Medlin the Writer

Friday, 11 September 2026

Months: The Sea: August

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; that for June, posted on Monday 27 April 2026, here, that for July, posted on Thursday 18 June 2026, 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 have written a handful of other poems about August. But first an ancient poem, from October 1981, which is non-specifically set in summer, is "To an Acquaintance Gone Into the Country," posted on this blogsite on 14 July 2012. It is linked here. Two more recent poems are "On a Hot August Day," written in September 2013 and posted on 23 December 2015 (linked here) and "A Mosquito Bite," written in August 2014 and posted on 8 May 2017 (linked here).

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(Month of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary)

Hwæt!

August for the people | next the purple sea:
The seasons have found stasis, | if sort of, only;
The people, fagged, | have flocked to the resorts,
Blanking the nay-sayers, | their “never send to know...,”
With a grunted guttural | “give us a break;”
Hence, this Sunday | several only
Will chant in church, | in chapel, hosannas
To He who makes clean, | He who invigorates,
(“Were not ten cleansed: | where cloister the nine?”):
Rather, by nine, | wrangling families
Or passing alliances | of loosely-made friends
Will stake the beach, | assert dominion
In the house-high dunes, | foot-hot already
For already the sun | like solder, heat-white,
Has swaddled the shore | with a steam-bath fug:
Like travellers pitched, | there’s towels and chairs,
Windbreaks, barbeques, | and blankets thrown,
Chill case and sunshades | and smattering boom-box:
Bodies are stripped, | bloated with feeding,
Blotched with yesterday’s | blistered sunburn;
A few are toe-paddling | the temperate sea,
Wary so soon | of a wet-body plunge,
Though sterner, task-rapt, | two kayakers
Are pulling their craft | from their portable sheaths,
Eager to engage | with the easy-fall waves:
Haply, the Azores high | has hoist itself
Across the earth’s camber, | accruing fine weather,
If temper-trying heat, | for non-torrid man,
The speech-bearer, now sotto-ing | expletives as midges
And wasps ferret | his pheromone-sweated skin.

Along the beach, | a black-head gull
Winnows a wing, | wobbling on one leg,
The other stretched: | widely, it yawns,
Its brown head moulting, | mouldering to white,
Leaving two dots blobbed, | backed behind its eyes.
The immature herrings, | haphazard in plumage,
Brown-patched as ticking | pulled from a palliasse,
Bully among themselves, | squeaking their long-calls
Like unoiled screws turning, | ignored by the adults
Perched on groyne posts, | picture perfect,
Which, sylphed with glistening | girls’-hair weed,
Slope out to sea, | sinking beneath
The glass-clear water, | graving shadow lines
Like ribs under flesh. | A rich haze
Hangs at the horizon, | happenstancing the distance –
No sky, no sea, | just a screen, pigeon-blue:
A trawler, full-loaded, | levitates through heaven,
Returning to harbour | to unheave its catch,
Its engines evenly | echoing the waters,
A “V,” bay-wide, | vectoring from its stern.
A harrowing heat | like a hand’s clench
Has wrapped all bodies | in its rivelling sweat,
The windlack beach | is a’broil and buzzing
With sun’s radiation, | simmering and raw:
On the prom, a flung | flash of light
From an opening window | pierces a watcher
With a seared lance | of locused heat,
As if Transfiguration | had torn Its way
Into this Adam’s world, | adumbrating truths
Which beach-fun humans | are huffy to resist.

The holiday funfair | is hollering loudly
By noon. The Sizzler, | XLR8TR, [= Accelerator!]
Xtreme Power | and Project Orbiter,
The Super Waltzer, | the Speedodrome –
All scintillate | with screams and laughter,
Cannonading music | and cataclysmic lights,
Dry ice irruptions, | all detonated by
Jammering generators. | Generations mell,
Close-crushed, careening | the colour-bright stalls;
Dazed dogs leapingly | dance on leads,
Gulls corkscrew between legs, | levering up scraps,
And wheelchairs and buggies | byway the crowds,
Dumbfaced as dodgems, | for the dense, the young,
The aged, the crippled, | all aggregate a role
In this middle-earth’s microcosm. | Maddened by fun,
Inebriate of excitement | and odour of meats
Charring at burger stands, | these champions might laugh though
At the groans of Laurence | grilling on an iron,
The moralled animal | murderous to pay cash
To baste him bellowing | in his browning juices,
“Amo” now “odi.” | All afternoon
The humid hug | of the hammering sun
Has hotted the sands, | hammed with folk
Like stolid homesteaders, | stubborn to flee
The stink of the seine nets | slung up to dry,
Poled at the beach top. | A brown bloom
Of suppurating seaweed | slops in the wave-break,
Draping the bodies | of dipping bathers:
A huge crab | in its crenellated shell
Scuttles from the teasing | of a troublesome child.

The Microwave

This short piece uses the tanka stanza with rhyme added in the last line of each stanza. In fact the microwave lasted for 23 years which I trimmed to 20 because of the exigencies of the tanka form. And for many of those years I did not bother with a cooker but used the microwave for everything: so it was good value. How long will the new one last? The shop keeper told me if I'm lucky, 4 to 5 years for, admittedly, a lower priced model!

A much earlier syllabic poem (written in January 1982) about the separate life of our gadgets is "On the Intractability of Things," written in January 1982, posted on 23 January 2013 and linked here. Its line endings are looser than I would tolerate now. A much more recent poem, which cuts out the gadgets but keeps the disabused attitude to life, is "There is Nothing More Louche," written in August 2016, posted on 19 October 2021 and linked here.

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My companion
Of twenty years – not a wife
But a microwave! –
Suddenly died, leaving me
Forlorn – like a spouse indeed!

A kitchen fixture
So long, its demise made me
Rudderless: how now
To heat that half cup of soup,
Or that sausage roll at speed?

Happening hot on
My seventy-fifth birthday
It seemed portent of
Another death, escapeless
And nastily conclusive.

For think: at that death,
The mental enmesh which forged
Meaning – home to both –
Will void: soon, others’ recall
Of each will be illusive.

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© November 2024

Three Chestnut Tree Poems

Not far from where I live is a huge mature chestnut tree. These three poems were written independently but I thought they worked well gathered together. In "Utterly Stark..." it may be worth noting the internal rhyme in line 6 which chimes with the rhymes at the end of lines 5 and 6. This applies in each stanza. In the second stanza there are also serendipitous rhymes in lines 2 and 4 which rhyme with those in lines 5 and 6. In "The Chestnut Tree Now..." there is an internal rhyme in line 3 of each stanza. "Jigwarra" is a nonce word developed from Porthgwarra, a tiny cove at the far south-western tip of West Cornwall and a place visitors fall in love with not knowing what it's like to live there when the weather (frequently!) turns bad.

An earlier poem to take a close look at a tree is "The Sycamore Tree," written in December 2014, posted on 28 January 2019 and linked here. And another earlier poem, this time taking a look at a single bough, is "A Fallen Bough," written in November 2013, posted on 6 June 2016 and linked here.

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1. "Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree"

Under the spreading chestnut tree
With leaves gone autumn-brown,
The fallen chestnuts mush the ground,
The year swaps smile for frown.

I swept my mind through days of old,
Their jaunts and jibs now gone,
But all I found were shrivelled hopes
And promises not done.

(What yellows, reds, what sickly pales,
Have smutched the chestnut’s leaves,
They zig-zag-fall from branch to earth
Like splotches brushed from sleeves.)

Always this lust to stew in self,
That sly-glanced foul “I will!”
Neighbour or loved one, both are blanked
That appetite might swill.

(Fissured and knolled, a scaly-grey,
The tree’s trunk sags with age,
Its baring branches jag the sky,
Stiff with an old man’s rage.)

Who tells? Can there be settlement
Of years and self’s excess?
For truth, these hates and lusts still burn,
Aching for cheap success.

And like the spreading chestnut tree
One day I’ll rot and fall,
Then rain’s caress and earth’s warm loam
Will soothe its final sprawl;
But I, driven and wraithed, will flail
In the wind’s caterwaul.

(October 2024)

2. "Utterly Stark Is the Chestnut Tree"

Utterly stark is the chestnut tree
As January frosts flash white,
And crazed as a sheet of splintered ice
Its branches clutch the light;
For dank is the day and dark is the night
When none might dream or beg respite,
And snow slumped in its lee
Writhes in the wind like lice.

Its trunk now bent like a crook’d knee
And grained as a gaffer’s hand,
Is froze half-sided with brittle frost
And by the weather tanned.
What hope or dream that’s summer-bland
Can live when fanned by winter’s wand?
Yet soon hunched buds will spree,
Shrugging off cold’s accost.

(January 2025)

Months: The Sea: July

There are four epigraphs for the entire "Months: The Sea" sequence and they are posted at the head of the March poem.

I do not seem specifically to have written much of substance about July. One ancient poem, from July 1980, is "July Days," posted on this blogsite on 14 July 2012. It is linked here. Two more recent poems are "July Woods," written in July 2013 and posted on 1 June 2015 (linked here) and "Late July Morning," written in July 2014 and posted on 10 May 2018 (linked here).

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(Month of the Precious Blood)

It slows and crawls into the station:
The train’s “hump–hump” on points in work-like fashion
Calls journey’s end, and doors along its length
Vomit this year’s luggaged hordes.
July pours burning heat and dense blue skies
On them; soon, crimsoned flopping flesh like gourds
Will splay the hot-stoned beach. All month the stalls and kiosks
Affording food and beach ware work long hours;
Hotel and pension terraces are full,
And tots’ cries, arcade tunes, disturb the lovers.
The slapping sea churns human flotsam, laughing, thrashing,
Jet skis roar in thumped-chest passion;
Embayed, a bloated cruise boat frees its launches
For two hours’ feeding – water ice or whelks;
Bemused, surfboarded lifeguards crouch on haunches
And chaperone these foolish folks.

“Off-piste,” and life proceeds untouched,
Raw children in their gardens play unwatched;
Shopping and washing done, there’s coffee with
Flames – old, new – and thrill of footing:
Life’s settlement, as always, finely edged.
At harbour, the white fish auction closed, and gutting
And packing underway, a trawler’s beached for prop work;
Come lunch, men will make tryst with tabled pints.
And always halyards chatter, stench of crab
And fish rot sours the streets, noised with the chants
Of gulls at swirl. It’s full tide at the rocks, and terns
Plunge for prey – many times botched,
Then winging, fry in beak. An egret stalks
The rock line, its beak a halberd, stabbing death
For fish and shrimp. Eyeless, a dead gull rucks
In the surf, ignored like a torn cloth.

All’s heartless! Yes: the breeding gulls
On roofs do duty as a hormone pulls,
Feeding their begging fledge reluctantly.
Toppling, screeching, brownly-downed,
The fledglings prance the copings, keen to fly –
Unbalanced, some, wing-thrashing, plunge to ground,
Their parents yapping from a wall as feet or cars
Chivvy the young to a puzzled kerb-edge cower.
Then morning, evening, maelstromed, all erupt
In screaming flight – a disputing, staking blather;
Settled, night long they’ll call, fly, rest, though sleeping little.
Three a.m. a dog-fox prowls;
Spotted, they roar alarm; folk yawn, disturbed.
Next day, adults rebonding quiver in frenzy,
Beaks clashing, chattering; they cease, unverbed.
Language, unfelt, grew from this motley.

Language is structure bred by structure,
By organisms bound by social gesture –
The rat-faced herring gulls example this.
Topping all is Man whose brain,
Protein-engorged, has burst brute physics’ grip,
Creating mind, disbodied, ever keen
To structure further. Thus, a paddle on a log
Becomes a week’s regatta: high-tech yachts
Compete a close-thought course to testing rules,
The winner self-formed by work against those boats.
Hegel, blade-faced, thought this the crux of man’s fulfilment,
Mind’s self-knowledge making contour
Of what’s the case; mind only was what’s real,
Its absolute; but what completion’s that?
Mind presumes data, an existent mell,
Which lacking being must be kept.

Opened Earth

Way back in the 1970s, walking along a railway path (between Raynes Park and Wimbledon in southwest London) on a wet autumn day I was struck by the rich and pungent odour seeping from a newly-dug hole which someone had gouged beside the path for some reason. The phrase, "the pungent smell of opened earth" came immediately to mind and I thought it would make a good start for a poem. That phrase has been in my mind all these decades and finally - finally! - in 2024 I used it to create the poem below. The larger nine-line stanzas are written using a loose blank verse. The "Addendum" was an afterthought to use up lines one and five which originally were meant to be part of the main poem but did not survive to the final draft.

An earlier poem (written in July 1979) and based on close looking is "The Old Stone Wall, Honey-Red." I posted it on 25 April 2012 and it is linked here

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The pungent smell of opened earth,
Freshly turned and churned,
It stings the nose like smoke from the hearth
Or furzes newly burned.

Walking the railway path in autumn-tide
I found a fresh-dug hole some worm collector
Had turned in the damp black leafy loam banking
The path. That tart-aroma’d rotting, fecund
Of ooze and seep, trickled a sheen of wet
Which puddled the gouge. That reek, that sour and sweet
Unripeness, dank and tingling like an acid,
Yet hinted bitingly at a rich fulfilment
Next year in spring’s resistless bloating-forth.

All’s closing, crumpling; comes a sleep
Uneased, deprived, diseased:
Winter’s a time when the creatures weep,
Neeps with snow are fleeced.

Winds needle through the bare boles of frosted trees.
Climbing the combe, couch-grass beneath foot crunches
Like plastic sheeting. Clouds, leaden as gangrene,
Compress this cliffside gash, so that plant, creature,
Must starve in a freezing death-daze, grubbing shreds,
Day-long, within winter’s blackened, snow-smeared grip.
At combe’s top, smallholding man, denuded of work,
Stirs roots in his cookpot, brooding on his land-toil
Once earth’s year’s-end ice crust has thinned and split.

Water and chiffchaff prattle joyly –
Here’s cakes and mating, maidens!
What plant or creature foots it coyly
When sun’s restored their Edens?

As if a womb disgorged its groping bairns
A’sudden, spring’s a shouting, swollen fact;
There’s shoots, leaves, buds, all’s wetly warm, and lust
Of coupling frictions the agog woods and fields.
Already, thought of summer’s fleshpot months,
Of corn and beef, juices the mouth; and evenings,
Delighting in hum and stir, open like hands.
Hasten to live! gulping sun’s feeding, for soon
His prime’s decayed; autumn’s first leaf will fall.

Addendum

Winter’s a roar of gale and sodden snow,
Sobered, I question everything I know.

Then spring comes dancing with a primrose tint,
Its meaning’s hidden, readable as flint.

Through summer’s golden months the corn grows fat,
At last I found the truth, then smelt a rat.

And now in autumn’s damp and chill decay,
I mourn we live alone and end as clay.

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© October 2024

Lyric: Autumn to Summer

I have always greatly liked Sir Walter Scott's little poem "Proud Maisie." I thought I would give young Maisie a happier outcome, albeit inclusive of the pains of childbirth. Also, I wanted to try and write a lyric with something of the lightness but also depth of felt experience in Shakespeare's unmatchable lyrics. I'd be astonished if I succeeded.

"Bake first fruits loaves" is a reference to Lammas day (Loaf Mass day) on 1 August, when Mass was offered using the first bread baked from the wheat harvest of the year.

A more stately (syllabic) lyric is "Though the Weekday Go," written in 1976 and posted on 5 July 2013. It is linked here.

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What’s this! The oozy reek of rained-on earth,
It sets my nose a-twitch,
And autumn’s apples, girl’s-cheek red,
Make lusts and loins to itch!
So grab your girl – here’s tease, here’s mirth!
For winter’s freezings kill all pleasings,
And that’s a truth well said!

What’s winter? Maisie’s window piled with snow,
And spring’s her sleepy yawn,
But sun’s months urge the wheat to swell –
And Maisie swells with spawn!
Bake first fruits loaves, dance fast, dance slow,
For summer’s breezings force womb’s easings –
Lord, Maisie’s lungful yell!

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© September 2024

The Days of Old

Technical details: a shared rhyme links the penultimate line of each stanza with the first line of the following stanza. To round things off, the last two lines of the final stanza share a half-rhyme.

A much earlier poem on the "what's it all about?" theme is "The Hedgehog in the Garden," written in July 1980. As such it is not a "summation" or a "looking back" because it was written by a much younger man; it's more of a speculation. It was posted on 14 July 2012 and is linked here.

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The days of old were never cold,
The sun shone on and on,
And heat haze simmered on both coast and wold
In glassy light glints never done.
Thoughtless we are of days as lived:
You never know they’re good until they’re gone.

What’s left when age has closely sieved
All loves and memories
Are glows like sun’s warm shafts in leafage weaved
(But aches at hands we failed to seize):
Days are like fruit now fresh, now bruised,
You never know they’re good until they’re gone.

Ruses and lusts, perhaps excused
For that’s what lovers do,
Enjoined a trysted life of bodies fused,
Of whelps and duties, laughings too:
Like rueful scarecrows are our days,
You never know they’re good until they’re gone.

Even ill-luck, a smash, a blaze,
Much worse, a dear one’s death,
In time will cultivate our coping ways,
For breath is better than no breath:
Our days can soothe the pain they cause,
You never know they’re good until they’re gone.

Seek what’s intense then, licking sores,
Live as the creatures live,
Hourly aware of chance’s gifts and claws,
The “now” which only Time can give;
For soon days’ truths will sink to one:
You never know they’re good until they’re gone.

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© September 2024