West Penwith

West Penwith is the far south-western toe of the UK mainland; only the nail clippings of the Scilly Isles lie beyond.  Up on the moors behind Penzance is Carn Euny, a preserved Iron Age settlement of the Cornovii tribe. Fogous (rather crudely "caves") probably had a religious/ceremonial significance - there are several in West Penwith. The coastal village of Pendeen until 2014 had a massive working foghorn replete with signs to stay well away during poor visibility because the horn was so powerful it could damage your ears. (The disused foghorn is still there beside the Pendeen lighthouse.) 

   The poem, with just a little bit of grammatical stretch, is written in a single sentence. It is one of three written in the same rather jogging metre in 2021/22. The others are "Cornish Gorse" posted here on 24 October 2023, and "If You Want to Know What Sea Is" posted here on 25 November 2023.

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The cliffs are shook, the thyme is shaken,
The roar is such to waken the Kraken;
Dank mist like suds is flung from the sea,
Greyly streaming over stack and scree;
Sharp rain is piercing the grass and sedge
Clinging blackly to slab and ledge,
And the wind, the wind! like a searing flail
Scourges the cliffs and moors with hail:
Carn Euny, stark on its rising breast,
Has a view all ways, north-east, south-west,
But compass-open there’s no reprieve
From the air’s freeze, the wind’s heave;
Here the Cornovii built their huts,
Granite and thatch, their paths all ruts,
And wind-swept, damp-rotted, scratched their fields
For oats’ and barley’s skinny yields;
Some bony cattle, some goats and sheep
Graze the moorland with its constant creep
Of heather, bracken and yellow-eyed gorse
Grabbing ground with bullying force:
Arthritic, coughing, weather-scarred men
Hack the furze from the field walls again;
Their women, bent-backed, carry and cook,
The children learning by help and look:
And has much changed through centuries’ reach
(Some offer nostrums, others preach)?
But look, Penzance – harsh-granite-grey –
Hunkers as a rain squall swamps the bay,
Glinting grimly through the solid pour
Battering gutters with its ear-split roar;
The sea, the rain-drenched wind, the salt
Govern life and health from birth to vault;
And soon or late, folk to the grave
Crumple and fall like a stumbling wave,

Down at the Water's Edge

All the references will be well known to Penzance aficionados; Pen Sans is the "Holy Headland" around which Penzance is built. For my attempt to convey what it's like to be caught in bad weather at sea see my "Gale at Sea" posted here on 25 October 2023. And for my memorial of a genuine Penzance/Newlyn "character" see "Roger Nowell, A Cornish Skipper" posted here on 19 December 2017 and easily my most visited poem: it's astonishing how his memory lives on!

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When the wind blows and the scud is low,
Swamping St Clement’s Isle,
When the sea surges as black as pitch
And the cloud’s as brown as bile;
Then’s the time to gasp your last
And groan for cart or sledge:
“O, haul me out and let me die
Down at the water’s edge.”

Rattle me down through Chapel Street
Sinking below Pen Sans,
Hear! the rain is flung in swathes
Roaring like falling cans;
Drag me on to Battery Rocks
For I’m to fulfil a pledge –
Soaked, battered, it’s there I’ll die
Down at the water’s edge.

So many! In youth we were forced from the west,
Urgent for work and a wage,
In London town I sweated and jobbed
As the years became an age;
Now old, returned, in Gwavas Street
I sit in my window’s ledge,
Waiting the end when I wish to die
Down at the water’s edge.

St Peter in boots, with his oilskins tight,
Staggered along Heaven's pier,
The seas were high, the entrance rough,
Boats off wallow and veer:
“Ahoy,” he bawled, “there’s few will enter
Struggling with sheet and kedge,
But are you from the west and did you die
Down at the water’s edge?”

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© October-November 2022

Eyelids

The stanzas are written as haikus with the usual syllable count of 5, 7, 5. I've introduced rhyme in the third line of each stanza to bind the poem together.

   A sort of hunched-up winter contra-version of this poem is "Impromptu," written in February 1980 and posted here on 26 January 2012.

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But by God you’ve lived!
Late June, the afternoon sun’s
Intense, the wind strong,

The sea’s a’broil with
Plasma of leaping flash-flakes,
Flinging heat that shone

Glarely on suede sand
And hot-stoned shingle. The gulls
Crouched, panting, weighed by

The sky’s vaulted tons,
Lapis-blue, peremptory.
Lips and tongue are spry

With ozone-souse, flung
By the in-roaring waves, thumped
By wind’s fisted blast.

An hour’s prom walk is
Enough, threading the basted
Bodies, thin or vast,

Crisping in sun, all
Angst-work annulled in heat-trance.
Wake up! There’s self’s thrill

In this mêle of air’s
Primary dazzle, frank to
Enthuse the poised will.

Later, returned home,
An iced drink misting its glass,
Eyelids sting, cheeks throb,

Livened by sun’s, wind’s
Afterburn. Back! Go back, where
The sea shouts, gulls mob!

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© August 2022

The Spider

This is my only poem about spiders as far as I recall. I have, however, written a lot of poems about birds. So for comparison I give a link to my eleven year old poem, "Two Sparrows" here.

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A tiny spider but a mil or two,
Vaulted in terror as my finger swept
Above him like a comet razing earth:
   The domicile he kept

Disastered, gamely bristling legs like clubs,
He fled for safety to the cupboard’s bounds.
Ten days he’d commoned on that smooth white door,
   Sorting his granuled founds;

I him ignored, he me, but then my hand,
Forgetful, upside-downed with whistling winds
His lunar plain’s calm atmosphere, shaking
   His web-tied goods to flinds.

With caution, later, he sidled back and set
Himself again to hoard his winnowed shreds;
For him, at scale, that door’s unfeatured stretch
   Was place, with meats and breads,

A neighbourhood, terrained and closely-known,
Though heavened with a void, now light, now not,
Tornadoed by destroyings beyond all grasp
   Of his brain’s challenged dot.

What gulfs between that minim thing and I –
Both size and concept-handling depth of mind!
Looming, to him I’m but a whimful god,
   Destructive, lenient, blind;

But then, what depths, what deeps! draw endlessly
Between the Fleshless Ones and my garbed self;
To them, had Yahweh not touched flesh I’d be
   A bug upon a shelf.

Again, though Angels crowd the One’s just Hand,
Unbridgeable’s the tract that clefts His thoughts
From theirs: we none have being in ourselves
   Except He stoops and wroughts.

Many’s the thinker, centuries-long, who’s twist
His mind to know what’s known-not but it show
Itself! We come, we go – truth’s behind-veiled,
   And death’s its pilgrim’s glow.

So smile upon that spider’s life’s endeavours,
His treasured husks and flakes; soon he’ll fall prey
To some toothed gatherer, so let his dwelling
   Prosper him his day.

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© July 2022

Venus Glowing

This poem, as perhaps the rather light-hearted tone of the first two lines suggests, was planned to be a witty, bouncy consideration of life and morality as lived in the far west of Cornwall. Instead it developed into a more serious discussion of the Six Sins Against the Holy Spirit as enumerated in Traditional Roman Catholicism (as opposed to the current debased and corrupt Catholicism-lite plastered on the Church by the Robber Pope Bergoglio, who calls himself Francis).
   The poem is written in alternating trochaic pentameters and tetrameters, except for two lines where iambics crept in. Mounts Bay is the large bay between Gwennap Head and The Lizard on which my beloved Penzance sits; Cudden Point is a headland to the east of Marazion which itself is to the east of Penzance.

   For a very different treatment of deep matters, here's a link to my December 1980 poem "Plotinus and the Snake" (posted on this blog on 19 December 2012). I wrote it in the first flush of discovering Plotinus whom I still regard as one of the very greatest of the ancient philosophers and the greatest Neo-Platonist. It has often been pointed out how close his work is to Christian philosophical theology; indeed, in the seventeenth century there was an entire school of Christian Platonists for whom he was central. The various incidents mentioned in the poem are taken from his biography.

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Venus glowing on the Western Sea
Shines on sinners, shines on me –
Lovers, lusters, pursemen swelled and sleek,
Victors having stormed their peak:
Lit by midnight’s star-and-Venus glow
(Mounts Bay shillies to and fro),
All must quaver at the sea wind’s cry,
“MANE, THECEL, PHARES: die!
“O Baltázar, know thy soul is claimed,
“Countless are your sins and named,
“Swept to Sheol by the Lord’s fierce hand,
“Reft your world-hopes, foam on sand.”
Friends, know this, you too Baltázar are,
And I, the meanest sinner far.
      Six great sins like bales a’squat our backs
Frenzy us as flies in wax.
First’s Presumption: lo, the Pharisee
Draped in rubric, scalp to knee,
Harsh in faulting lessers’ ill-drilled ways,
Rank impresses through his gaze;
But assurance cranks to hauteur’s puff,
Soles him in his own enough,
Momently, he’s pillared like Lot’s wife,
Living, yes, but not a life.
      Then’s Despair, philosophy’s own gift:
Tenured, cuckold, last hairs quiffed,
Jürgen Krudsmann munches like a snail
Nietzsche’s orphic sense-spatched Braille;
Decades questing self’s sufficient “is,”
Cross-eyed with his helpless “viz,”
Chasm-dancing leave him, for in man
Essence is not found nor plan;
Self’s existence rests on what’s Without,
Raising it above things’ rout;
Krudsmann, though, his lecture notes in stone,
Pumps his texts like bodies prone;
Nothing’s found, nothing to salve his gloom;
Slowly shadow darks the room.
      Next’s Impugning Truth That’s Known. Behold,
Zadie Zed (once Adam Auld)
Swirls “her” stubble with a rouge-charged brush,
Bothered by “her” tub-sized tush;
Penis-bulged, “her” cami-draws enclose
Not girls’ poesy but male prose;
Bustless, hands like hairy Mowbray pies,
“Truth” for “her” is baked of lies.
Notice: “gender,” “sex,” are words which case
Fact’s one fact: there’s sex, its base
Chromosomes, which cannot jump as wish
Wishes; “gender” claims, like fish
Landed writhing, are but tantrumed screams
Contra datum, blemished memes
Imitating Satan’s “Non,” for he,
First, refused reality.

This Pestering Present Moment

There is more going on formally in this little poem than first meets the eye. The first four lines of each stanza are alternating iambic trimeters and trochaic tetrameters, and lines one and three have feminine endings. The final four lines of each stanza are alternating iambic tetrameters and trimeters, with lines five and seven ending in three-syllable words (well, four syllable in the second stanza, line seven). The rhyme scheme is obvious.

   For a much different approach to the endless present moments of time, here's a link to my free verse poem "Works and Days" written in May 1979 and posted here on 10 May 2012..

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   This pestering present moment
Stabs its goad and stings the mind;
   Indicting, never dormant,
Leaves no trespass unassigned:
            By self-division endlessly
            It births the endless now,
            Thus blighting all to guiltily
            Do all that sins allow.

   You cheated, lied, you slandered,
Pardoned self but not your friend,
   But appetites unlaundered
Flinder truth and never mend.
            Insist if must that frabjously
            The sated self’s at peace,
            But consequence will hideously
            Griddle you in your grease.

   And what is truth? laughed Pilate,
Truth’s my free-for-all, growled time,
   Where lust barebacks your wallet,
Mocks your groans as pantomime:
            It’s hate, it’s graft, and shamelessly
            Enthrals your grasping eyes;
            It sells you time-share earnestly
            But damns you to the sties.

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© April 2022

A One-Year Gull

Well, don't get me started on the lunacy of the lock downs which wrecked the economy and what was left of the social life of this country. And all to "deal" with a virus which was harmless to well over 90% of the population and whose victims were largely people in their eighties and older - i.e. well past their sell-by date. I write that as an elderly person myself.

   Back to the poem. The incident is true, occurring after an early morning visit to the supermarket, followed by a quick stroll along the deserted promenade to say hello to the sea. In the first stanza the rhyming lines have feminine endings, and the unrhyming lines masculine endings; then in the second stanza the rhyming lines have masculine endings, and the unrhyming lines feminine endings; and so on, the two stanza forms alternating, to the poem's end.

   In my first period of poetry-writing decades ago I wrote very little about the animal world. But already, with many others, I was becoming concerned about the horrors of industrialized farming and wrote "Mr Longley's Dream," a ballad specifically about factory farming for eggs. I posted it here on 9 May 2013.

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Monday 20 April 2020 at 8.30 am

In virus time, locked down, the streets denuded,
Hurrying home with food bags, thinly stocked,
Just off the prom a crise obtruded:
The cold-wind, blue sunned sky poured early light
Upon a gull be-snooded

In fishing gut. This lashed-up one-year gull,
Its fawn-brown plumage like a mattress’ ticking,
Was wrapped round pink-stick legs and skull
By line which trapped its wings in half-spread angles:
It stood there, waiting cull.

I paused, rested my bags, and weighed my options;
Its unresponsive eye haughtily stared:
He’d edged some yards with hobbled actions,
Traced by a trail of gut, but now was leant
Breathless on the street stanchions.

Could I unpick the line? I’d need a knife
At home, but gull and bags could not be carried
Both. Anyway, what price a life?
Pledging return, I took my bags, offloading
That gull’s tight-knotted strife.

I thought: let nature do its work; some hunter
Will sink its jaws – gulls deal death, suffer death,
All’s fair; nature knows nothing gentler.
So, home-reached, the day’s business filled my mind,
Letting no self-doubt enter.

Yet pity, special to what’s human, hissed
“Go back.” I didn’t. Fallen man’s hard-hearted
When self’s convenience is grist.
I failed a test. Why mourn if at death’s taking
I also am not missed?

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© March 2022