(Month of the Precious Blood)
It slows and crawls into the station:
The train’s “hump–hump” on points in work-like fashion
Calls journey’s end, and doors along its length
Vomit this year’s luggaged hordes.
July pours burning heat and dense blue skies
On them; soon, crimsoned flopping flesh like gourds
Will splay the hot-stoned beach. All month the stalls and kiosks
Affording food and beach ware work long hours;
Hotel and pension terraces are full,
And tots’ cries, arcade tunes, disturb the lovers.
The slapping sea churns human flotsam, laughing, thrashing,
Jet skis roar in thumped-chest passion;
Embayed, a bloated cruise boat frees its launches
For two hours’ feeding – water ice or whelks;
Bemused, surfboarded lifeguards crouch on haunches
And chaperone these foolish folks.
“Off-piste,” and life proceeds untouched,
Raw children in their gardens play unwatched;
Shopping and washing done, there’s coffee with
Flames – old, new – and thrill of footing:
Life’s settlement, as always, finely edged.
At harbour, the white fish auction closed, and gutting
And packing underway, a trawler’s beached for prop work;
Come lunch, men will make tryst with tabled pints.
And always halyards chatter, stench of crab
And fish rot sours the streets, noised with the chants
Of gulls at swirl. It’s full tide at the rocks, and terns
Plunge for prey – many times botched,
Then winging, fry in beak. An egret stalks
The rock line, its beak a halberd, stabbing death
For fish and shrimp. Eyeless, a dead gull rucks
In the surf, ignored like a torn cloth.
All’s heartless! Yes: the breeding gulls
On roofs do duty as a hormone pulls,
Feeding their begging fledge reluctantly.
Toppling, screeching, brownly-downed,
The fledglings prance the copings, keen to fly –
Unbalanced, some, wing-thrashing, plunge to ground,
Their parents yapping from a wall as feet or cars
Chivvy the young to a puzzled kerb-edge cower.
Then morning, evening, maelstromed, all erupt
In screaming flight – a disputing, staking blather;
Settled, night long they’ll call, fly, rest, though sleeping little.
Three a.m. a dog-fox prowls;
Spotted, they roar alarm; folk yawn, disturbed.
Next day, adults rebonding quiver in frenzy,
Beaks clashing, chattering; they cease, unverbed.
Language, unfelt, grew from this motley.
Language is structure bred by structure,
By organisms bound by social gesture –
The rat-faced herring gulls example this.
Topping all is Man whose brain,
Protein-engorged, has burst brute physics’ grip,
Creating mind, disbodied, ever keen
To structure further. Thus, a paddle on a log
Becomes a week’s regatta: high-tech yachts
Compete a close-thought course to testing rules,
The winner self-formed by work against those boats.
Hegel, blade-faced, thought this the crux of man’s fulfilment,
Mind’s self-knowledge making contour
Of what’s the case; mind only was what’s real,
Its absolute; but what completion’s that?
Mind presumes data, an existent mell,
Which lacking being must be kept.
By what? By that whose essence is
Existence. Wondrous, then, It sought repose
(His Name announced) and graced in systal love
Mary’s blood-gorged womb. Nine months
That haemal give and take caressed her flesh –
The storm-rode Yahweh stooped, accepting wraths
Of men that, Christ-revealed, the Is be known by face.
Water and blood drenching the rough-sawn Rood,
The Twelve, twelve years avant, divided, blown
Which-way, telling and dying, that flesh and blood,
A’roast on the beach or scheming in town-back streets,
Mindwork trashed in paltry use,
Might know. To what return? The ruthless gulls,
Savaging others’ fledglings wandered on
Their patch, untaught know more of death and ills
Than men, oiled, preened, for sea-edge “fun.”
And yet compassion’s bell-note sings
Made final by that Cross-death. Hegel’s “whence”
And “where” clod-hops unless the child’s piped “why?”
Wrings the Cross’s dialectic:
The All created that It might redeem.
A one-year herring like a paralytic
Staggers on beak and leg – the other broke – across
The shingle – it will starve. Chastised, encaved,
The Magdalen wept penance for the world;
It pleased God, bliss was poured and, sinner-shrived,
In death self-knowledge of the Truth houselled her soul.
Dawn, sun-hot: the turned tide swings
Its cape across the sands. Fresh weed and salt
Surprise the palate. Tones of ochre, gall,
Variegate the foreshore as if, Grail-spilt,
The Precious Blood infuses all.
===============
© August 2019. Revised June 2026
Notes:
This poem is written, obviously, in large stanzas following examples found in W. H. Auden and that ever-interesting Cornish poet, Jack Clemo. The structure and rhyme scheme (mainly half-rhymes) of the stanzas is easily analysed: note, lines four and twelve are always trochaic. In the true (pre-1955) Missal the month begins with the wonderful Feast of the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
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 pre-1955 Catholic Missal.
Stanza 3: Morning and evening, through the summer months, and particularly in the autumn, the gulls (at least in my part of the world) often launch themselves to circle for some minutes in a competition to see who can scream loudest and longest. Then, whilst there are still nestlings and fledglings to protect, they do not really sleep at night but remain restless. Finally, as fledglings become independent, parent gulls will often go through a rebonding routine in which they crouch together, quivering and howling. It is quite a sight.
Stanza 4: Hegel is an ever-fascinating philosopher – if only it were easier to understand him! I have found Peter Singer’s little volume, Hegel, in the OUP Past Masters series invaluable.
Stanza 5: Tradition tells us the Apostles stayed in Palestine for twelve years until, after the Blessed Virgin's Dormition, they scattered as the Holy Ghost led them to spread the Gospel throughout the known world.
Stanza 6: Mary Magdalen, together with her sister St Martha and brother St Lazarus, journeyed into the south of France. Sts Martha and Lazarus laboured as missionaries whilst St Mary led a life of penance in a cave.
