter scraps
To shape their beds where blotched eggs will fructify,
Broiled by parents aquiver if unheeding
That spring’s lusts and saps
Embody promise, dependent, yes, but urged
Of fulsome being, guileless (if but moments)
Which only piety has words to express;
Thus, wrong-seeing purged,
“Ave Maris Stella” we sing, and a month’s
Length struggles to contain the truth that He who
Descended ascended, sending the Spirit
With flames to free mouths
To glorify the wonderful works of God,
Confirming, more so, that Truth is Trinity,
And in Corpus Christi lauding the gift where men
Touch His flesh and blood.
This press to create, matter’s pulse to combine
And continue, sits deep in all structures, in
Moist carbon-built systems, for sure; awareness
And force, then, align
And as foot-slipped will (hence all must choose), having
Survived our front step, we strut forth to such gains
As facts and chance allow: some will despair, some,
Like hikers waving,
Tide-trapped on the mud shoals, the waters rising,
Will be lost (pray for them), yet the contrary
Crowd – blind, vindictive, gleefully hot to kill –
Is ever surprising
A heart-sensed “Oh!” at thought of the rightness of
Things. Pile up negatives! The Danzig Buddhist
Was champ: all efforts done, he made his chosen
Nothingness a love
As positive as Rilke plucked on harp strings!
For try as might, it’s being’s words and concepts
Which govern sense, even in the negative:
Nothing never sings!
“Choose life,” the Jews say, the Greeks prosaically,
“A dog deserves its chance,” Our Lady Help of
All, “my prayers for you make peace of earth and heaven,
Therefore fare freely:”
Boon to the salt-steeped, tugging life from the dark
Sea’s rages. But now, at rest, late afternoon,
Furloughed trawler hands fish from the weed-black groyne,
A crow’s throaty “karrk!”
Dismissing their intent for whiting and dab.
The beach has emptied, cafés closed, their windbreaks
Clapping in the brisk breeze; midges have settled,
The sea has turned drab.
Later, in town, restaurants will incubate
Civility. The roof-topped gulls, patrolling
Nests, will wrangle their own sour truce: deceit or
Strength will arbitrate.
====================
© June 2019. Revised September 2025
© June 2019. Revised September 2025
Notes:
This syllabic poem is written using the sapphic form. The syllable count is 11, 11, 11, 5. There are no elisions, but there are moveable caesuras in the first three lines of each stanza between the 4th and 6th syllables (in three cases after the 7th syllable). Some of the caesuras are pretty imaginative - not my finest achievement. Eight lines have an extra syllable, although allowing for the typically slurred pronunciation of some words that comes down to four. Finally, the first and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme - using full or half-rhyme.
This syllabic poem is written using the sapphic form. The syllable count is 11, 11, 11, 5. There are no elisions, but there are moveable caesuras in the first three lines of each stanza between the 4th and 6th syllables (in three cases after the 7th syllable). Some of the caesuras are pretty imaginative - not my finest achievement. Eight lines have an extra syllable, although allowing for the typically slurred pronunciation of some words that comes down to four. Finally, the first and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme - using full or half-rhyme.
Each of the 12 "Months: The Sea" poems makes reference to some of the saints and/or major festivals of that month as memorialized in the pre-1955 Catholic Missal; in this case the saints got crowded out because of the importance of the Holy Virgin and the major festivals of the Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi.
Stanza 20: the "Danzig Buddhist" is the nineteenth century atheist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who was born in Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland). He was one of the first to take an interest in, and be influenced by, Indian philosophies. He was also, along with Plato and the pre-Socratics, the first philosopher to interest me in my later teens (decades ago now). His conclusions may be wrong, but his arguments along the way are powerful.
