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

A Halo

This is written using an expanded haiku stanza, i.e. the syllable count is 7, 9, 7 instead of the haiku's 5, 7, 5. I found I needed the wider lines to keep my argument flowing. Note, the first 14 stanzas of this poem constitute a single sentence - how very Jamesian.

   The impressive phenomenon was seen on Saturday 25 November 2023 at about 6.30 pm. I thought I was the only one but when I came to write the poem, a bit of web research showed it had been widely seen all over the UK with many images recorded on social media.

   The final line of the poem is a truncated version of the first line of Psalm 18 (Douay-Rheims version) - "The heavens show forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of His hands." It is a wonderful psalm - read it.

   Another of my syllabic poems which argues its way to a conclusion is "Thoughts Whilst Watching," written in October/November 2018 and posted here on 1 July 2022.

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   In Advent-tide, one frozen
Still-aired evening, thinking to freshen
   My mind, made slug-a-bed by

   The house’s baunic heating,
Stepping from my kitchen door to breathe
   Taut lungfuls of the icy

   Winter’s darkness (my backyard
Pin-glittering with crusty ice-dew
   Patched on wall and slipskate path),

   My eye, astonished, staring
With a toddler’s fixed and doubtful gaze,
   Was lifted skywards by what,

   In the hominid ages,
Would doubtless have cravened skins-clad men
   To their knees, foreheads trembling

   Against the freezing plateau,
Fearful that some dire god stood threshold
   To indulge its tripwire self:

   Well, in a cloud-lacking sky,
Windlessly silent bar the grizzle
   Of surf slumping fretfully

   On the beach’s distant banks,
And pin-cushioned here-there by stars’ glints,
   By chance’s pure fluke I saw

   A prodigy which, with gasps,
Might force even modern self-praising
   Man to his grovelling hams:

   A mighty miles-wide halo,
Whitely glowing, lasooed a full-faced
   Moon all yellow-gold, filling

   Fully a quarter heaven
With its misty aureole, corralled
   At edge by a flamed border,

   As if the moon’s Brünnhilde,
Catafalqued, lay captived but cherished
   In Wotan’s protective fire:

   And more: adjunct at the moon’s
Bier, Jupiter, tungsten-bright, outshone
   All heaven’s creatures, intense

   As a welder’s flare, pupiled
With the moon in that halo’s iris:
   Astounding sight! And both loomed

Kerb Stones

Like many Penzance residents much of my working time was spent away from the far west because work was elsewhere. Granite kerb stones and facings used to be ubiquitous, much of the granite hailing from Penwith's quarries. Much of old Penzance is built of granite. The Penlee quarry (now closed) to the west of Penzance was a major supplier of granite for roadworks. Castle an Dinas quarry to the east of Penzance is still working. The moors behind Penzance are dotted with disused, water-filled quarries. "Hireth" (in Cornish), "Hiraeth" (in Welsh) is a near-untranslatable word for extreme home-sickness.

   This is a poem about leaving Penzance, so here's one about moving to Penzance, "John Davidson and I," written in June 2016 and posted here on 23 September 2021.

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      When banished from Penwith
By work commitments in the cesspool east,
   Elbowing every Jones or Smith
   For commons at a grudging feast,
      I joy to walk the streets
Of town or city where I’m glumly lodged,
   Tracing the granite kerbs and leets,
   Once fresh-installed now stained and bodged.

      That granite, dimpled, grained,
Foot-smoothed and browned by rain and vehicle-splash,
   In-minds me of my home, Penzance,
   Salt-strewn and mottled, greyly-drained
      By wind and sea’s cracked lash,
(Though, sun-hit, its granite lanes can gleam with quartz,
   Light-livening the damp west air):
   What helps? I’m exiled otherwhere!

      This exile’s lust for home –
A grief, a lack-sick longing for what’s lost –
   Leaps countless miles to Penlee’s combe,
   Its quarry, now disused and mossed,
      Where rock-hard men hewed stone,
The granite slabs and roadfill cobble shipped
   Upcoast where, by the weather blown,
   They kerb and face, unthought, tight-lipped.

      I ache for Penwith’s moors,
Their wind-smacked inclines cleft by flooded pits:
   “Hireth,” we say, its wist desire
   Urging despite our games or chores;
      For peace-in-being sits
Truly in landscape, be it town or shire,
   Where, meaninged, each is nourished by
   What’s loved: old streets, high moors, rough sky.

====================
© January 2024

Months: The Sea: May

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. 

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

   I forgot to mention in the March posting that 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 appear to have written much else specifically about May. I've found two poems: "May Fragment," written in May 2015 and posted on 15 November 2019, is linked here, and "Spring and Meaning," written in February 2014 and posted on 21 November 2016, is linked here.

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(Month of the Blessed Virgin Mary)

When the tide brims, the sea, you would think, might leap
Its broad basin; it looms over the beach strip
Like syrup taut in its own thickness, lazy
   But suddenly deep.

At shore grey-green though cobalt-blue at distance,
Flashed with white horses, it slaps, plucks, the pier struts,
Gargling, and darkening the limpets and weed
   Supine in its jaunts.

Post-lunch, in convoy, dinghies assay the year’s
First race – ducklings docile in the May-mild haze;
The sun, now hot, smudged to thinness, high and small,
   If stared at makes tears.

Wet-suited (year-young, the water’s cold as frost),
A father teaches risk to his wave-tumbled
Daughter, otter-lithe, crowing as, upended,
   She handstands like a post.

Quivering on air, gulls quarter the beach, tensed
To steal; trippers, wind-pink, incautious as lambs,
Display their sauced burgers, swag to the curt gulls
   For all will be flensed.

Café society! Warmth and the skin-balm air
Tempt tables and chairs, the “quality” in high-
End casuals take coffee, lunch done, still grazing
   On a fat éclair:

Croque Monsieur ou Madame, carafes of Sancerre,
Bottles of Keller Pils, and now Espresso
Or Cortado: how fine to stretch limbs, relax,
   Confidingly share

The year’s project – expansion, promotion, new
Directions, travel: but voyager look north!
Over the hills, blue indeed, the clouds are thick –
   Cumulus, whose hue

Of grey sobriety imposes grim forethought
That though self-sure doing, choice, enthusing of
The swarming mass, enthralled in sheer aggregate,
   Lie inland – ah sought

After in spades! – so do dog eat dog treachery,
Ruthlessness, politics (tautologous?), in
Fact sin! He who stumbles is threshed by fixed-faced
   Peons whose hurry

Drives anguish that life pays at piece rate except
Winner take all. Sin? Of a trice we sound depths
For sin is but Will, and who steps from his door
   But that his will stept?

John Medlin's Thanks to Mrs Susan Horton

To those who know, this poem will need no introduction. But for the others: the Catholic Church went mad after the disastrous Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. It destroyed its immemorial liturgy in an effort to be "with it" and persecuted all those who remained attached to the ancient liturgy. The great unsung saint, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, established the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) to protect and spread the old liturgy. He, too, was persecuted by Rome. Today, the SSPX is a worldwide force.

   Mrs Susan Horton, like many other lay people, spent many years working tirelessly to support the SSPX and she is sorely missed. The SSPX uses the Missal of 1962 in its liturgies and completely rejects Pope Paul's disembowelled "new rite" missal of 1970. Many, however, prefer the pre-1962 Missal (myself included) as the fullest expression of Catholic faith and worship. The SSPX has established schools throughout the world. In the UK its St Michael's School is almost the only school teaching the genuine and full Catholic faith. At the end of Part One, "the Bergoglian revolt" refers, of course, to the recent disastrous papacy of Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio). "Indietrist" (backwardist) was his scornful insult directed at those who clung to the Tradition he actively attacked. For much more information see the SSPX English website!

   Part Two uses the form of W.B. Yeats's "John Kinsella's Lament for Mrs Mary Moore" which is a wonderful poem but completely profane. I think I had thoughts of "cleansing it" by using it to memorialize Mrs Horton: perhaps I should have used a different form.

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I.
What serendipity, though graced and guided
By His great hand, it is when unawares
One takes a step which, much like Frost’s forked path,
Results in life’s occasions – fruits or tares –
Resolving to a thankful final end.
Fierce Mrs Horton, keeper of the chapel’s
Devotionals and haut-indietrist book stall,
(A chapel served by faithful priests – “bad apples”
Written off by the Popes’ post-Council Church),
Took me in hand when first I found Tradition,
Guiding my doubtings Truthwards, quarantined
From Council shallowness and its admission
Of satan’s kitsch into the House of Faith.
One Sunday after Mass, knowing I lacked
A Missal, turning to a window ledge
Where books much-used but surplus now were stacked,
Selecting one she said, “Take this,” and thrust
A time-torn Missal in my hand. I gabbled

My thanks, retiring to inspect this prize

In a nearby café where, intrigued, I dabbled

Its dowdy pages, puzzling that there seemed

“Discrepancies” compared to the “Sixty-Two” –
The Missal used for all the chapel’s rites.
Well, frequent use, both home and in the pew,
Revealed the reason: Mrs Horton’s gift
Was of a 1940s Missal, thus
Complete with Great Week rites not yet “reformed”
And Calendar not yet “improved” – that fuss
For civil servants’ “tidiness” which broke
A generation’s faith, and as a gibe
Produced, at last, Pope Paul’s amoebic Mass,
Committee-made by men half-clown, half-scribe.
What depths of doctrine, nodes of pious truths,
What praisings’ vaults are held in that “old” book
Which sanctified worldwide the Church’s worship
Prior the Council’s folly, and with a look
Can crush the new rite’s tickbox childishness.
Dear Mrs Horton, what a seed you sowed!
I pray your Missal daily, loose with age,
Elastic-banded: foot-mate on the road,
Dialogist when at my desk, confessor
Crouched on my knees; and so until my death!
   Enough. I thought to sketch and analyse,
To catch her whole, but that’s a waste of breath:
Suffice to say she was irascible
(To me, the backward-slider!), always tough,
Untiring, and insistent on the Truth
That is Tradition; so, she scorned the fluff
Posing for now as Catholic catechesis
(The Faith can neither change nor contradict
Itself), and saw the True Mass of the Martyrs
As guard and future of a Faith re-quicked
Once Rome’s louche love-clasp with the heresies
Was broken. Gone now to the Lord’s reward,
The chapel where she strove still thrives, its prayer
And sacramental life innately moored
In what the Church has always done (and meant) –
Refusing the Bergoglian revolt,
Its thuggish quackery. Her memory’s
In this: indomitable and sharp as salt!

Penzance: Six Occasional Poems

Note: “An October Gale” is based on the form of stanzas 2 and 3 of Thomas Campion’s “A Day, A Night”; “Turnstones” is based on the form of his “Never Weather-Beaten Sail”; “A Blithe and Bonny City Lass” is based on Thomas Lodge’s “A Blithe and Bonny Country Lass”; “The Settled Life” uses the form (feminine line endings) of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 87 “Farewell, Thou Art Too Dear for My Possessing”; “A Newlyn Roundelay” uses the form of Spenser’s roundelay “It Fell Upon a Holy Eve” (from the August eclogue in “The Shepherds’ Calendar”) and “November Damp” is based on the form of Thomas Dekker’s “Art Thou Poor” (from “Patient Grissill). All these poems are in Patricia Thomson’s highly enjoyable, and useful, anthology “Elizabethan Lyrical Poets” (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1967).

   Obviously, all places mentioned in the poems are real, either in Penzance or the adjacent Newlyn. Penwith is the area of West Cornwall. "Emmets" is the local name for incomers and holiday-makers. A "Bucca" is a proud, born and bred Newlyn resident.

-----------------

An October Gale

    A gale swept in, and greyed the day:
    It greyed the day through thickened rain;
    That thickened rain was flung as spray,
    Was flung as spray by wind’s distrain;
    The wind’s distrain upturned the bay:
    A gale swept in, and greyed the day.

The water’s ankle-deep in Daniel Place!
The ramping waves engulf the prom then drain!
In New Street soaking wind distorts your face!
And Rosevean Road’s a howling gulf in pain!
At noon all’s twilight – streets gone brown like mace!
Ouf! Wave shocks rock the town’s length, brace and brace!

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Turnstones

   Turnstones turning stones for hours in hope their food to find,
   Shore and pool and waves’ frothed edge have haunt time out of mind;
Compact, chestnut-brown, black-bibbed, yet stark with whited underparts,
   Twitting liquidly they dash, pale-legged, about their arts.

   Wolfing hoppers, morsels, mites, like monks they duck and bow,
   Hour by hour they feed or die, for life’s a constant now;
Spooked, they launch and fleet along the wave line, wings’ black bars on show;
   Settled, feeding and their breeding urge are all they know.

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A Blithe and Bonny City Lass

A blithe and bonny city lass,
   Hey ho the city lass,
Sat on her fore-step, out of place,
   Mourning her luck, which way she turned.
Came one who had a gentle way,
   Hey ho a gentle way,
   Fair hair, good wits which earned his pay,
   Who caught her eye, and so she yearned.

Her pert light beauty, seamed by life,
   Hey ho seamed by life,
Quite seized his love thoughts, made them thrive.
   “I have a child: take me, take her,”
She warned. He swore, “She’ll be my own,”
   Hey ho “she’ll be my own.”
   Love’s heat drew both, they made their moan,
   And so, content, one-fleshed they were.

He took that woman and her child,
   Hey ho and her child,
Far west to where the waves are wild.
   In Penzance town they wove their nest
Among granite streets, wind-wet and cold,
   Hey ho wind-wet and cold,
   But love’s first joys made all to gold
   (Always his hand was at her breast).

Well, all must cool: life duns for rent,
   Hey ho life duns for rent;
Their food is budget, work is scant,
   The girl begs frills that aren’t to have:
The woman’s baulked, tongue-sharp and grey,
   Hey ho tongue-sharp and grey,
   For he’s in drink, with eyes that stray,
   His hair unwashed, and boozed of breath:

And fate should warn each pretty peat,
   Hey ho each pretty peat,
That smicker men are rancid meat,
   And love’s a trudge through life to death.

(Note: "peat" means pet, merry girl, or simply girl. "Smicker" means beautiful, handsome.)

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