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, link to it here; the poem for April was posted on 28 July 2025, link to it here; that for May, posted 20 September 2025, is linked here.
There are four epigraphs for the entire "Months: The Sea" sequence and they are posted at the head of the March poem.
Each poem carries an ascription of the liturgical importance of the month. These ascriptions were widely used in the pre-Vatican II Church: they were yet another casualty of the destructive consequences of that foolish Council.
I do not seem specifically to have written many poems about June. One such is "A Blackbird in June," written in June 2013 and posted on this blogsite on 2 March 2015. It is linked here. A much earlier poem which is "June-ish" is "Epigraph on Rome," written in 1979 (and which I have always been fond of) and posted on this site on 31 October 2012. It is linked here.
---------------
(Month of the Sacred Heart)
My God! Hades’ gates roared, and shelves of rock screamed
Into a battering skip: a thunder-shriek seized the town,
Quaking the granite streets; clefts of lightning cracked
From cloud to sea, boned and crook like a hag’s claws, and flash glared
A shocked second, dowsing dawn’s twilight. The beached
Worm-glutting gulls leapt to wing instantly, howling a’group
In tight-turned circles, wing feathers clapping as
Raging, gabbling, they swung like thrashed souls driven through hell’s
Gloomy bolges. In a gasping moment, rain’s
Avalanche drenched the town as wide-footed thunderheads,
Anvil-tall from sea to high sky, crept mollusc-like
Across coast and village, braun and convulsed, liver-dark,
Purposed as locusts blackly gulfing the fields.
The rain, solid as chain-mail, clashed in the streets – the gulls
Forced to ground; it fried like fat on the beige sands
And clattered hoarsely a shine of spume on the lead-puce
Beaten sea. In town on walls and roofs, herring gulls
Hunched and suffered, glum in the pounding soak, feathers glued
To points, their wing quills rutted, their beaks adrip:
The tart whiff of the plumb downpour, chilling the air, belied
The hoped-for heat of a smack June day. To some – most? –
A pious plea such times, urged to the Sacred Heart, might seem
Inane, the world shrunk to flexing panes, iron-grey,
Of water, the flumes gushed by the beach’s storm drains, grimed
With town dirt, gouging fanned Mississippis through
The slathered sands; but friend whether Megiddo’s endgame
Is bodied by these false-mirrored drapes, or they’re
But a passing puff, that shrined Heart, consoling as a hand
Proffered, gifts a gritted patience portioned to
The pleader’s disastered state – oh Horn of Goods, replete
Of Blood and Water, Trove Box of pity, Vault
Of refuge for the blight and perplexed! It’s a fraught truth
For strandsmen that gulfed offshore in a storm force
Blether, or skewered on a cliff by a ton’s weight of wind,
All atheists go AWOL, (none ever turned a trick
Trundling the nay-sayers’ naff bookstall across battlefields).
The day a washout, the next – June’s longest – was fine.
By four, dawn’s tones – lime-olive rosined with jade-pink sheens –
Had lotioned the attic-wide sky; a slivered moon,
Vague as a slopped clam of bread in rose-milk, wasted away.
By chimneys, on gables, nested hatchlings squealed,
The parent gulls off-hand; a breeze scattered the sea’s hiss
Through the lanes, and night-out cats nosed the cracked shells
Dumped by the gulls like rind. Come eight, the beach having warmed,
Morning forage done, blackbacks and herrings rest
In flocks, distrustful and jump: glared eyes, thrust beaks, insist
On lifetime social distance. The cirrused sky
Is ruthless blue, the sands hemp- and umber-stained, the sea,
Full-ebbed and flat, is emulsioned greeny-pale.
Unstopped, the heat piles and the strand’s hours amble to afternoon;
