Icarus

Very high in an egg-blue sky
A jet flashed in the post-noon sun
   As though an atom split;
Or in that instant did it fly
Between dimensions and thus shun
   This world for that of spirit?

In the bare April trees a pair

Of blue tits seeking insects bounced
   Between branches ceaselessly;
So, particles with a fecund flare
Artlessly nourish Being’s founts,
   Dancing creatively.

Too grand: rather, Icarus’ hand,

Touching the sun, exploded in
   Presumption; wreckage fell,
Past the blind-to-death tits, to land
In shattered skeins, dissolving in
   Matter’s ebb and swell.

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© June 2013

 

Months: February

The poems for March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December and January in this sequence were posted on 24 February 2014, 21 March, 20 April, 24 May, 20 June, 29 July, 29 August, 27 September, 25 October, 24 November and 30 December 2014. This is the last of the poems: I shall gather them all together in one sequence subsequently.

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A niggard thaw fouls pavements; filthy melt

Refreezes; encrusted snow streaks parkland
Like a scraped canvas. Spattered frost like felt
Tops hedge and soil, blighting with a thrawn hand

The muted froth of heathers. Scarlet berries

Decay in the holly though the cherry tree
Powders its crown with hesitant fancies
Of blossom. Taut daffodil wands make free
      
With the breeze, dipping their yolk-heads broodily
Over the beanshoot-skinny crocuses.
The tide is slack. Clouds eddy wearily,
Blotting the sun – a disc which focuses

No light nor heat. Men like woodlice in litter

Grudgingly stir, their torpid warmth combusted
By the seasons’ peristalsis. But the bitter
Monochrome wind discourages bombastic

Gesture: better to re-curl in shavings

Like a breathing nodule than be woken
By an incautious morning mob of starlings –
Their wings cracking like a black cloth shaken.

Dead water: sopping sands glitter; suede shingle

Darkens beneath indigo shadow; the waves
Lift careless heads like seals. But that wrangle
Of waters is unstable; soon that which laves

Will pound, driving up the foreshore to thrash

The sea wall and startle all drowsing flesh.

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© February 2013

Reggie Maudling: Consensus Politics 1951-79

Not my best poem and perhaps not even a good poem, but how many people have written any sort of poem about the Rt. Hon Reginald Maudling MP, leave alone a sonnet?

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(After reading Lewis Baston)

“God be merciful to a soul of this gentleman’s way of thinking.”

 

A splendid dinner – wine, cigars and port;

Some chat of Butskellism, Keynsianism
And sad decline. Later, ‘Come Dancing’, caught
On TV, sparkles with cosy pragmatism.

And then the Sixties and the dash for growth –

Abortion, youth and drugs; coarseness creeps in;
Morning meetings idly dissect a graph,
Perfumed by jugs of Dubonnet and gin.

Corruption festers; Ireland thrashes in hate;

But the caviar and swimming pool days
Are done; the gifts and commission men wait
Exposure; a weary decade decays:

All ends in the Winter of Discontent

And Margaret Thatcher with a terse intent.

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© May 2013

Months: January

The poems for March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December in this sequence were posted on 24 February 2014, 21 March, 20 April, 24 May, 20 June, 29 July, 29 August, 27 September, 25 October and 24 November.
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Dawn like creation’s moment: fireball orange
Engulfs the sky, inflaming the flat cloud
And searing pink the townscape below; lozenged
Glass flares and freezes, intincted with blood.

Shorn of growth’s clutter, a wisteria prinks

Its picked bones; the tall poplar swayingly
Disdains the bundled shoppers whom cold cranks
Into shop door stand-offs, shrill and unseemly.

And then the snow. From a steel sky it flogs

Faces and legs, creaks underfoot and lards
The common. Gulls, edgy at snow-mad dogs,
Settle, beaten down by its stinging shards.

The iron-bound lake is frozen. White-nosed coot

Ballet-strut its grey slabs, planting arrow-prints
In slush. Snow waves, chivvied by the wind’s shout,
Lap the ice, where thrown sticks protrude, black as flints.

Determined, children build snowmen, cupping

The featherdown to ice, though perished fingers
Produce screams at sunset. The air, dipping
To dark, is mauve with snow. A coot cry lingers.

Despite all, the yellow jasmine has flowered,

Its petals soggy as tissue. Bulbs erect
Their spatulas. The fragile snowdrop, bowered
In ice, droops its molars. Shabby man, shipwrecked

In darkness, racked by bronchitis or worse,

Janus-like twists in the turn of the year’s course.

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© January 2013

A Memory

A boy rapt in his play darted
In some game for the high-hearted
From a gate, fairly impaling himself                            
On the headlands of my sharp knees.
Like wind-bounced bees                                            
He dodged the obstacle and ran
On to glory, giving no thought
To the old man wheezing in poorly health                  
In his way: so with boys since time began.

And so fifty-plus years ago                                        

On holiday: my eyes aglow
In a comic, I fumbled for the hand
Of someone, thinking him my father –
In fact a stranger;
Startled, I hurried to my father,                       
Regarding him whose hand I sought
Not as a person but some faceless brigand,
Forgotten in an instant with a shiver.

But those forgotten are persons

Indeed – subject to death, its lessons
Toughly-taught. Twelve years later my father
Lay dying in his death rattle,                                  
His fraught battle                                                        
For breath defeated; surely that                  
Holiday stranger also fought
And lost. And I, held fast by death the lover,             
Whose hand shall I seek in my final combat?

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© May 2013

Months: December

The poems for March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October and November in this sequence were posted on 24 February 2014, 21 March, 20 April, 24 May, 20 June, 29 July, 29 August, 27 September and 25 October.

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The shortest day. Men slumber heavily,
Rising belatedly from their own must;
The brief hours pass in twilit lethargy:
How bitter is the sharp air’s Hades taste.

The flint church broods among its dead, their stones

Slewed beneath burdensome ivy; wind wreathes
The graveyard, polishing to corpse-grey tones
The folded frosty grass and ice-thin leaves.

A stark oak with its heart’s-vein branches bears

A derelict nest like a wart; below,
The densely-armoured holly, dour, outstares
The swart yew at whose trunk no plant will grow.

Among the graves a barrel-chested robin

Chides the rummaging blackbirds. At sundown
Magpies in the frost-hung willow come mobbing –
Their clatter stilled by mist fading to fawn.

A yelping bark: a watchful fox appears,

Scabby-brown and thin. A house-fed tabby
Sneaks to safety. A man with cold-pinched ears
Considers the pocked stone of a tomb, webby

With rotted bindweed. Ah, the dead will shiver

Tonight! The sun, apricot-small, resiles
Beneath roofs. Ice-film drifts in the river.
What fraught silence, what darkness; bead-hard frost fills

Hollows. In such nullity, how will birth

Force passage through the stiff, refusing earth?

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© December 2012

A Thought in the Sistine Chapel

World-weary Michaelangelo
Harrowed the Sistine Chapel with
Maelstroms of the Christ-Apollo;
His blatancies of the flesh-fork
Angered dewlapped clerics who wrought
Correction, daubing veils of stuff.

Pope Benedict, enswathed in gold,

From the Sistine throne taught depth-dark
Truths, his face alight with a cold
Mosaic clarity. His warted
Cardinals shifted hams and doubted,
Seeking relief in whispered talk.

Be it the Florentine upon

His scaffold or Benedict at
His beads, those who have thought or done
Great things are wrecked in solitude:
So Dante, exiled, ate his food
On other men’s stairs and raged at that.

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© May 2013