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, so scroll down to view, or 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 (for April the "Month of the Resurrection"). These ascriptions were widely used in the pre-Vatican II Church: they were yet another casualty of the destructive consequences of that foolish Council.
Apart from the three Months series I can only find two other poems of mine specifically about April: both are short. "April Wind," written in April 1981, was posted on 31 March 2012 and is linked here. "April Heavy Days," a sonnet, was written in April 2014, was posted on 8 June 2017 and is linked here.
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(Month of the Resurrection)
It scours, it scours – the tide I mean – muscled, deep-bodied,
Clenched in the harbour’s channel like a snake;
Silent and solid, shoddied brown and man-devouring,
It speeds with the world’s ache to reach the sea.
Behind the harbour piles, a sandy ledge of cobbles
Has hoarded droves – tiny, translucent, whole –
Of baby crab shells – obols flung by mindless nature,
Dead before living, goal lacking all point.
All’s tragic, rightly seen: to Physics’ law-bound endings,
Known in the constant grab and gulp of the sea’s
Ruthless inmates, man’s fendings, blazed as self-sufficient,
Are futile stutters, breezed autonomies
And flourishings which, virus-hit or harvests failing,
Collapse to windvane creatures gabbling prayers
To what? An own-self God, ailingly mawkish, neutered
By faint belief. What flares along the shore?
A biplane, first of many as the year relaxes,
Its petrol engine clacking, prop a daze:
Ah, screwed and soldered praxis of the self-puffed skillsman!
Preferring staider ways, the beach-gear ton
Repaint their status-stripey beach huts for the season.
Wonders are many, sang Sophocles, and none
More so than man, but reason soured by lah-dah graces
Is like wax in the sun, gleek and unfirm,
And leached of virtue, its point d’etat, quails like a slavey
Before a herring gull’s unfeeling stare:
Face on, it peers from mauvey wings, its flatline forehead
And hunger-purposed glare, the nostril slits,
The socket slits for the frowned eyes, and the malignant
Projectile of its beak, ivoried, hooked,
Poising to butcher, faux-indignant, red spot gleaming,
Announce, bell and booked, finis for its prey.
Ah, flashes, frozen-stepped, the Four Last Things! – there’s Judgement
Chivvying Death, Bliss, and the Other Place,
And loathsomely that Lodgement gluts on uncount numbers
Who crimefully abased their intellects:
The challenge as at tourney is to win the prize-good
Gifting a knowledge into carking death’s
Meaninged-noneness, its sackhood blackness torn to shreddings,
Or life’s engathered breaths will dry unplused.
What’s horrored, grappled chest to chest, is gross extinction
Which oxymorons meaning, concept, truth;
Nice pecks of ticklish unction, meant-well but degrounded,
Will wrench to uncouth screeching, “Sauve qui peut!”
What saves? Looms like a hard-sought light-gleam in a seaway
The Incarnation, plain but mazed in sight,
The Crucifixion – hearsay? – follows, then Redemption
And Resurrection, bright though bloody-won;
These Four gift comprehension which confirms the purpose
Of world and all in Justice’ final hest,
Their tout intincts the campus which, long centuries fallen,
Now rescued is blessed, conjugal with the One.
As always, April stirs like Janus, fronting, backing,
Intrigued by wisps of sun, then shrinking grey;
Today, the sea fret hacking the beach soaks the shingle,
And seahorses fly spray from the surged waves.
It’s cold, the wind’s constant, ozone sharpens the nostrils,
Wind whine and pebble roar shackle the ears,
Black draggled weed – folds and fistules, whelk sacs, drenched cuttles,
Scatter the beach, smears in its tin-grey scarps.
Above the fish quay, early-nested starlings arrow
Day-long to feed their squeaking fledge, whilst puffed
Beneath the jetty’s narrow legs, gruff purling pigeons
Prattle around their huffed unwilling mates.
Outside the harbour, seals like blacksuit frogmen supply
Incise the foam-spread backwash at the mole;
Aloft greedily, gulls wind-high, circle for food-slops,
Long-calling like death’s knoll: they’re quick to fight –
If one finds food it’s mobbed in hieroglyphic ambush,
Their frenzied yowlpings clashing like squealed glass.
In town, and paxed, there’s glad-hush then, paired-off, love’s tensings
Begin: the male makes passes, keening; she
Shows ready: wings aloft, he backs her, plaining harshly;
She stands and yelps; climaxed, his tail drops low,
Exchange is crowed, and promptly jumping down uncaring,
He preens, his hormoned glow eclipsed for the year.
Life, though, is seeded; resurrection as a sequence
Turbos the months, and opulence of spawn,
Its tissues and swelled unguents, clutches rock and water,
Barely a half-step, dawn to night, from death.
The cormorant stands token: upright on the waypoles,
Archaic with “S” neck and coal-black sheen,
Hunted and sated, shrapnels of water wind-glinting
From arched-out wings, it’s lean as a starved man.
Or One who’s Crossed, slung on the Tree for hours and tortured
By body weight. The Talmud, Tacitus,
Agreed that laws infractured, brutely should be vengenced:
The Law, then, walked – shoved, cussed – from waving palms,
The spy’s bargain, the garden’s face-off, to His threshing,
His hoisting, and His business in the tomb;
Come morning’s pre-dawn freshing, He had won Redemption,
Dragging men from the combe of sunken sin,
His Cross-death pacifying Justice. Resurrection’s
Stupendous act concluded, spinning earth
Gained object in its fluxions, so that Life Eternal
For mind-graced men found berth again, and urged.
This Life is final understanding – goal and being;
The seeker finding, joyly clasps what’s real,
Becomes it; this known and knowing, timeless, extras physics,
And ransomed from the Wheel all’s truth in All.
Of this the Resurrection gifts first fruits abounding:
So Justin Thinker, Anselm at his themes,
Made mind-work’s helpless go-rounding Faith’s grateful handmaid
That learning’s fit streams might at last flow full.
====================
© May 2020. Revised July 2025
------------
(Month of the Resurrection)
It scours, it scours – the tide I mean – muscled, deep-bodied,
Clenched in the harbour’s channel like a snake;
Silent and solid, shoddied brown and man-devouring,
It speeds with the world’s ache to reach the sea.
Behind the harbour piles, a sandy ledge of cobbles
Has hoarded droves – tiny, translucent, whole –
Of baby crab shells – obols flung by mindless nature,
Dead before living, goal lacking all point.
All’s tragic, rightly seen: to Physics’ law-bound endings,
Known in the constant grab and gulp of the sea’s
Ruthless inmates, man’s fendings, blazed as self-sufficient,
Are futile stutters, breezed autonomies
And flourishings which, virus-hit or harvests failing,
Collapse to windvane creatures gabbling prayers
To what? An own-self God, ailingly mawkish, neutered
By faint belief. What flares along the shore?
A biplane, first of many as the year relaxes,
Its petrol engine clacking, prop a daze:
Ah, screwed and soldered praxis of the self-puffed skillsman!
Preferring staider ways, the beach-gear ton
Repaint their status-stripey beach huts for the season.
Wonders are many, sang Sophocles, and none
More so than man, but reason soured by lah-dah graces
Is like wax in the sun, gleek and unfirm,
And leached of virtue, its point d’etat, quails like a slavey
Before a herring gull’s unfeeling stare:
Face on, it peers from mauvey wings, its flatline forehead
And hunger-purposed glare, the nostril slits,
The socket slits for the frowned eyes, and the malignant
Projectile of its beak, ivoried, hooked,
Poising to butcher, faux-indignant, red spot gleaming,
Announce, bell and booked, finis for its prey.
Ah, flashes, frozen-stepped, the Four Last Things! – there’s Judgement
Chivvying Death, Bliss, and the Other Place,
And loathsomely that Lodgement gluts on uncount numbers
Who crimefully abased their intellects:
The challenge as at tourney is to win the prize-good
Gifting a knowledge into carking death’s
Meaninged-noneness, its sackhood blackness torn to shreddings,
Or life’s engathered breaths will dry unplused.
What’s horrored, grappled chest to chest, is gross extinction
Which oxymorons meaning, concept, truth;
Nice pecks of ticklish unction, meant-well but degrounded,
Will wrench to uncouth screeching, “Sauve qui peut!”
What saves? Looms like a hard-sought light-gleam in a seaway
The Incarnation, plain but mazed in sight,
The Crucifixion – hearsay? – follows, then Redemption
And Resurrection, bright though bloody-won;
These Four gift comprehension which confirms the purpose
Of world and all in Justice’ final hest,
Their tout intincts the campus which, long centuries fallen,
Now rescued is blessed, conjugal with the One.
As always, April stirs like Janus, fronting, backing,
Intrigued by wisps of sun, then shrinking grey;
Today, the sea fret hacking the beach soaks the shingle,
And seahorses fly spray from the surged waves.
It’s cold, the wind’s constant, ozone sharpens the nostrils,
Wind whine and pebble roar shackle the ears,
Black draggled weed – folds and fistules, whelk sacs, drenched cuttles,
Scatter the beach, smears in its tin-grey scarps.
Above the fish quay, early-nested starlings arrow
Day-long to feed their squeaking fledge, whilst puffed
Beneath the jetty’s narrow legs, gruff purling pigeons
Prattle around their huffed unwilling mates.
Outside the harbour, seals like blacksuit frogmen supply
Incise the foam-spread backwash at the mole;
Aloft greedily, gulls wind-high, circle for food-slops,
Long-calling like death’s knoll: they’re quick to fight –
If one finds food it’s mobbed in hieroglyphic ambush,
Their frenzied yowlpings clashing like squealed glass.
In town, and paxed, there’s glad-hush then, paired-off, love’s tensings
Begin: the male makes passes, keening; she
Shows ready: wings aloft, he backs her, plaining harshly;
She stands and yelps; climaxed, his tail drops low,
Exchange is crowed, and promptly jumping down uncaring,
He preens, his hormoned glow eclipsed for the year.
Life, though, is seeded; resurrection as a sequence
Turbos the months, and opulence of spawn,
Its tissues and swelled unguents, clutches rock and water,
Barely a half-step, dawn to night, from death.
The cormorant stands token: upright on the waypoles,
Archaic with “S” neck and coal-black sheen,
Hunted and sated, shrapnels of water wind-glinting
From arched-out wings, it’s lean as a starved man.
Or One who’s Crossed, slung on the Tree for hours and tortured
By body weight. The Talmud, Tacitus,
Agreed that laws infractured, brutely should be vengenced:
The Law, then, walked – shoved, cussed – from waving palms,
The spy’s bargain, the garden’s face-off, to His threshing,
His hoisting, and His business in the tomb;
Come morning’s pre-dawn freshing, He had won Redemption,
Dragging men from the combe of sunken sin,
His Cross-death pacifying Justice. Resurrection’s
Stupendous act concluded, spinning earth
Gained object in its fluxions, so that Life Eternal
For mind-graced men found berth again, and urged.
This Life is final understanding – goal and being;
The seeker finding, joyly clasps what’s real,
Becomes it; this known and knowing, timeless, extras physics,
And ransomed from the Wheel all’s truth in All.
Of this the Resurrection gifts first fruits abounding:
So Justin Thinker, Anselm at his themes,
Made mind-work’s helpless go-rounding Faith’s grateful handmaid
That learning’s fit streams might at last flow full.
====================
© May 2020. Revised July 2025
------------
Notes:
The poem is written in elegiac stanzas, i.e. with alternating iambic alexandrine and pentameter lines. There is quite a bit of freedom in the use of the stresses so in places it might be best to regard the lines as accentual, i.e. as having six or five movable stresses per line. Throughout, lines 1 and 3 have feminine endings, lines 2 and 4 have masculine endings. All line 2 masculine endings are single syllable except in stanza 22 where the Roman historian Tacitus cropped up. There are internal rhymes or half-rhymes as follows: the final word of line 1 rhymes or half-rhymes with a word or part of a word starting at the 6th syllable in line 3, except on six occasions when the rhyme starts on the 7th syllable. The final word of line 2 rhymes or half-rhymes with a word or part of a word starting at the 6th syllable in line 4, except on five occasions when the rhyme starts on the 5th syllable.
Each of the 12 "Months: The Sea" poems makes reference to some of the saints and/or major festivals of that month as memorialized in the Catholic Missal, but not the impostor 1970 Missal of Paul VI, rather the pre-1955 Missal which contains the true and complete daily Liturgy of the Church. The two have different Calendars of Saints, with the 1970 Calendar being grossly deformed.
Stanza 2: Decades ago, exploring a silted-up harbour on the South Coast, I came across a bank of thousands of baby crab's shells, all with their leg shells still in place. The pile had been assembled by wave and tide action. The profligacy of nature always astounds.
Stanzas 8: "bell and booked": a reference to "bell, book and candle" - an ancient method of excommunication used by the Catholic Church. It was discontinued (of course) after the Second Vatican Council.
Stanzas 12/13 and stanzas 23/24: the one was meant to develop on the other. I now find the two groups rather too close to tautology for comfort.
Stanza 13: "campus": here stands for the idea of the intellectual polity, of civilization.
Stanza 14: "seahorses": these are white horses, whitecaps, i.e. breaking waves at sea.
Stanza 21: Curiously, cormorants, astonishing underwater swimmers, do not have oiled feathers like other swimming seabirds. Hence, they have to dry their wings after hunting by holding them out to the wind on their perch, which must be a freezing activity during winter!
Stanza 22: "The Talmud, Tacitus": Just two of the many historical sources which confirm the existence of the Lord Jesus. The Talmud refers to Him as a criminal who suffered a proper punishment: such is ecumenism.
Stanza 26: "Justin Thinker" is St Justin Martyr, also called St Justin the Philosopher. He was one of the first pagan philosophers to accept Christ; he defended himself before two emperors but was put to death. St Anselm of Canterbury produced the famous ontological proof of God's existence, and the first detailed theory of "satisfaction" to explain the significance of the Lord's death. Both are commemorated in April in the Traditional Latin Missal.
