Snow Stuns All

Sunday 17 January 2016, 8.30 am

Snow stuns all:
Black-wet earth,
Bark-soaked limes,
Mist-blanched bush,
Ice-crisped grass,
Haunt-hunched birds,
Melt-dripped roofs,
White-stretched streets,
Noise-mute cars,
Grey-lumped sky,
Lead-weight sea,
Freeze-breath man,
Life-death’s gasp:
Snow stuns all.

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© January 2016

Europe Blues

I stride to my desk in the mornings

To study absicht and donnée,
But soon I take pause to consider
Herr Professeur has little to say.
        Oh the gruff good sense of Old England.

Come evening I twirl my spaghetti
Or dabble a thin Tuscan wine,
But really I find it’s all rat food
Not hearty and struck from the chine.
        Oh the ale and roast beef of Old England.

On Sundays I turn to my Maker
To acknowledge good fortune received,
But appalled at thought of the priest-hagged
I give thanks for what Cranmer achieved.
        Oh the matins and psalms of Old England.

And sometimes I struggle with paroles
Or drang which a dichter has sung,
But they clog my exasperate vision
Like chaff which madmen have flung.
        Oh the part-songs and tales of Old England.

Thank God for these green rocky islands,
For the wolds and the homesteads and lanes,
Though now swarming with Europe’s children
Like a locust army of Cains.
        Oh the fair fields and towns of Old England.

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Note: "Herr Professeur" is deliberate.

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© January 2016

David Varney

"David Varney" - I changed his name - was indeed annoying! But his end, a lonely wanderer of the streets, was sad. The poem makes obvious reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Felix Randal" and, perhaps less obviously but important to me, Yeats's "Paudeen." One of those little poetic felicities occurred in the writing when I found that the rhyme sound of lines 9 and 11 in the first stanza was repeated in the same lines in the second stanza.

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David Varney, the shop help, ah is he dead?
Tiresome, he’d dog your side with gibbous eyes
And purchase patter – words, but nothing said,
Squabbling the while with staff like boys at shies.
Put out by management he limped the streets
With heavy coat and hat and plastic bags;
Years passed, a pulled-down shade with scowls and bleats
He dredged recycling bins, collecting rags.
Last seen on Christmas Eve, a bitter nought
Among the glee, I heard by New Year’s Day
He’d died; who knows if he sweet ransom sought
Before that sea change from his heavy clay?

How do the unendearing find their peace,
The crank, the spiteful or the blank as snow?
That’s you, that’s me. At death, each growth, each crease
Of soul is polished like a glacier’s flow.
Cold light, a curlew’s cry are metaphors
For the Sun’s burning which expels all trash,
So that the billionth person, once in sores,
Is purified in an eternal flash.
That sear of light, made simple as a thought,
Becomes an offering to That which gives,
And David Varney, who in life was fraught,
Beyond all being, now in Being lives.

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© January 2016

After Christmas

The days after Christmas were dull;
The sea licked the beach like a cat
Its paws, and the herring gulls hung
   In the soft damp air;
The wagtails like williwaws ran
From rain pool to rock on the sand,
And, turning, the tide slowly swung
   The pool weed like hair.
 
But nothing can halt winter’s cull;
Old men coughed to death in their beds,
Young women had seizures and died,
   And the gulls gave tongue;
They scorned carolled claims of new birth,
And fought for the left-over food;
Then virus dug claws in their side,
   And their death begun.

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© January 2016 

Here's an alternative ending to the second stanza for those who like variety:

They scorned the bells’ chimes of new birth,
And gorged on men’s left-over food;
Then virus dug claws in their side,
   And they, too, died young.

In December

Saint Lucy's Day is 13 December, previously considered the shortest day of the year. She was martyred with a knife on the orders of the Roman prefect for defending her virginity. She is often shown carrying a lamp and is the patron saint of the blind and of writers (how ironically appropriate!)

   Anyone who knows the cliffs around Lamorna Cove to the west of Penzance, will have thought on the disastrous consequences of a fall onto the rocks and sea below.

   For poison in the ears see Shakespeare's 'Hamlet.'

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The years pass by, though speeding up in age;
December and the shortest day are here;
The twelve months gone have quit and claimed their wage
And left a twilight trough that’s more a bier.
Saint Lucy’s day is slow to light and soon
To dark, the hours between are brown and stale;
Like brittle leaves those hours are dead by noon
And after that the dusk is mute as braille.
An age-pained body and a mind in woe –
These things I muse on, Yeats’s “life and work,”
Both unperfected; one as cold as snow,
The other blustered up from trick and quirk.
But worse is thought of these past fifty years
In which an island culture killed itself,
Smashed its temples, poured poison in its ears,
And flung its bones upon a dusty shelf;
It thereby stole the context which might give
Meaning to my failure, and orphaned me
To stumble mud-bound, anguished how to live
In fair fields flooded by a foreign sea.
No polity survives without a creed
That’s Other-based. And yet the western church
Let slip elite and mass: the mustard seed
Become – self-stranded on a stony perch –
A thing of women and falsetto men.
And now a book-fomented angry roar
That’s bound to catechize the state again
Makes hajj through field and town and strikes the door.
Ah, where find succour in an age so foul?
Might Orthodoxy’s icons calm the brow,
Their cool-eyed staring from a martyr’s cowl
Which peace and stiff-backed piety endow?
Or might Plotinus with his trance-like thought,
Tough analyst of Truth’s economy,
Give comfort whilst the self in matter caught
Seeks flight to That whose essence is to be?
Perhaps, when standing on the split-faced cliffs
Beyond Lamorna, thundering pagan winds
Will throw me to the sea’s mad hieroglyphs
Which, frenzied, tear the flesh and life rescinds;
And then, at one with rock and sand and sea,
My scattered molecules all shared about,
The helpless questions of finality
Will hang in the wind’s laugh and the waves’ shout.
Well, Lucy’s night has fallen. With my books
And sad regrets I crouch upon a flame
And warm my fingers, their arthritic crooks,
Palsied in mind with self-deriding shame.
My window flares a moment with a lamp
As someone treks the dark like Will-o’-wisp,
Though pray it’s Lucy in the frost and damp,
Her footsteps lisping on the grasses crisp.
Her death-crowned ardency before the knife,
Prefect-defying with a maiden’s might,
Gives balm to one whose each-way-driven life
Sags like a shroud this deep December night.

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© December 2015

" 'Tis the Year's Midnight, and It is the Day's,/ Lucy's"

The title is, of course, the first line and a bit of John Donne's great poem, 'A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day,' which traditionally was regarded as the shortest day of the year. The first and last stanzas mention Dante ("the hell-worn Guelph"). In the Divine Comedy St Lucy was asked by the Blessed Virgin to send Beatrice to instruct Virgil to guide Dante through Hell. Afterwards, St Lucy, who Dante dreams of as an eagle, carried the sleeping Dante to the gate of Purgatory to continue his journey to Paradise.

   For "Larkin's hospital" see his late poem, 'The Building.' For Mr Pontifex's farewell to the sun see the third chapter of Samuel Butler's 'The Way of All Flesh.' For Fagin, in case you didn't know, see 'Oliver Twist.'

   For "those unlifted gates" see Psalm 23 (Douay-Rheims); for Svengali see George du Maurier's 'Trilby' and for "Conrad's terse Professor" see his 'The Secret Agent.'

   By tradition, St Lucy is often depicted carrying the weapon of her martyrdom, a sword or knife.

   Note the end words of the first two lines are repeated at the ends of the last two lines of the first stanza and again at the beginning and end of the last stanza. This was serendipity as I wrote the poem but I like the effect.

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   Saint Lucy’s day, the shortest day,
   A day of loss and sour decay,
The martyrdom of truth, Dantean echt;
Ageing, I sought insight and self-haled rest;
      Instead, maggots enfleshed
Of love, of hate, gorged with regrets and pain,
Crawled through my heart; and stark dark to the west,
At east a sallow sheen, a chill of rain,
   Announce morning of the eighth day,
   Creation limping in decay.

   The body’s pain, its weakness, tell
   With the insistence of a bell,
And twist-knife horror felt for the first time,
That I shall die, in Larkin’s hospital,
      Perhaps, its washed-rags grime,
Unblessed like Pontifex to hail the sun
“Goodbye,” and so to peaceful sleep eternal;
Rather, like Fagin, screeching as he spun
   At rope’s end, his miserly soul
   Wrenched through his mouth to pay his dole.

   Sin-eater of self, strung with weights,
   Gog-eyed at those unlifted gates,
Each deadly fault was mine in life and work:
Colleagues betrayed, Svengali to my loves,
      Assassin with a smirk
Of any kicking hope which swells a womb;
A self-hug casuist in a pair of gloves,
Like Conrad’s terse Professor with his bomb,
   Cold-shouldered, vain, I stalked the town,
   Aloof and throwing frown at frown.

   Now dog-faced dusk garrottes the day,
   Ego collapses, lies decay;
Like Ulysses in frenzy at his mast
I searched futures toothed as the shrieking fife
      And in brute sea-mist cast;
For all that shipwrecked banditry I’ve wept:
Lucy, truth’s eagle with your martyr’s knife,
Engraft in me a light, and you who swept
   The hell-worn Guelph from death to day,
   Sear my murk brain, purge its decay.

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© December 2015

Nativity

The days before Christmas
Were listless and damp;
For us foragers
Outside the camp

The woods were wet,
The trappings few;
Half-hearted hunters,
We each one knew

That in camp the king
Spent his days in plots,
The soldiery squabbled,
The women burned pots;

And pointless abandon
Like mist on the downs
Fuddled men’s minds
To next-day frowns.

The priests ignored
In their leaking tent
Prepared for a birth
Unsure what it meant.

In the distance the sea
Rocked the boats it bore:
An army was planting
Black flags on the shore.

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© December 2015