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.
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© January 2024
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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
Note: I wrote a fifth
stanza for “Kerbstones” but decided not to use it because it shifted the poem
from the personal to the political, indeed existential. However, that fifth
stanza expresses, albeit rather in code, important truths – expression of which
is thoroughly discouraged in the public sphere – about the future of the
British Isles. For the record, here it is:
Kerb Stones: Afterthought
There’s more: for, truth, when massed
Resistless waves of “rights”-garbed men inflood
Long-settled lands, a scale’s surpassed,
Fouling those lands which once were good;
Their ancient template’s rent;
The dwellers, margin-driven by the new,
In hireth-woe must learn to scant
Themselves, for they’re but sweepings now.
====================
© January 2024
