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?

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© 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.

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© 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