Months: The Sea: June

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;

Michaelmas Daisies

All stanzas share the same "edge" rhyme sound in lines one and six. Also, in each stanza a rhyme echo from the rhyme of the penultimate line appears somewhere in the last line.

   For comparison, way back in October 1979 I wrote "A Bowl of Chrysanthemums," one of my few "free verse" poems. I posted it on 12 November 2011 and it is linked here. Much more recently, in April 2015, I wrote "A Cherry Blossom," in which I looked closely at a single cherry blossom. I had in mind Jon Silkin's sequence of "Flower Poems" in which, similarly, he made a close study of a range of flowers. "A Cherry Blossom" was posted on 26 September 2019 and is linked here.

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At summer’s end, from every dint or edge,
Michaelmas daisies surge to shout their say:
   All’s failing: winds and chilling air,
      Short light and whipping rain,
Soon will brown with phthisis this spray, that spray
Of summer’s delicates; but ledge and hedge,
   St Michael’s daisies, against the grain,
      Maintain their dark-eyed stare.

Ha, the sea winds craze the blond-haired sedges,
The grey salt light frowns on the twitching gorse;
   But orange-pupiled, iris’d blue,
      Wax-brown legged, loll leaved,
Michael’s daisies rattle in shaken morse,
Asserting ledge-grabbed rights which autumn’s dredges
   Will not dislodge till all’s bereaved
      By November’s freezing dew.

They’re proxy of the seaboard men who pledged
Life’s limb from birth, gouging sea depths for spoil;
   And both, hard-minded in life’s risk,
      Defy the weather’s clamour;
Draining of colour, trawling sea or soil,
They cling this side of winter, rooted, kedged,
   Firm, though, that next year, come summer’s glamour,
      They’ll brag in the wind’s whisk.

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© August 2024

Busvargus Down

This is written in a mixture of iambic and trochaic lines. The final rhymes of stanzas one and two link to the first rhymes of stanzas two and three.

   Busvargus Down lies to the east of the village of Tregeseal which itself lies to the north of the town of St Just on the far west coast of Cornwall.

   Note: "Ela!" is Greek and is used colloquially to mean "come!" "Pugging" (a Shakespeare word from Autolycus' famous song in "The Winter's Tale," Act 4 scene 3) means thievish (in my sense, seize the moment). "Gilded flies" are butterflies. "Banting" is my neologism meaning slight, young, bouncy, bantering. A "mew" is a seagull. A "scrip" is a bag, purse, satchel. "Smicker" mans handsome, amorous, smiling.

   Another lyric, written as long ago as April 1980, is "What is the Use of Grinning." I posted it here on 31 March 2012. And a more recent and more discursive poem is "July Woods," written in July 2013 and posted here on 1 June 2015.

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   Ela! And here’s a lively thing
   Prods my pugging tooth to buzz:
         Summer’s heat
         And bright-air days
   Set Busvargus Down a’craze;
   The gilded flies are fluttering,
      Larks outsing their size
And hares, big-eyed, play touch-tag, suave and fleet.

   Truly it’s a thing that’s sweet,
   The bearded heather, yolksy gorse,
         Sky’s high blue
         And banting breeze
   Thithered as the prying bees;
   The adder though, rotund with meat,
      Curls question-marks, ignores
A pagan fieldmouse dancing slew and skew.

   Yapping, veers the white-splash mew –
   Scrip it, scrip it, ah this bon!
         Come nightfall, scents
         Like wine enlush
   The smicker air. Hist! through the hush
   Purls the dun nightjar, ancient, new;
      And a sudden light shone
Catches the spiders legging at their tents.

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© August 2024

The Foggy Foggy Dew

Is the far west an idyllic place? No, it ain't! This poem presents the grittier side not seen by the holiday-makers but on full view once the tourist season is finished. Causewayhead is one of the four shopping streets in Penzance, known to each and every Penzancer. 

   Two other folk-like poems from decades ago are "The Explorers," written in July 1980 and posted here on 26 September 2012 and "Love's Imprecation," written in December 1979 and posted here on 26 April 2013. Both these poems are written in trochaic tetrameter.

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In Penzance town when autumn’s come
   All’s damp and grey, all’s chill;
The wind’s an endless gusty hum,
   There’s rain on door and sill;
And each thin dawn of leaden hue
   Brings the foggy foggy dew.

The granite streets are tight of face,
   Folk trudge against the wind;
The sea’s like slate whose cold embrace
   Hides bodies bloat and skinned;
And early risers hunch askew
   In the foggy foggy dew.

Well, through that fog there walks a wife,
   Time-worn though still petite,
Fearing she’s never lived her life,
   That men are all a cheat,
That joys or sobs, and all that’s true,
   Are but foggy foggy dew.

She married, sprogged (just one), her man
   (A drinker) though soon ran;
For years to please she freely span
   But none was gentleman:
Sometimes she ended black and blue
   Like the foggy foggy dew.

Scraping a living as a clerk,
   An admin drudge of sorts,
She slaved to build a shaky ark
   For self and child, both noughts,
For all around like bills now due
   Was the foggy foggy dew.

And now past sixty, daughter gone,
   Solving her drought of cash,
Her man returned; much put upon
   She felt again his lash,
Resigned to what she always knew –
   Life is foggy foggy dew.

But all those years, close by was one
   Who fumed and held his tongue,
Who wanted her and might have won
   If he had fit among
The tough she sought, drinking their brew
   Dark as foggy foggy dew.

So, baffled, sour, down Causewayhead
   He limps each lonely day,
And if they meet there’s nothing said,
   They nod and look away:
Out in the bay in slew and slew
   Curls the foggy foggy dew.

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© August 2024

"Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep..."

In this poem in trochaic tetrameter the first, third, fifth and so on lines use the same rhyme sound, from the third line running through the rhymes alphabetically. The first line rhyme word - "sleep" - reappears at the end. However I seem to have overlooked the word "cheep" - perhaps there are others. All the even lines use feminine rhymes.

   I've written several poems using a single rhyme or at least a very limited number of rhymes. An example of a single rhyme poem is "Pride: Skeltonics," written in July 2021 and posted on this blog on 19 December 2023. Read it here.

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   Now I lay me down to sleep,
Day’s long wester done and dusted,
   In my head I hear a “beep,”
Loud then thin like winds when gusted:
   Pointed as a signal’s bleep –
Conscience’ restless, “Oh, if only...” –
   Probing “Were you kind or cheap,
Aidful to the lame and lonely;
   Were you frank or did you creep
Thoro’ swamps of lies for spoilings?”
   Matters these, which, psyche-deep,
Fuddled by fake motives’ coilings,
   Many thrust in some dark heap,
Urgent that they be not branded
   Losers like Uriah Heep.
Nightmare: with your sins you’re stranded,
   Chased by lictors in a jeep;
Pinned, hot-cheeked, you face the sentence,
   “Truth’s not yours to mould and keep;
Clouded though it be by pretence,
   Truly it exists. Now leap.”
Fly-lords, though, those dire deceivers,
   When the soul is at its neap,
Wielding reason’s logicked levers
   “Prove” all that’s a misheard peep.
Caution! What they’re really saying’s
   “Buster, what you sow we reap.”
Limping, then, through springtime mayings,
   Trudging winter’s frozen seep,
Thoughtful man, though still cuss-minded,
   Follows inkling, not the sheep:
Trustful is he or self-blinded?
   Whichway, having topped a steep,
Visioned, there he finds a locus;
   Eye-wide at the land’s far sweep,
Scruples, guilts and all that hocus
   Purge away; absolved, he’ll weep;
Going down, his world adjusted,
   There at last he’ll soothe in sleep.

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© July-August 2024

Gull and Pigeon

This is written using the Tanka stanza with a syllable count of 5, 7, 5, 7, 7.

   The Lady Macbeth quote in stanza four is from Act V, scene ii, lines 34-5: "...yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" And truly, when a gull has finished disembowelling a kill, it is a revolting sight to see its head and beak slathered bright red with blood.

   I have written several poems about gulls - annoying "flying rats" as many call them, but always fascinating to me. In November 2014 I wrote "Gulls Landing: An Observation" about a flock of blackhead gulls. Its purpose was simply to document what I had seen and make a few speculations. It didn't occur to me at the time but it seems to me now to be rather in the tradition of Erasmus Darwin's scientific poetry which, again, was much concerned with precise observation. I posted "Gulls Landing" on 22 November 2018; it is linked here.

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Returned from the beach
I found a brute herring gull
Attacking the corpse
Of a roadkill young pigeon,
Tossing it like a duster.

Its back feathers stripped,
The gull gouged to its innards,
Quarrelling out strips
Of guts, gulped down with relish –
Meatier prize than bread scraps!

Full fifteen minutes,
Dodging the passing cars’ wheels,
Tugging that body
From road to pavement to road,
It gorged greedily at speed.

Ah, Lady Macbeth,
Bloodied of hands and night-dress
And “who would have thought...!”
That gull’s white head, yellow beak,
Were red-drenched by the pigeon’s

Oxygen-bright blood:
Lord, how its chaps must have reeked
Of blood and flesh’s
Tart sour gases. Uncaring,
It ransacked ever deeper,

Ripping out liver
And heart – purpled, mucus’d gobs,
Swallowing them whole,
And flinging that pigeon-rag
High; its wings, feathers, loll head –

Glaring-eyed – flopping
Mutely in death’s helplessness.
Yet crass are the gulls,
Crude as the log crocodile
Hurling its prey to all points,

Void of the crow’s dodge
Of one foot grasping its prize,
Thus firming it for
Defilement: lacking also
The hawk’s hook beak, powerful

To rend the breast flesh
That, tool-less, a gull can’t scoop;
So, feed’s end, what’s left’s
Not a bared carcass, rather
A grimy hollowed puppet.

Well, all gut-strippings
Eaten, losing interest,
Languidly the gull
Flew off, leaving that battered
Clout, knocked by cars in the road.

And come night a fox
Will grub it up, sneak it down
Some alley. Next day
Only a stain will be left
To hint there was life then death.

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© July 2024

A Thought on Death

This is written using the Tanka stanza (syllable count 5, 7, 5, 7, 7).

   One of my early poems about death, written in October 1980, featured one of my most-admired philosophers, Plotinus - the greatest of the Neo-Platonists. Its title, "Try to Bring Back the God in You to the Divine in the All," is a quotation of Plotinus's final words on his deathbed. I posted it on 19 July 2012 and it is linked here. A more recent poem on the subject is "A Shop Doorway," written in September 2014 and posted here on 12 July 2018.

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When Chance discovered
What’s organic, in fact it
Discovered Death. For
Life is Process: started, there’s
No dodging Newton’s fiat –

Lacking self’s being,
Process must burn itself up
And, cindered, return
To unlife, mere particules
Inert in Space-time’s dredgings.

Think: from Conception’s
“Now,” each thing that lives – creature,
Plant – though first it grow
In spades, complexing itself
That a fine-tuned entity

Result, at one with
World and task, is fraughtly skid
On an escapeless
Scarp, recycling energy
Until, like a sucked-out shell,

Shrugged by life’s forces,
Which leach to a younger host,
And strengthless to feed,
Its “thisness” that’s unique slumps
To miasma, Death’s last breath.

That’s a fate includes
Even the self-aware – us:
Surely knowledge, though,
Should disabuse of skin’s creep,
Mind’s tremor, at End’s beckon?

Heidegger teaches
That Death’s finis in itself
Gifts not nulls meaning,
Exerting limit which duns
Effort, outcome, to effect:

But that’s mere whistling –
The condemned man’s petrified
Faced with unbeing!
And even bed-death is hard –
Its cancers and infections!

Truth, some affect shrugs,
Others will shiver, but all
One can do is wait
That unlimbing loneliness
For who knows the place or hour?

Might faith help? It claims
Knowledge of our embodied
Wilderment, its rapt
And final homing, barring
Sin’s free-willed choices which damn.

All depends: does Chance
Or God have the monarchy?
Hints glint like dust motes
In light, but all that’s assured
Is Death’s grin: the rest is hope.

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© April - May 2024