Another Prod at Auden

I decided I had more to say about W.H. Auden (see my previous post, "Just a Prod at Auden"). This much longer poem uses the stanza from Spenser's "Up Then, Melpomene." The rhyme scheme and line lengths are obvious; line 7 in each stanza is trochaic, and lines 8 and 10 always have feminine endings. The first phrase in the first stanza is adapted from Pound's "Canto II." The two direct quotes in the poem are both from Auden.  The reference to Christ Church in the first stanza recalls how undergraduates would exasperate their tutors when challenged on some view by responding, "Well, Wystan says..." "Rhoda" in stanza two is Rhoda Jaffe who did indeed have an affair with Auden. Unfortunately, and unrelated to Auden, she eventually committed suicide.

   Way back in 1976 I wrote "The Thing Which Sticks," a long unfinished poem about writers in the 1930s (in some people's view, not mine, Auden's heyday). I revised it in March 2013 and posted it here on 1 April 2013. And in October 1981 I wrote a sonnet, "The Artist," which is self-explanatory. I posted it here on 14 June 2012.

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Hang it all, Wystan Auden: great your gift but veined
   Like cheese with worm: from Christ Church – “Wystan says” –
   Camply declaring law, to late life ’blained
   And slippered, all men’s uncle in a faze
   Of fag smoke, mourning moral ills in your maze
      Of words, your work was feminate,
      Mother’s teat your lifelong bait:
         A flouncy archness
   Too often flabbed its florid fine-meshed bays,
         Like linen starchless.

“Unfinished weaning”? No, rather a wilful urge
   To “other” your third son status; thus to claim
   Dogmatic rights in world and love, to merge
   And part Mama and son, and itched by shame
   Embrace vocation that the Muse might tame
      The Lord’s command that babes be born,
      Jack and Jill one-fleshed in spawn.
         But did not woman,
   Pert Rhoda, tempt your manhood to enflame,
         Become your leman?

All failed: once more you grieved in Kallman’s pathic clutch.
   Think though! To scorn man’s duties to his girl
   Invites perversion: two men’s sexual touch,
   Then man and child, or animal; and whirl
   The tables, girl and girl; then last, the skirl
      Of transdom, screaming against fact,
      Wigged or trousered, science quacked!
         And contraception
   Forborne by church and state – that fatal pearl! –
         Loosed this vexation.

So sex for fun, not childing, thus became a “right,”
   Quick-followed by abortion’s blade: what doubt
   The child was double-victimed, killed like a mite
   Enwombed, or sexed-with, grown? But they who pout
   At Law face ends, their tribe grown old and stout –
      For childless – cursed to dim and die:
      Nature, ruthless, puts them by,
         And a tribe that’s virile
   Swamps in, seizing, smashing, what once had clout,
         Laid bare as puerile.

This post your death, but trahison has its harsh deserts.
   Your crust of Goethed wisdom failed to mute
   Your nanced “Miss God says no!” wealing no hurts
   But trifling, rather, the Kind’s self-dispute.
   Waysided now by epoch’s turn, your bruit
      Of late-termed Christian Staat must sink,
      Spurned as frankly too much ink,
         For the struggle’s started
   ’Twixt withered West and Crescent which will moot
         Who’s firmer-hearted.

====================
© March 2023

How Unpleasant to Meet Mr Medlin

A mere bagatelle, obviously playing off T.S. Eliot's "How Unpleasant to Meet Mr Eliot." A longer piece of persiflage is "Romanists and Anglicans," written in February 1981 and posted here on 20 October 2011. Its final couplet does not represent my own views!

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How unpleasant to meet Mr Medlin,
Always his poetical eructions peddling
(Frankly, it quite does my head-lin):
It reminds me I once knew a chap called Edlin
Who was obsessed day and night with the roots of trees
And how their leaves (he said) pas de deuxed in the breeze,
I recall he had appallingly muddy knees:
You know, now I think on’t, I prefer Mr Medlin!

Apologies to Herbert L. Edlin, author of The Observer’s Book of Trees (1975), a greatly enjoyable and helpful volume.

====================
© February 2023

Just a Prod at Auden

Back in the 1930s William Empson wrote his famous - and still well worth reading - poem, "Just a Smack at Auden." I thought I'd have my own say, using the Tanka stanza. As I wrote, two quiet references to Auden's elegy for W.B. Yeats crept in. In the fifth stanza there is a quote from St Paul, 1 Cor. 11.22 (Douay-Rheims translation). Blenheim is Blenheim Palace, surely pretty massive on anyone's scale, (my spelling "massifed" is deliberate).

   I expanded on some of my own feelings about writing in "Meaning," written in April 2016 and posted here on 22 June 2021.

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Your subjects were large,
Your languaged proclivities,
Your scoped poetics,
Immense. And engrossing were
Your rococo’d, modulate

Speech-things, busied with
Ethics in this double-cross,
Back-slap-and-grin world:
A gemmist, you rehabbed words,
Bran-tubbing the O.E.D.

But you were silly,
Unserioused by queerdom,
A wrist-dropped “get her!”
Veining even your starkest
Moralled works. Those epicene

Love songs, unfocussed
By the twink impulse, hidden;
The doctrined poems
Later, Christ typifiying,
Wormed by the harlot, Kallman;

And, in age, your broad
Divagated hold-forths, wealed,
But cricked by your eye
For “trade” and young men blooming:
Well, in this I praise you not!

Oh, for that finalled
“Whoomp!” of braced argumentum –
Arnold’s tense hair-pull,
Say, worrying to terse ends
(A dosing of his father’s

Masculine credo
Would have helped, too). Despite that,
Your gift survived all,
Uneasing, now, “woke” wordcarls,
Popping-eyed for “inclusion,”

Castrated syntax –
All such man-dreamt Ponzi trash!
Massifed as Blenheim
Your work shrugs: what’s consequent
Is virtue; praise; and pity.

====================
© February 2023

Language

This poem, using the Tanka stanza, cost me much blood and sweat to write, lacking Auden's wonderful facility with conceptual argument. The statistics about Shakespeare's and others' word scope are from Anthony Holden's biography of the Bard; Kraus is Karl Kraus, the 1920s/30s Austrian satirist; the peasant in the final stanza was recorded by the saintly Curé d’Ars as sitting for hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament Exposed: when asked his purpose he gave his famous reply. (And you can scorn anyone who tells you the Host is merely a piece of bread.)
   Auden, of course, was much concerned with language. Here's a link to my humble "Homage to W.H. Auden," written in 1981 and posted on this blog on 21 February 2012.

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Milton eight thou. words:
Shakespeare twenty-one thousand!
The grammar school oik
(And Papist-tainted) quite swamped
The orotund Puritan!

Luculent wordists,
Laptop-lorn, drudged by candle
Computing the Bard’s
Wort-fest – wide-eyed at the scoped
Terrains his weirdings revealed;

Yet in Stratford’s rents
The lumpen trammelled their lives
With a few hundred
Words at most: how, we puzzle,
Did the Swan’s epi-massive

Fructions of language
Emerge: some sprite chromosome
Knacked as Ariel?
It matters? It does: the tribe’s
Width of being – its far fetch,

Its fulled purposes –
Grows from, expands, its self-heft
Torso’d in language,
Mutter not diener of thought
(Kraus noted); and thought parents

The anguishing will,
Its conundrums and turn-’bouts,
Whose nose-taut searchings
At last might inhere the veld,
Tiptoeingly adequate

To all that’s the case.
World-historical Virgil,
Then, mything the brute
Growings of tough-shouldered Rome,
Abundanced its can-do speech

To fount that telos
Which, historied, now insists
As Rome’s foredained “Thus.”
And Rilke, tranced in a rose,
His teetered syntax torqued to

Grasp Dasein, aweing
Youth to saltimbanque featings
That body’s autumned
Sadness might, thought-forced, bud-burst
To soul’s glad terror, light-laved

By a dread Angel –
Oh, his words lived what they knew!
Well, by mind’s reachings
Language has birthed from clod things
An Ideosphere, where what’s

Mental blooms a world
Broader, deeper, than physics’
Navelling. It’s here
That the throned Word, contexting
All words, is gaspingly known,

Silencing tattle
Which false-steps the unwary,
Chorusing with mates
At table in bombast rounds:
At end the fullest words are

Wordless. A peasant
Hours-long sat before the Host:
When asked what he did
He replied, “Just this: I looks
At ’Im, ’an ’E looks at me.”

====================
© August/September 2022 & January/February 2023

The Garden Crock

For comparison here's a link to another garden poem - "A View of My Garden," which was the first poem I completed after returning to poetry in 2012 (after a near thirty year break). I posted it on this blog on 18 January 2014.

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   A disused kitchen crock was dumped
      Upon a scrubby path
   At garden’s rear, collecting there
         The rain which flumped
      From autumn’s clouds: hence, birds
   Would to and fro for drink or bath:
   Gruff gulls, meek pigeons, poised to scare,
Made weal or woe, like roughly-butted words,
   Churning that crock with cries and merds.

   Pre-Christmas, freezing air flowed in –
      The prom and shingle banks
   Were iced, the sea a sluggish lead.
         A metalled skin
      Of ice panelled the bowl
   Which after fraught days burst its flanks,
   Peeling the iced plug’s solid head:
The shards and shattered hulkings, winter’s toll,
   Lay round like shipwrecks on a shoal.

   Long days it took that plug to melt
      Till January’s nought
   Had come. I thought of the prom’s tribe
         Of old – unsvelte,
      Wheelchaired or zimmered, slow
   To die, and like that ice-pig wrought
   To dribs. Ah, Time’s unfriendly jibe:
Both ice and old thin to a slivered floe,
    Then wind’s puff shakes them. And they go.

====================
© December 2022

West Penwith

West Penwith is the far south-western toe of the UK mainland; only the nail clippings of the Scilly Isles lie beyond.  Up on the moors behind Penzance is Carn Euny, a preserved Iron Age settlement of the Cornovii tribe. Fogous (rather crudely "caves") probably had a religious/ceremonial significance - there are several in West Penwith. The coastal village of Pendeen until 2014 had a massive working foghorn replete with signs to stay well away during poor visibility because the horn was so powerful it could damage your ears. (The disused foghorn is still there beside the Pendeen lighthouse.) 

   The poem, with just a little bit of grammatical stretch, is written in a single sentence. It is one of three written in the same rather jogging metre in 2021/22. The others are "Cornish Gorse" posted here on 24 October 2023, and "If You Want to Know What Sea Is" posted here on 25 November 2023.

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The cliffs are shook, the thyme is shaken,
The roar is such to waken the Kraken;
Dank mist like suds is flung from the sea,
Greyly streaming over stack and scree;
Sharp rain is piercing the grass and sedge
Clinging blackly to slab and ledge,
And the wind, the wind! like a searing flail
Scourges the cliffs and moors with hail:
Carn Euny, stark on its rising breast,
Has a view all ways, north-east, south-west,
But compass-open there’s no reprieve
From the air’s freeze, the wind’s heave;
Here the Cornovii built their huts,
Granite and thatch, their paths all ruts,
And wind-swept, damp-rotted, scratched their fields
For oats’ and barley’s skinny yields;
Some bony cattle, some goats and sheep
Graze the moorland with its constant creep
Of heather, bracken and yellow-eyed gorse
Grabbing ground with bullying force:
Arthritic, coughing, weather-scarred men
Hack the furze from the field walls again;
Their women, bent-backed, carry and cook,
The children learning by help and look:
And has much changed through centuries’ reach
(Some offer nostrums, others preach)?
But look, Penzance – harsh-granite-grey –
Hunkers as a rain squall swamps the bay,
Glinting grimly through the solid pour
Battering gutters with its ear-split roar;
The sea, the rain-drenched wind, the salt
Govern life and health from birth to vault;
And soon or late, folk to the grave
Crumple and fall like a stumbling wave,

Down at the Water's Edge

All the references will be well known to Penzance aficionados; Pen Sans is the "Holy Headland" around which Penzance is built. For my attempt to convey what it's like to be caught in bad weather at sea see my "Gale at Sea" posted here on 25 October 2023. And for my memorial of a genuine Penzance/Newlyn "character" see "Roger Nowell, A Cornish Skipper" posted here on 19 December 2017 and easily my most visited poem: it's astonishing how his memory lives on!

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When the wind blows and the scud is low,
Swamping St Clement’s Isle,
When the sea surges as black as pitch
And the cloud’s as brown as bile;
Then’s the time to gasp your last
And groan for cart or sledge:
“O, haul me out and let me die
Down at the water’s edge.”

Rattle me down through Chapel Street
Sinking below Pen Sans,
Hear! the rain is flung in swathes
Roaring like falling cans;
Drag me on to Battery Rocks
For I’m to fulfil a pledge –
Soaked, battered, it’s there I’ll die
Down at the water’s edge.

So many! In youth we were forced from the west,
Urgent for work and a wage,
In London town I sweated and jobbed
As the years became an age;
Now old, returned, in Gwavas Street
I sit in my window’s ledge,
Waiting the end when I wish to die
Down at the water’s edge.

St Peter in boots, with his oilskins tight,
Staggered along Heaven's pier,
The seas were high, the entrance rough,
Boats off wallow and veer:
“Ahoy,” he bawled, “there’s few will enter
Struggling with sheet and kedge,
But are you from the west and did you die
Down at the water’s edge?”

====================
© October-November 2022

Eyelids

The stanzas are written as haikus with the usual syllable count of 5, 7, 5. I've introduced rhyme in the third line of each stanza to bind the poem together.

   A sort of hunched-up winter contra-version of this poem is "Impromptu," written in February 1980 and posted here on 26 January 2012.

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But by God you’ve lived!
Late June, the afternoon sun’s
Intense, the wind strong,

The sea’s a’broil with
Plasma of leaping flash-flakes,
Flinging heat that shone

Glarely on suede sand
And hot-stoned shingle. The gulls
Crouched, panting, weighed by

The sky’s vaulted tons,
Lapis-blue, peremptory.
Lips and tongue are spry

With ozone-souse, flung
By the in-roaring waves, thumped
By wind’s fisted blast.

An hour’s prom walk is
Enough, threading the basted
Bodies, thin or vast,

Crisping in sun, all
Angst-work annulled in heat-trance.
Wake up! There’s self’s thrill

In this mêle of air’s
Primary dazzle, frank to
Enthuse the poised will.

Later, returned home,
An iced drink misting its glass,
Eyelids sting, cheeks throb,

Livened by sun’s, wind’s
Afterburn. Back! Go back, where
The sea shouts, gulls mob!

====================
© August 2022

The Spider

This is my only poem about spiders as far as I recall. I have, however, written a lot of poems about birds. So for comparison I give a link to my eleven year old poem, "Two Sparrows" here.

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A tiny spider but a mil or two,
Vaulted in terror as my finger swept
Above him like a comet razing earth:
   The domicile he kept

Disastered, gamely bristling legs like clubs,
He fled for safety to the cupboard’s bounds.
Ten days he’d commoned on that smooth white door,
   Sorting his granuled founds;

I him ignored, he me, but then my hand,
Forgetful, upside-downed with whistling winds
His lunar plain’s calm atmosphere, shaking
   His web-tied goods to flinds.

With caution, later, he sidled back and set
Himself again to hoard his winnowed shreds;
For him, at scale, that door’s unfeatured stretch
   Was place, with meats and breads,

A neighbourhood, terrained and closely-known,
Though heavened with a void, now light, now not,
Tornadoed by destroyings beyond all grasp
   Of his brain’s challenged dot.

What gulfs between that minim thing and I –
Both size and concept-handling depth of mind!
Looming, to him I’m but a whimful god,
   Destructive, lenient, blind;

But then, what depths, what deeps! draw endlessly
Between the Fleshless Ones and my garbed self;
To them, had Yahweh not touched flesh I’d be
   A bug upon a shelf.

Again, though Angels crowd the One’s just Hand,
Unbridgeable’s the tract that clefts His thoughts
From theirs: we none have being in ourselves
   Except He stoops and wroughts.

Many’s the thinker, centuries-long, who’s twist
His mind to know what’s known-not but it show
Itself! We come, we go – truth’s behind-veiled,
   And death’s its pilgrim’s glow.

So smile upon that spider’s life’s endeavours,
His treasured husks and flakes; soon he’ll fall prey
To some toothed gatherer, so let his dwelling
   Prosper him his day.

====================
© July 2022

Venus Glowing

This poem, as perhaps the rather light-hearted tone of the first two lines suggests, was planned to be a witty, bouncy consideration of life and morality as lived in the far west of Cornwall. Instead it developed into a more serious discussion of the Six Sins Against the Holy Spirit as enumerated in Traditional Roman Catholicism (as opposed to the current debased and corrupt Catholicism-lite plastered on the Church by the Robber Pope Bergoglio, who calls himself Francis).
   The poem is written in alternating trochaic pentameters and tetrameters, except for two lines where iambics crept in. Mounts Bay is the large bay between Gwennap Head and The Lizard on which my beloved Penzance sits; Cudden Point is a headland to the east of Marazion which itself is to the east of Penzance.

   For a very different treatment of deep matters, here's a link to my December 1980 poem "Plotinus and the Snake" (posted on this blog on 19 December 2012). I wrote it in the first flush of discovering Plotinus whom I still regard as one of the very greatest of the ancient philosophers and the greatest Neo-Platonist. It has often been pointed out how close his work is to Christian philosophical theology; indeed, in the seventeenth century there was an entire school of Christian Platonists for whom he was central. The various incidents mentioned in the poem are taken from his biography.

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

Venus glowing on the Western Sea
Shines on sinners, shines on me –
Lovers, lusters, pursemen swelled and sleek,
Victors having stormed their peak:
Lit by midnight’s star-and-Venus glow
(Mounts Bay shillies to and fro),
All must quaver at the sea wind’s cry,
“MANE, THECEL, PHARES: die!
“O Baltázar, know thy soul is claimed,
“Countless are your sins and named,
“Swept to Sheol by the Lord’s fierce hand,
“Reft your world-hopes, foam on sand.”
Friends, know this, you too Baltázar are,
And I, the meanest sinner far.
      Six great sins like bales a’squat our backs
Frenzy us as flies in wax.
First’s Presumption: lo, the Pharisee
Draped in rubric, scalp to knee,
Harsh in faulting lessers’ ill-drilled ways,
Rank impresses through his gaze;
But assurance cranks to hauteur’s puff,
Soles him in his own enough,
Momently, he’s pillared like Lot’s wife,
Living, yes, but not a life.
      Then’s Despair, philosophy’s own gift:
Tenured, cuckold, last hairs quiffed,
Jürgen Krudsmann munches like a snail
Nietzsche’s orphic sense-spatched Braille;
Decades questing self’s sufficient “is,”
Cross-eyed with his helpless “viz,”
Chasm-dancing leave him, for in man
Essence is not found nor plan;
Self’s existence rests on what’s Without,
Raising it above things’ rout;
Krudsmann, though, his lecture notes in stone,
Pumps his texts like bodies prone;
Nothing’s found, nothing to salve his gloom;
Slowly shadow darks the room.
      Next’s Impugning Truth That’s Known. Behold,
Zadie Zed (once Adam Auld)
Swirls “her” stubble with a rouge-charged brush,
Bothered by “her” tub-sized tush;
Penis-bulged, “her” cami-draws enclose
Not girls’ poesy but male prose;
Bustless, hands like hairy Mowbray pies,
“Truth” for “her” is baked of lies.
Notice: “gender,” “sex,” are words which case
Fact’s one fact: there’s sex, its base
Chromosomes, which cannot jump as wish
Wishes; “gender” claims, like fish
Landed writhing, are but tantrumed screams
Contra datum, blemished memes
Imitating Satan’s “Non,” for he,
First, refused reality.

This Pestering Present Moment

There is more going on formally in this little poem than first meets the eye. The first four lines of each stanza are alternating iambic trimeters and trochaic tetrameters, and lines one and three have feminine endings. The final four lines of each stanza are alternating iambic tetrameters and trimeters, with lines five and seven ending in three-syllable words (well, four syllable in the second stanza, line seven). The rhyme scheme is obvious.

   For a much different approach to the endless present moments of time, here's a link to my free verse poem "Works and Days" written in May 1979 and posted here on 10 May 2012..

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   This pestering present moment
Stabs its goad and stings the mind;
   Indicting, never dormant,
Leaves no trespass unassigned:
            By self-division endlessly
            It births the endless now,
            Thus blighting all to guiltily
            Do all that sins allow.

   You cheated, lied, you slandered,
Pardoned self but not your friend,
   But appetites unlaundered
Flinder truth and never mend.
            Insist if must that frabjously
            The sated self’s at peace,
            But consequence will hideously
            Griddle you in your grease.

   And what is truth? laughed Pilate,
Truth’s my free-for-all, growled time,
   Where lust barebacks your wallet,
Mocks your groans as pantomime:
            It’s hate, it’s graft, and shamelessly
            Enthrals your grasping eyes;
            It sells you time-share earnestly
            But damns you to the sties.

===============
© April 2022

A One-Year Gull

Well, don't get me started on the lunacy of the lock downs which wrecked the economy and what was left of the social life of this country. And all to "deal" with a virus which was harmless to well over 90% of the population and whose victims were largely people in their eighties and older - i.e. well past their sell-by date. I write that as an elderly person myself.

   Back to the poem. The incident is true, occurring after an early morning visit to the supermarket, followed by a quick stroll along the deserted promenade to say hello to the sea. In the first stanza the rhyming lines have feminine endings, and the unrhyming lines masculine endings; then in the second stanza the rhyming lines have masculine endings, and the unrhyming lines feminine endings; and so on, the two stanza forms alternating, to the poem's end.

   In my first period of poetry-writing decades ago I wrote very little about the animal world. But already, with many others, I was becoming concerned about the horrors of industrialized farming and wrote "Mr Longley's Dream," a ballad specifically about factory farming for eggs. I posted it here on 9 May 2013.

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Monday 20 April 2020 at 8.30 am

In virus time, locked down, the streets denuded,
Hurrying home with food bags, thinly stocked,
Just off the prom a crise obtruded:
The cold-wind, blue sunned sky poured early light
Upon a gull be-snooded

In fishing gut. This lashed-up one-year gull,
Its fawn-brown plumage like a mattress’ ticking,
Was wrapped round pink-stick legs and skull
By line which trapped its wings in half-spread angles:
It stood there, waiting cull.

I paused, rested my bags, and weighed my options;
Its unresponsive eye haughtily stared:
He’d edged some yards with hobbled actions,
Traced by a trail of gut, but now was leant
Breathless on the street stanchions.

Could I unpick the line? I’d need a knife
At home, but gull and bags could not be carried
Both. Anyway, what price a life?
Pledging return, I took my bags, offloading
That gull’s tight-knotted strife.

I thought: let nature do its work; some hunter
Will sink its jaws – gulls deal death, suffer death,
All’s fair; nature knows nothing gentler.
So, home-reached, the day’s business filled my mind,
Letting no self-doubt enter.

Yet pity, special to what’s human, hissed
“Go back.” I didn’t. Fallen man’s hard-hearted
When self’s convenience is grist.
I failed a test. Why mourn if at death’s taking
I also am not missed?

===============
© March 2022

The Good 'Un

This poem is in trochaics. In the first two stanzas lines two and four share a rhyme; in the final two stanzas lines two and four share a different rhyme. And in the fourth and final stanza a second rhyme is introduced to give finality to the poem. 

   I wrote this simple poem whilst musing on my friend Barrington Millson who died in his early sixties of rapid Alzheimer's disease in 2004. Ten years later I wrote an elegy for this extraordinary man, "In Memoriam: Barrington Millson," which I posted on this blogsite on 9 December 2016. It is linked here. Both the poem and a brief prose introduction give more details as to why those who knew him found him so remarkable.

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All the good ’uns are taken early,
Leaving the also rans behind:
Those who glowed like a high June sun
Fulsome on the crabbed and chined.

Says the Scripture, God coud’na bear
Simplitude of the seeing mind
So to sully in world’s contempt
It might stagger and grow opined,

So He took it to final bliss:
Age is not grey hairs and skin,
No, but insight cored from life’s
Fleshed and deadlocked stop/begin.

Barrington, so soon to go,
Sanctuaried now as Being’s kin,
Aid in night-hints us below
Crawling Truthward shin on shin.

===============
© March 2022

Many Years Ago

The first line of each stanza has a feminine ending; all other lines have masculine endings. All fourth lines end with a colon - I forget if that was deliberate or not. 

   Re the third stanza: in the heady 1960s (what a disastrous decade that was) I was indeed a "peace'n love-ist", and the Rev. Donald Soper was extremely well-known as both a Methodist leader and pacifist. He was very helpful to military types who wished to leave the armed forces on conscientious grounds, but he was no push-over: he inquired carefully whether someone was genuine or simply "swinging the lead." The fact that he is now totally forgotten is an indication of the speed of de-Christianization in Britain, enforced by our political and cultural "elite." But a heavy price will be paid: there is no such thing as a genuinely secular or atheist society; and in the West, Islamization will be the demographic result.

   I see this poem largely ignores mention of man/woman relations. To show there were such moments here's a link to an early poem, "To His Wife," (actually four sonnets) written in January 1980 and posted on this blog on 15 April 2013.

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Ah, dinghy sailing in the Solent’s waters,
   The rain-specked wind athwart your cheeks,
Rolling and yawing in the steepling waves,
Tacking for shelter in the sandbanked creeks:
   With childhood friends I now no longer know,
      I did that many years ago.

Girlfriended at the Tate to look at pictures,
   Shamming a tout I barely felt;
A hand on back or arm to test my luck,
But fearing what her calm indifference spelt:
   It was a crash course in the female “no” –
      I learnt that many years ago!

A twenty-something peacenik, I abetted
   A squaddie’s wiles to leave the force,
Pleading his tale to Donald Soper who,
Hard-hatted, quarried what was true, what “sauce”:
   Fooled and turned-over by that squaddie’s show
      I felt hate many years ago.

Then love! For chancing to the western wetlands
   I found Penzance ensea’d and grey,
The damp winds, gleaming streets, even the mists!
Engulfed my heart and hold it to this day:
   Life’s "once" – pure gift – stark at the land’s far toe,
      Remade me many years ago.

Well, this or that I did, the list is endless,
   In age there’s much that crowds the mind;
All, though, comes welling from the years long past,
There’s little recent that seems gold and vined:
   The old live severed from time’s busy flow –
      Their present’s many years ago.

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© February-March 2022

The Fly

There is a complicated scheme in this poem. Within each stanza the rhyme scheme and line lengths are easily seen. However, the DEF lines in the first stanza become the ABC rhymes of the following stanza. And so on. In the final stanza the DEF lines rhyme back to the ABC lines in the first stanza. Further, all line endings are single syllable masculine, except line 9 in the first stanza which is feminine. Because of the "carry over" rhyme scheme this means lines 3, 6 and 9 of the following stanzas become feminine endings except in the last stanza where only lines 3 and 6 have feminine endings: (because of the link back to the ABC rhymes in the first stanza, line 9 of the final stanza becomes single syllable masculine). Finally, line 3 in every stanza is trochaic.

   For a spot of bracing iambic pentameter, and for contrast, here's a link to "A Blackbird After Rain," written in November 2013 and posted on this blog on 4 July 2016.

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      Who doesn’t cheer October’s sun,
      Weakling, gone pasty, but still warm?
   Standing at the kitchen sink who’ll not,
Side-glancing through the open door at autumn’s dun,
      Feel body-comfort (like a corm
   Amassing energy in its tight knot
      Against the winter’s frozen thrall)
   From sun’s delightful finger dabs on skin
   And clothes, gifting a wistful concilation
         That ice-and-dark time nears,
         Wringing with wind-sprung tears.

      But first, a sleepy fly made call,
      Slow-gliding at the door, then in:
   Tottering the air in vacillation,
It pondered round the kitchen then with buzzing drawl
      It bull-nosed to the hall – a jinn,
   Wary, not over-keen on exploration,
      But seeking resting space to sink
   In season’s fuddlement – a sleep, a death,
   To end its brief life’s gene-pushed concitation,
         Those days in searching spent,
         Prospecting ordure’s vent.

      Later, both here and there, in chink,
      On wall, it flustered like a breath
   Wandering the rooms to find summation;
Settled, if poked it wouldn’t move, instead would shrink
      As longing for the pupa’s sheath,
   All struggles, feeding, breeding, at cessation.
      Two days in windows, crept on chairs,
   It lasted, then, one morning’s clouded chill,
   Was found, brittle in death’s last habitation,
         A dropped speck on the floor,
         Swept up and then no more.

      Well, autumn-winter’s plangent airs,
      Tranquil, but lessing heat to nil,
   Mediate mind’s puzzled divagation:
All, no? are like that fly, though some be wheat, some tares,
      Less dozy but a’quest to fill
   With knowing life’s closed room, its oscitation;
      And at man’s end, despite the spun
   Bewail of obsequies with drums and shawm,
   Must not his corpse like any fly that’s swat
         Be tidied off, that days,
         Unfussed, pursue their ways?

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© December 2021

"Time is Merciless"

This is obviously a bit of persiflage. For a more substantial lyric treatment see my poem "Time" written in August 1980 and posted here on 12 December 2012.

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Time is merciless,
Time is flear:
Lose a minute?
Lose a year!

Slow it crawls,
Slow and then –
Spinning spalls! –
There’s no more “when.”

All must suffer,
All must fall;
Saint or huffer,
Waits the pall!

Works and days,
Loves and loathes,
Each one frays
Like old clothes.

“Mercy, mercy!”
Screams the slave:
Strait, per se,
Time digs his grave.

Coldness, blackness,
Life now ceased,
Mind is trackless,
All is least.

One day space,
Time too, will die:
Physics’ base
Prised like ply.

Till that point
See it sheer –
Time is merciless,
Time is flear.

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© November 2021

Lollai, Little Child

This is poem 82 from a wonderful little anthology, “A Selection of Religious Lyrics,” edited by Douglas Gray, in Oxford University Press’s Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series (1975). Written in Middle English, I have put it into modern English with a handful of changes/ "improvements" to enhance readability.

   The poems in this anthology are mainly not literary masterpieces; they derive from the faith of "ordinary" people or, often, the priests and friars who wrote them for use in preaching to unlettered congregations. They reveal how medieval society was completely saturated in the life and language of the Christian faith and, therefore, how disastrously far Western Europe has fallen into the intellectual barbarism of "secularism," i.e. social Marxism. But now there is a new swamping faith knocking at the door - Islam, which will deliver the coup de grace to the unfaithful, child-aborting snowflakes who constitute what is left of Western "civilization."

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Lollai, lollai, my little child, why weep so sore?
You needs must weep; it was prepared before
Ever to live in sorrow, and sigh for evermore,
As your elders did before, while still alive they were.
   Lollai, little child, lollai, lulloo,
   In an unknown world trapped are you.

Beasts and birds, the fishes in the flood,
And everything alive that’s made of bone and blood,
When they come into the world, they do themselves some good –
All but the wretched brats of Adam’s brood.
   Lollai, little child, by care are you fore-met,
   You are lost in this world’s wildness that’s before you set.

Child, if it chances you shall thrive in plenty,
Remember you were fostered at your mother’s knee;
Ever have in your heart’s-mind thought of these three –
Whence you came, what you are, and what shall come of thee.
   Lollai, little child, lollai, lollai,
   With sorrow you came into this world, with sorrow you’ll wend away.

Nor should you trust this world, it’s your foul foe,
The rich it makes poor, the poor rich also,
It turns woe to weal, and then weal to woe,
Trust not any man in this world while it turns so.
   Lollai, little child, your foot is in the wheel,
   You know not whether it turns to woe or weal.

Oh child, you are a pilgrim wicked-born,
You wander this false world, looking before.
Death shall come with a blast out of a sombre horn
And cast down Adam’s kin, as he was cast before.
   Lollai, little child, your woe was caused by Adam,
   In Paradise-land through the wickedness of Satan.

Child, you’re not a pilgrim but a foreign guest,
Your days are reckoned, journeys all imprest;
And whether you wend north, or whether east,
Death shall waylay you with sadness in your breast.
   Lollai, little child, this woe has Adam wrought,
   When he ate of the apple which Eve him brought.

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Put into modern English © November 2021

"Ah, Ah, Ah"

This poem derives from Jeremias 1:6 - "And I said: Ah, ah, ah, Lord God: behold I cannot speak, for I am a child." It also refers to David Jones's "I said, Ah! what shall I write?" in his "The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments" (Faber 1974). David Jones is the Welshman in stanza 5.

   I was impressed to learn from Douglas Gray's "A Selection of Religious Lyrics" (see my introduction to the following post of "Lollai, Little Child") that in the medieval age "there was a traditional belief that men when born cried 'A!', the first letter of Adam's name," i.e. in recognition of the disaster of Original Sin into which they had now arrived.

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“Ah, ah,” the new-born cried,
   “Adam, you have done me ill:
Safe was I in the squeezing womb;
   Now, in the air I chill.”

An apple’s bite brought psyche’s woe,
   Edginess in the self’s deep;
Pigs and swill are the crème of life:
   The dumbstruck children weep.

“Ah, ah,” the prophet said,
   “Words begrudge, but God-touched I
Waste and strike down the bellied cits –
   Their idols and their scry.”

But few there are face truth with will:
   Exile’s trek, task-master’s whip,
Bloody those who “coud’na fash”
   Begging for bite and sip.

“Ah, ah,” the Welshman wrote,
   God’s seven lamps gone flicking-faint;
“Nozzles pump and glass refracts,
   But purpose, form, are taint.”

The Lost in Action being lost
   Crassness fevers each man’s glance:
Turn, turn, but where, to what end?
   A dice! It falls askance.

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© November 2021

Season's Change

Here's a link to "In a Summer Garden," which, on reflection, has very little to do with the theme of "Season's Change," but what the hell... It was written in August 1980 and posted on 4 June 2012. (By the way, in the final stanza the rhythm requires that the Greek word Agápe be pronounced Agapé. Not having any Greek I am confused because the Oxford English Dictionary - before the wokeist luvvies got hold of it - gives the latter pronunciation.)

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      The seasons change,
      The body aches,
And there’s no joy in ale and cakes;
      The great estrange
      From warmth to cold
Shivers the flesh like shoes un-soled:
   Hallows’ Eve for some
   Comes with deaths and wakes.

      Plans neatly plumb,
      Ambitions great,
For one who lived beyond the gate
      Collapsed to crumb;
      And fates and loves
Now ripped and stained like floor-dropped gloves
   Fester in remorse,
   Tapping sorrow’s drum.

      Thoughts become coarse
      And limbs are crick,
Eyes wander, guilty, with a tic;
      Like frost on gorse
      Sins' razors cut,
Selves parlay but can only “but”:
   Wary, bodies limp –
   Judged, no longer trick.

      And grits are skimp,
      The urbs decays,
Its self-myth stripped to un-gemmed clays,
      Grey-veined and crimp;
      Exhaustion’s moan
Finals what now will be ungrown:
   City walls unkept
   Shadow thief and pimp.

      Now Time has crept
      To winter’s brim:
Will riddling Birth or roisters’ whim –
      A foot which stepped
      Through crusted snow –
Scuffle a path that men might know
   Warmth, spring’s flaring hum;
   Truth, that’s nature’s limn?

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© October 2021

"Autonomy"

From famine to surfeit. Here's a much fuller treatment on this theme, called "Urbi et Orbi," written in December 1979 and posted on 11 December 2011.

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   Christ Cross-ly cauterized the world then Rose:
His challenge opened Heaven’s gates: we so-and-sos,
   Now choiced, should dash to Him upon our toes;
Instead we game the odds then freeze in hell-gate’s snows.

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© August 2021

Three Ages

In a very early poem, "Four Answers Above," written sometime in 1973-76, I broadly covered (oh dear, I've split an infinitive) the same theme albeit from a much gloomier point of view. And I was only in my twenties! I posted it on 23 December 2013; it is linked here.

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Even though the young have all the luck,
      Their wits, their strength,
Sheer stamina that goes to any length
   To gain an edge, to earn a buck,
      They still end up stuck.

Come midlife and there’s little left to suck
      And see: there’s bills,
Alimony and redundant skills:
   You may try a final dodge or duck,
      But you still end up stuck.

Of age I’m speechless: you survive the ruck
      And climb age’s heights
But find mere sickness, frailty and spites:
   Death will giggle, its hand will pluck –
      And you’ll know you are stuck.

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© August 2021

Time Passes

I find I covered the same subject in a lyric, "Impromptu," written in February 1980 when I wasn't even old. I posted it on 26 December 2012 and it is linked here. Twelve lyrics on the months of the year, and therefore called "Months: Lyrics," written in 2014/5, were posted on 11 March 2016 and are linked here.

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      An ancient wall,
   And one brick shoddy-red
   (Things decay and fall)
Crumbling palely in the rain’s
   Dissolving caterwaul:
In short years gone it’s dust and dross
At the wall’s foot, crawled on by moss.
   Time passes, so pass I.

   The leggy Shepherd’s Purse
   Gangling by the wall
   (Things decay and fall)
Grows dry, yellows to mulching sticks,
Sortileged by an autumn squall:
Those abandoned bones will lie in frost
By the needy chaffinch grubbed and tossed.
   Time passes, so pass I.

      A neighbour’s dog
      Gone gruff and old
   (Things decay and fall)
Lifts its leg against the wall,
Wheedling a few drops’ rancid scrawl,
Then limps off with a weary bark
Having made its final short-lived mark.
   Time passes, so pass I.

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© August 2021

Hark! The Lark!

This should be read with a certain speed, thus copying the singing manner of the lark. I have been reading the Elizabethans recently and they often contrast the lark with the cuckoo. Hence, opportunistically, here's a link to a poem on a totally different theme and written as long ago as 1980. It's called "The Cuckoo,"  was posted on 1 January 2013 and is linked here 

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A hidden dot in heaven’s misted blue –
That vault that’s depthless,
Arching from one far vista to horizon’s other –
And yet insisting on its presence,
Its song a tress
Of radiation that’s unquenchable
As upland streams, as swittering
From rock to rock in barbling freefall,
Scooting in lightfoot pleasaunce
Vertexly down scree and sprawl,
They seek a hearer open-mouthed impressed
By acrobatics’ twirling similes of song,
The skylark broadcast-sows its one and all:
"Avaunt you pigeon-chested knock-kneed males,
Come hither, yes hither, you ladies all,
Here’s a squire who fills his thong,
Eager to tup all summer long,
That, brood on brood,
My offspring like a Saxon horde
May claim the scrub and crop-rich fields
Of these chalk-boned and lazy-rolling wolds!"
An hour or more he hangs
And sings, the syrup-heat of summer, hued
And dense, lolling like ocean swells;
His wings in dashing flitter
Pump up his shout;
Like bells it pells, mells, wells, quells,
Skittles like shells, invokes like spells,
That none might guess
That ground-returned
He’s but a ball of drying mud,
Leaf-shred flecked and mongrel,
Belly-plump like a swelling downy bud,
His only brag his bristling crest,
Rising, sinking, rising, sinking,
As billiard-eyed he darts here-there,
Glancing, glaring, glancing:
How like the silly human, that crack-brained chest-thump chump,
Lard-bellied, trigger-fused concerned with “face”!
Take air, man, launch,
With weightless grace
Ascend the sun’s rich otherness,
Forgetting ground-stuck truths;
Think only of the lark as pure
Affectless being merged in thrilling blue,
A presence and a fons
Which sheerly gives beyond all mind or weal;
And as that lark which neither knows nor cares
But, winging, sings,

So, too, do you.

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© July/August 2021