This is my first poem in syllabics for thirty years or more. The syllable count is 5 6 3 7 with no elisions; for good measure I introduced rhyme in the first and fourth lines of each stanza. I wrote quite a number of poems in syllabics when I was much younger; they are posted in the earlier pages of this blog. A couple of examples are 'Outside, a Blunt Wind Shatters...' here, a sonnet following the example of Elizabeth Daryush, a most interesting poet though largely forgotten now; and 'Hearing Thunder' here, using a model adapted from W.H. Auden who in turn used Alcaic and Asclepiadean models found in Hölderlin
and in turn borrowed from their Greek originals. Poetic craft almost completely forgotten by today's younger poets!
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In the dawning hours
A pounding weight of wind
Wrenched the house
As
if clambering powers
Burst Hades’ black walls.
A morning’s drenching walk
Through wrecked fields,
Wading
ditches and leaf falls,
Found the wind-torn oak –
A bough an arm’s-reach thick
Ripped from its
Trunk
by the brute gale, its cloak
Of leaves palling its
Twisted corpse collapsed in
The mud-grass.
The
October sun span glits
Of watery light
On the brood of branches
Borne by the
Thrown
bough like Medusa’s fright
Of
hair. A wide third
Of the oak’s crown had been
Dismembered –
The
bight broiled with the sky’s curd
Like the sea squirming
Across a bay. A stark
Suede adit
On
the trunk’s flank was firming
Already into
A lumpish thick-lipped scar,
Tannin-brown –
A
dank haven to accrue
Tree mould and birds’ bones.
The bough stump, shattered to
Fangs, gleamed white,
Sprinkled
by the rain-wet groans
Of wind. Inspected,
Its switchback limbs, dense with
Chisel-chased
Elephant-bark,
infected
By lichen pastes, grey
And bilious, and caked
With soaked moss,
Smelt
mutedly of dunged hay –
The raw exchanges
Of air and fatal life
Curtained from
Livers
in heated granges.
In seconds that bough,
Gnarled grower of decades,
Had staggered –
Felled
by the wresting wind’s sough.
What hope for the finch,
Then, bundled from a hedge
By the blast,
Worn
brittle by autumn’s pinch?
Or us, tramping back
In cloud-smoke and rain-shot,
One day to
Be
sundered by our bones’ crack?
====================
©
November 2013
