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; that for May, posted 20 September 2025, is linked here.
There are four epigraphs for the entire "Months: The Sea" sequence and they are posted at the head of the March poem.
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 seem specifically to have written many poems about June. One such is "A Blackbird in June," written in June 2013 and posted on this blogsite on 2 March 2015. It is linked here. A much earlier poem which is "June-ish" is "Epigraph on Rome," written in 1979 (and which I have always been fond of) and posted on this site on 31 October 2012. It is linked here.
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(Month of the Sacred Heart)
My God! Hades’ gates roared, and shelves of rock screamed
Into a battering skip: a thunder-shriek seized the town,
Quaking the granite streets; clefts of lightning cracked
From cloud to sea, boned and crook like a hag’s claws, and flash glared
A shocked second, dowsing dawn’s twilight. The beached
Worm-glutting gulls leapt to wing instantly, howling a’group
In tight-turned circles, wing feathers clapping as
Raging, gabbling, they swung like thrashed souls driven through hell’s
Gloomy bolges. In a gasping moment, rain’s
Avalanche drenched the town as wide-footed thunderheads,
Anvil-tall from sea to high sky, crept mollusc-like
Across coast and village, braun and convulsed, liver-dark,
Purposed as locusts blackly gulfing the fields.
The rain, solid as chain-mail, clashed in the streets – the gulls
Forced to ground; it fried like fat on the beige sands
And clattered hoarsely a shine of spume on the lead-puce
Beaten sea. In town on walls and roofs, herring gulls
Hunched and suffered, glum in the pounding soak, feathers glued
To points, their wing quills rutted, their beaks adrip:
The tart whiff of the plumb downpour, chilling the air, belied
The hoped-for heat of a smack June day. To some – most? –
A pious plea such times, urged to the Sacred Heart, might seem
Inane, the world shrunk to flexing panes, iron-grey,
Of water, the flumes gushed by the beach’s storm drains, grimed
With town dirt, gouging fanned Mississippis through
The slathered sands; but friend whether Megiddo’s endgame
Is bodied by these false-mirrored drapes, or they’re
But a passing puff, that shrined Heart, consoling as a hand
Proffered, gifts a gritted patience portioned to
The pleader’s disastered state – oh Horn of Goods, replete
Of Blood and Water, Trove Box of pity, Vault
Of refuge for the blight and perplexed! It’s a fraught truth
For strandsmen that gulfed offshore in a storm force
Blether, or skewered on a cliff by a ton’s weight of wind,
All atheists go AWOL, (none ever turned a trick
Trundling the nay-sayers’ naff bookstall across battlefields).
The day a washout, the next – June’s longest – was fine.
By four, dawn’s tones – lime-olive rosined with jade-pink sheens –
Had lotioned the attic-wide sky; a slivered moon,
Vague as a slopped clam of bread in rose-milk, wasted away.
By chimneys, on gables, nested hatchlings squealed,
The parent gulls off-hand; a breeze scattered the sea’s hiss
Through the lanes, and night-out cats nosed the cracked shells
Dumped by the gulls like rind. Come eight, the beach having warmed,
Morning forage done, blackbacks and herrings rest
In flocks, distrustful and jump: glared eyes, thrust beaks, insist
On lifetime social distance. The cirrused sky
Is ruthless blue, the sands hemp- and umber-stained, the sea,
Full-ebbed and flat, is emulsioned greeny-pale.
Unstopped, the heat piles and the strand’s hours amble to afternoon;
Those free to loaf splay the shingle, children chase,
And swimsuit girls, dark or blondes, gleamed with sun-block, exhale
The health and flesh-firm arrogance of bodies at
Their peak. Is Eden’s realm refound? Eat and drink, have fun
The prom’s tea parlours call: let the Garden tend
Itself. But there’s a worm: the blackened cormorant, returned
From gawping on the Tree of Life, bombards across
The swell, mere inches high, its neck stretched out to length, stub
Wings held rigid – a devil’s inverted cross.
Lust’s the worm! It drives this gew-gaw colony quickly sprung
At the sea’s hot edge, the summer’s musky rage
To fornicate which traps so many (the Virgin warned
At Fatima) in Sheol’s black-stenched, wind-torn wastes:
The wafted hair and glossy lips, the appraising half-flung glance,
And, oh such torment! the windsail girls a’wet with spray,
Disboarding in the surf, their wet-suited bodies clutched
And contoured, blatant magnets for men’s lewd gaze!
Pity the old ruts their loins’ chafe still urgent to surge at
What’s now beyond their grab: venery, Franklin thought,
Was best doled like hoarders’ pence, the bed retained for sleep
Not jinks, but yet, sunk in years, the reins can flare,
Aghast at the gelder’s noose of illness, rot and death;
And caught unawares, a glance perhaps in some scrap
Of glass, a man might quake at what squats grinning – its fact
Known but shunned: birthed, in life, at end, he’s alone,
Mere animal, and the slake, grunting, of the sex-clasp
Is but a dodging of this unselfing truth.
Sans a Divine coup, life’s but the senses, dazzled, struck,
Helpless to find certainty, except death’s own,
Dragging through day after day the body’s diseasing lump.
And dunned at a stroke, seized over Jordan’s deep,
Blasé with mired minds, and hips crocked with the crotch’s dank sins,
What shock, what own-fault dread, finding there’s a Judge
Leafing receipts, your notes of hand, hunting your sweat prints
To prove noon’s labours at the wine press! For His friends,
Heat-stained, dried like jerk, have pruned, burning their fruitless crave
For the world’s spick glitters: booze n’ fame are smashed husks,
And for the years-trapped sick, codgered in wheelchairs, as much use
As Lawrentian eye-pop sex to the de-balled.
Spare thought, then, for the old clerks, their treasons: rent-boy Auden whose
Works were in better taste than his life; short-necked
Durrell, eye-mauling flocks of beauties, dropping his jaw,
Whilst his flight boarded; and vatic Yeats, breath-taut,
Clog-hearted, distilling song from his vexed lust and rage:
They knew, like alchemists (who might not say so),
That their conjuring for trine, and ego’d grappling for
Love and cash, hid pride, lust’s yellow-faced bed mate,
Satan’s pus which, freely drunk, had flung him from the steep
Of Heaven like a lightning shard. Worldly vim
And attic salt won’t count a wink when the terse gavel falls
If through self’s lack of censure, or the auteur’s willed
Word-preening licence, art lies, forcing language to kiss
The devil’s arse. Paulinus, Ephrem, teach us
True ways that the distincting Muse might gift her crown in grace:
Paulinus, praising martyr Felix in your
Yearly hymn, who spurned your stylus, giving yourself to
Slavery that a widow’s only son be freed;
And Ephrem, “Spirit’s Harp,” who wound your songs in complex threads
(Vide Auden!) but taught the faithful hands-on sense
In direful times of the Cross-haters: both knew that art
That’s congruent, like Balaam’s ass, refuses roads
That snake to the gross altars jacked-up to lip-lick gods,
Frothing with excess’s dayglo’d garlands, piled
With rancid giftings of sense transgressed and spliff-eyed, freaks’
Autonomy. True art is God-ward, fruited by
The Twice-Disclosed (its two “R”s), both galvanised and jibbed
By the stone-scribed Precepts which circumcise the ways
Of man to man. Its garb’s decorum, it wears the stole
Of proper quantity, accordant to the world’s
Relations; and its verbs are pure, deploring all dung
Of faux-intentioned ugliness, that dupe cult of
Feeling, troped as “one man’s truth.” No doubt such thoughts are null
To the beach-sprawled. By three the corona’d sun,
Bloodshot-orange, was a seethe of heat, its glistered glare
Dancing the sea in cluttering foils, glitting with
Scorch-eyed flashings. Off-coast, the basking sharks and pliant schools
Of dolphin, tempt but averted by man’s clashed
Water frolics, forged east in the warming Channel, past yachts
Conversely sprinting for the western deeps. But still
Life’s brutishness can strike. A young girl, snaking on the prom,
Lies in a fit, her parents pattering like
Puzzled gulls, faces blank, waiting the medics; a quick
Glance thrown, the kite-flyers from the upper beach turn
Back to their wings. Black-head gulls, squalling like spinsters goosed,
Wing-hang at the kiosks, red legs flailing, keen to
Drop between tables and take the floored biscuits or chips,
Feeders protesting with “eughs!” and slapping hands.
Unease is never far, this being Adam’s demesne, but
Afternoon calmed to a timeless evening might soothe
The conscienced, their raw nerves like sunburn unctioned by sight
Of a heron, its ballooned wings like punkahs as
It indolently flies to roost, legs trailing like strings.
Fulfilling its writ, the longest day leaned out
To horizons hazily bronze; black-amiced, collared doves,
Pink-brown in the sun’s thick heat, had wandered from
The town’s dry streets to strut the beach’s breeze-pattered slope.
And somehow it was ten. The light deftly dulled
To sepia, the sea was jet, though bathers still shouted, swam;
The shingle matted to suede. Above, a cloth
Of linnet-green spread the sky, and westering it tanned
To cerise and feldspar-red. Tide-turning, waves
Lispily flopped, for flood or ebbing the sea’s a voice
Unstilled whilst men continue. But now it seemed that
Peace had soothed the sands and stones; the Accuser’s roar had died
In his own self-doubt, and something like a hint of
Joy wrestled in my bones as I thought upon the days
Of old, having in my mind the eternal years.
====================
© July-August 2020. Revised April 2026
© July-August 2020. Revised April 2026
Notes:
The poem is written in alternating syllabic lines of 11 and 13 syllables. There are no caesuras but there is elision (which obviously affects the individual line syllable count) as follows: contiguous vowels, if sounded, are elided; vowels separated by h, y or w are elided (this includes diphthongs); an elided syllable can only count once in a line and only in one direction. All lines end on a single syllable, therefore masculine, word or if an end word has more than one syllable, the final syllable must be capable of carrying a stress. There are internal half-rhymes in lines 2 and 4, then 6 and 8 and so on; they are movable between the fifth and eighth syllables and the rhyme sounds are all masculine, i.e. on one syllable.
The poem is written in alternating syllabic lines of 11 and 13 syllables. There are no caesuras but there is elision (which obviously affects the individual line syllable count) as follows: contiguous vowels, if sounded, are elided; vowels separated by h, y or w are elided (this includes diphthongs); an elided syllable can only count once in a line and only in one direction. All lines end on a single syllable, therefore masculine, word or if an end word has more than one syllable, the final syllable must be capable of carrying a stress. There are internal half-rhymes in lines 2 and 4, then 6 and 8 and so on; they are movable between the fifth and eighth syllables and the rhyme sounds are all masculine, i.e. on one syllable.
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.
Line 26: "Megiddo's endgame": the site of the final battle of Armageddon on the Day of Judgement (Revelation: 16, 14-16).
Line 69: the twelfth of Benjamin Franklin's "Thirteen Virtues" or rules for living was Chastity: "Rarely use venery but for health or offspring."
Line 91: "short-necked/ Durrell, eye-mauling flocks of beauties": someone records seeing Durrell at an airport, waiting for his flight and blatantly ogling the young ladies passing before him. And, of course, he had a very short neck.
Line 93: "Yeats, breath-taut": Yeats suffered from heart and breath problems at the end of his life and an oxygen cylinder was kept handy.
Line 96: "conjuring for trine": i.e. seeking what was favourable or useful to them.
Line 103: St Paulinus of Nola and St Ephrem the Syrian were early Christian poets (besides much else). St Paulinus wrote a yearly hymn in praise of his predecessor St Felix of Nola. It is recorded that St Paulinus gave himself into slavery to gain the release of the son of a poor widow. St Ephrem wrote hymns, poems and sermons in verse, often using complex metres but expounding good Christian sense in a time of great persecution. Both saints have feasts during June in the true Roman Missal.
Line 116: "The Twice-Disclosed (its two "R"s)": This refers to the Revelation and Resurrection/Redemption. What is disclosed, of course, is the Father and His Eternal Son. And where is the Holy Spirit? Well, as St Paul tells us, we have access to the Father and Son always through the Holy Spirit. The two "Rs" are also referred to in the April sea poem. In line 117, the "stone-scribed Precepts" are the Ten Commandments.
Lines 156-157: these final two lines are my slight rewording of the sixth verse of Psalm 76 (Douay-Rheims version).
