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

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