Boils

The child was myself and I still carry the skin scars to this day: not surprisingly, the plague of boils launched against Pharaoh (Exodus 9:8-12) came to mind when writing this poem. Whilst we're on the personal, here's a poem about the early death of my father, "A Memory," written in May 2013 and posted here on 23 December 2014. And "The Self-Condemned," about a marriage breakup, written in August 1983 and posted here on 20 May 2013.

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A child, he suffered from a plague of boils,
The doctor puzzled, parents at a loss;
They ached and hardened to a throbbing eye
Which, squeezed, would puke its pus. To the child’s cry

The mother soothed, dabbing the hot wound dry.
Boils pimped his face – eyebrows and temples, cheeks,
His arms and chest, his shoulders, neck and back:
Each evening bathed till ripe, his mother’s knack

Of mounding the boil was a fear’s cold rack
She’d squeeze and split in pain the pus-taut head
To sick its greeny muck. Those months of boils
Were spent aggrieved, patchworked with ointments, oils –

Like a rashed fellah grubbing Egypt’s soils,
At odds to know why fate had pused his hide.
Well, plagues must pass, and many years have fled,
Though gristled still on brows, his trunk and head,

He bears the scars. Body’s an A to Z:
What if disease has ends? Those boils a prompt;
Like Hebrews desert-trekked for a life’s age,
Seeking the Goading in a sort of rage?

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© November 2019

The Staggering Fox

The first part of the poem describes my own experience when I inadvertently surprised the sickest fox I've ever seen in my seaside backyard. The second part contains my ponderings thereon. I seem to attract dead or dying foxes: see my poem "A Dead Fox" written in January 2015 and posted here on 12 March 2019. And, again, "Dawn Fox" written August 2013 and posted here on 16 October 2015. By way of contrast is "A Dead Hedgehog" written way back in January 1981 and posted here on 20 November 2011.

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1.
Rue for the creatures! Rue the staggering fox! –
That trembling swagster sinking on its legs.
Post-noon, in a yard chill with April’s damp,
It stood despairingly, then slumped to haunch,
Head-sagged with effort, panting: young but old,
Made so by its unstopping tooth-fight with
The weathered world, it shivered, staring dully.
Mange-rotted, thinned to bones, its fur a’clot
With scabs and crusted with the scourings of
The street; its flanks clawed black and bald, its tail
A pizzled cabbage stalk near stripped of brush,
Bitten and bloodied by the itch, lethargic
It hunched. But man’s disturbing and a door
Thrown open prised it to its feet; it stood
And swayed reluctant to foreclose its brief
Fur-nuzzled rest. A man strode from the door.
Instinct gave strength. That fox in turn and leap
Scrabbled on top a four-foot fence, its legs
Clutching like arms. Then, shaking, glaring back,
It launched across a chasm, flinging limbs
To grab the ivy-hanging eight-foot lip
Of an outhouse’s next-door roof, that starved
And rib-chined body flailing to gain foothold –
The crashing of the ivy, screeching of
Its claws on brick, was like a wave’s explosion
Thrashing the shingle banks at the far beach.
Dragging itself across a parapet
It lingered, peering through the ivy’s tangle
Into the man’s unquiet eyes. That sick
Quivering snout and harsh eyes flamed with fever,
Yet frank, utterly frank, about life, death!
It turned, staggering from sight, most likely soon
To die, stretched in some ditch, eyes whitely glazed,
Tongue blotched on teeth, retching its final gasps.

The Wind-Bent Hawthorn Trees

All five poems record my close observation of a particular bunch of hawthorn trees and their environment through a year's cycle. They use a similar format and half-rhyme in the even-numbered lines. Note: "lurched" in line three of the first poem is not a verb: it describes position and posture. The fifth poem makes reference to William Golding's extraordinary novel, Pincher Martin, and its even more extraordinary closing pages describing Pincher Martin's death.

   Two of my early poems based on, relatively, close observation were "A Bowl of Chrysanthemums" (written in October 1979 and posted here on 12 November 2011), and "Ashford Stream" (written in September 1979 and posted here on 18 April 2012). Both were in free verse which I long ago abandoned. Two of my more recent poems about a "closely looked at" tree are "The Magnolia Tree" (written in December 2014 and posted here on 2 November 2019), and "Magnolia Tree: November" (written in December 2015 and posted here on 15 September 2020).

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i.
In mid-December, All Souls done, and dark
   St Lucy’s Day so soon to break,
The wind-bent hawthorn trees, lurched on their hill,
   Were scourged by the wind’s rain-shot freak.
Below, the sea smashed white-haired grey-gut rollers
   On shrieking shingle, and the gulls,
Flung in the brute-drum wind and swamping pour,
   Fled under clouds as black as hells.
Groaning, those trees rocked in the chilling blast,
   Twisted prone to the mud-sunk grass;
Fallen of leaf, arthritic-branched, their bark
   Was scabbed, tumoured with rain-black moss.
Bullied, they stretched shook fingers, grasping east,
   But pounded by the gales’ dark fists,
Like sick-faced crones, palsied at the grave’s edge,
   They slumped, mind-gone and numb, death’s guests.

   So sink all in the western wind.

ii.
Come March, Annunciation springs the sap
   Though grey-mist dawn humps down on frost;
The wind-bent hawthorn trees fruited with dew
   Stiffly awake in the air’s must.
Tide out, the sea is lumpen, brownly-dense:
   The gulls, gut-urged to dance and nest,
With dirge howls wring the sands in hungered flight,
   Food and soon hatchlings their sole lust.
Like youths greedy to do, but crabbed by wind,
   Thralled by the land’s puce heath and granite,
The trees haggle to growth: tight whorls of leaves
   Like bursting acne rash their branches;
Those whorls cup pustules, eager in their swelling –
   Broken, they’ll flare to cloudburst flower.
The lichen, daubed like salve on the trees’ bark,
   Crustily soothes their silent clamour.

   So swell all in the western wind.

iii.
And June, blazed by sun and the Sacred Heart,
   The fields loud-hummed with urgency,
The wind-bent hawthorn trees, freighted with leaf,
   Flexed branches in the blue-paned sky.
The full sea, light-flashed, huffing wave-slumped sighs,
   Bore gulls at rest, though hot to squabble
For wave-beached sops, then crop-full fleeting back
   To females at nest, eggs at coddle.
Corralled like crop-head convicts, berry beads
   In work gangs mobbed the trees’ crank limbs,
Half-blushed and sourly-green like Cox’s Pippins;
   Young growth like salad leaves glanced gleams,
Though cramped by older leafage, calloused, torn,
   But tautly bending to the sun’s
Hot swipe. Polished and stealthy to commit
   A wound, thorns grin, glinting like tines.

   So gleam all in the western wind.

iv.
September, mild and balmed by Holy Cross,
   The sky washed mauve, the hills clipped lean,
The wind-bent hawthorn trees, crisped by the sun,
   Thin out in wastage, their haws blood-brown.
The sea, dusty and still, flops kelp in swathes,
   And the year’s fledge scamper the sands,
Jostling and wolfing mud worms: moulting, glum,
   The adult gulls thieve crusts and rinds.
Death-browned at edge, the trees’ frail leafage shrinks
   Like flesh parting from ragged bones,
Those mildewed bark-flaked fingers, lumped with fruits,
   Soon to be frenzied by winds, rains.
Darkly-glowing, lusciously-globed, a’wait
   For seizure by the starveling birds,
The crab-red berries, dandled by the breeze,
   Lift and fall like a froth of curds.

   So wait all in the western wind.

v.
All months, that primal urge: go on, go on:
   Harsh matter’s will-less drive to be!
The wind-bent hawthorn trees, machines of cells,
   Take and discard on the hill’s knee.
At foot, the sea retreats, returns, its fecund
   Uncaution sculpting habitat
Which gulls, chancers of the scoured beach, make do
   Within, though prowled by death, for meat.
All has its ages – new to cankered old;
   Time’s footprint limps to the cliff’s lip;
Like Pincher Martin gripped on his soused rock
   Life sinks to claws, then dies to shape.
What’s left but context, mind-known, greater than
   Its parts, teased out by thought, by prayer?
What grows dies; in death meaning is its task,
   An ache that consequence be here.

   So pray all in the western wind.

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© December 2018 – October 2019

The Disused Railway Shed

By way of comparison, I posted another poem about a shed, "Toolbox and Shed" (written in 2015) on 15 November 2019. It is linked here.

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Like an old tramp slumped beside a rubbished path,
   The disused railway shed, adump
In bushes, harried by the sea-mew’s laugh,
   Endured, seeming to grieve its fate,
The hot and clanging times now past. Autumn’s
   Chaste mornings, cold, pure-aired, astound
The sky in silence, flimsy blue, which tautens
   When a crow caarks and wing-slaps to
The distant sun-tinged sea. Its brickwork tarred
   With oil and smut, splintered by frost
And scurfed with rotted mortar; windows barred
   By wire but stone-smashed; gutters hanging
Dirt-green with lichen, charred by rust; and roof
   Stove in, its fractured beams like fingers
Sootily clutching sky; the shed’s a proof
   That time wrecks all. Its walls are sunk
In blackened trash: old sleepers, clouts of rail,
   Fouled ballast; briars clogged with bindweed
And sprawling buddleia, brown-coned and frail:
   All’s summed in the tendon-tightened limbs
Of fossiled ivy, delta-splayed across
   Those walls like ropes lashed upon corpses.
It’s years gone since trooping the frosty moss
   The workmen bunched at dawn, then lit
A brazier, brewing tea, and fell to toil,
   Clattering wagons, heating rivets,
Lifting a chassis by brawn, block and haul,
   The air a stink of sweat and smoke;
And they in waistcoats, roll-armed flannel shirts
   And knee-tied corduroy. At home
Their women laboured likewise – hitching skirts
   For washing, cooking, back-bent in
The kitchen garden, balked by squabbling children.
   Stocky and watchful, town-edge folk,
They drudged long hours, their lusts and good deeds hidden,
   One slip from poverty but fierce
To jib if heavy-handed charity
   Besmirched their self-reliance or
Tattled their good name.
                                        Copse-hid, a gantry
   Is lifting plate-glass facings for
Exclusive flats (with porterage) being piled
   Beside the station: “London living –
A gym and pool, a terraced restaurant styled
   Upon artisanal cuisine –
But coastal ambience with a frequent, fast
   Connection to the capital!”
In heaven, who’s the blessed? The first are last
   We’re told. Perhaps those workmen with
Their kin, who lived with little, died still young
   Of fevers, lung disease, or saw
Their children cranked with rickets, all woe done
   And blissed in Justice’ final state,
Were shocked to find the “quality,” buff-nailed,
   Well-thicked in flesh, designer-dressed,
(Who, on completion, lived and then exhaled
   In those apartments), if allowed
Admittance to the Final Land, imprest
   To serve their which-way fancies like
Some chivvied chamber maid, so that bereft
   Of “three per cents” and trust fund cash
They’d find too grimly what it was to work –
   To rise pre-dawn and tug on boots,
Then, scarfed, to slither through the frozen murk
   To lay the fires and tables at
The “House,” or stumble to the railway shed
   Where, grateful, tea and baccy waited,
And then with curse and laugh to brace unfed
   To ten hours labour, man and boy.

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© September 2019

Of Self

Apart from being St Paul's Hebrew name, Saul was, of course, the name of the first Hebrew king - a "great one." Paul, by contrast, means small or humble. I wrote another small poem on a name, in this case my own - John, which in Hebrew means "God is gracious" - in 1981 and posted it on this site on 31 December 2011. It is linked here.

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Ha, ha! I sought to be a great one – like Saul.
Whereas I ended up a small one – like Paul.
The difference being he was great in small.
   And I? I wallowed small in small.

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© August 2019

Knapped Flints

By way of comparison, here is a link to the poem "The Old Stone Wall, Honey-Red..." which I wrote forty years ago in July 1979. I posted it here on 25 April 2012.

   The Lob in line 33 is the quintessential English countryman, wonderfully memorialized in Edward Thomas's poem, "Lob."

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In a lane on August afternoons of heat
And stillness, wandering to see what’s seen
But often not, pausing beside a wall
Grown stooped and crocked beneath its ancient sheen
Of lichened dust, I’d cast a clout at time
To tell what steps or stumbles might upend
My feet that twelve months gone, back-bent and lame,
I’d limp a gaffer before that wall, unmend
And cored by age, but time did not oblige.
The starlings, tits and goldfinch at their chatter,
The wall’s-foot vetch and purple knapweed, dosed
By sun, all shrugged that this was not their matter:
But the wall, a dusty glow of flints, though mute,
Blinked out a challenge from its eyes of flint.
Those flints! Obsidian-black, beer brown, mist white,
Some blotched like fat in sausage, some with a glint
Like blood-dark liver, some deep-clouded like
Piled clotted cream: white pudding, bran-thick dough,
Stained hearts of fresh-felled oak! Lens-smooth though creased
By ridges left when they were flaked by a blow,
They’re knife-edge sharp to blood an unwise finger –
That drying smear across the flints’ flat gleam
Hinting at depths of man and history:
The struggling on, the deaths, the flesh-torn teem
Of war; deeper again, blindly in the flints’
Unyielding stare, rock-strut geology’s
Ungraspable regress to ages where
Stark dust and stone, unconscious, warred the seas.
Oh, it’s like plunging through unbounded cloud,
Particularity, all human goods,
Depersonalized to chemistry’s chance bond –
Chiaroscuro unfooting men in its voids.
No, better far to run a poor Lob’s hand
Across the wall’s warm mortar, pit and stibbled
By hueless lichens, drained by sun, the mortar
Like parchment of an old man’s fist gone gribbled
By years, friendly to the palm as a hunch of bread.
What though am I, at Bible age, but one
Who waits his desiccation, strewn as dust
In some nearby field, there with water and sun
To nourish woundwort, spurge or yellow oxlip?
Well, time will turn its back and fate will yawn,
Although the flints, insolent in their glance,
A-glim in sunlight like a window thrown,
Stir up regret at what I cannot do
But would: their clumped resolve that though all things
Decay, swept up into the world’s piled rubble,
They’ll flash, as when at dusk a last bird sings.

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© July 2019

Rolling Down From Calvary O

This "theme" (to speak almost disrespectfully) has cropped up several times in my work through the years. Here are two other treatments written in December 1979: "Four Last Things," posted on 26 April 2013 and linked here; and "Now Barabbas," posted on 27 March 2013 and linked here.

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Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the springtime of the year,
Saw you the three loons slumped on the cross
   Like wheat dead in the ear?
One looked bad and one looked bold,
   One looked like a fate foretold:
Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the springtime of the year.

Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the summer heats of the year,
Saw you the three lags racked on the cross
   Like meat stewed on a bier?
One with a Fagin rattling screech
   Plunged down to hell like a maggoty peach:
Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the summer heats of the year.

Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the autumn mists of the year,
Saw you the three roughs stretched on the cross
   Like a blood and skin-flayed smear?
One with a heart-gasp croaking plea
   Saw heaven’s gate flash at his “Remember Me!”
Rolling down from Calvary O
   In the autumn mists of the year.

Rolling down from Calvary O
In the winter ice of the year,
Saw you the three rogues broke on the cross
And one of them hoist with a spear?
Oh, but His eyes pinned me like fire,
He smiled, He knew I was a cheat and a liar!
Sneaking down from Calvary O
In the winter ice of the year.

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© June 2019