Non-Winners

I took the idea of using stanzas of different form within the same poem from Christina Rossetti, whose poems I greatly enjoyed reading a couple of years ago. There is also a pattern of internal rhymes which bind the outer stanzas to each other and ditto the internal stanzas. I found this idea in the poems of Jack Clemo, an interesting Cornish poet who died some years ago. For good measure I find I also used assonance in lines one and three of the outer stanzas.

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Helping in 1981
Sift many hundred poems for
A competition won with lordly ease
By Tony Harrison, dismayed,
I waded through a swamp of raw
Ill-written doggerel untouched by sun;
But, oh, the black emotions thus                                          
Revealed: love-struck, self-hating, stark-afraid!

In flat free verse or badly-rhymed

Unstable stanzas, these poor “rude                                     
Mechanicals” – housewives or silly salesmen –
Poured out inchoate griefs which chimed                              
Brokenly like the toys of children;
Their subjects were those of an Aeschylus
Or Shakespeare, timeless if misviewed –
Love’s lack or its spurning, old age,
Loneliness, illness and the worm of death,
Longing for loved ones scribbled from the page.

By contrast, the “professionals”,

Penning cool ironies, discreet
And small, worried deflectedly at woes –
Money and lust, confessionals
Of status, failed affairs and blows
Suffered for art by its elite, pilous
And informal. At paltry heat
Their verse barely bubbled, content
To ignore all major themes, like the breath
Of God, and lean like reeds as others leant.

Bemusingly, the amateurs

Had told the truth; their horrified
Tugging at facts like burrs – that cruel disease
Kills and balked love deranges souls –
Shamed the ironists. Those who chide
Their lack of skill, buffing their miniatures
Of taste, know not the body’s pus
Nor honest telling which alone consoles.

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© June 2013

Months

In March 2012 I decided to write a sequence of twelve poems about the months - all the poems to be in the same form and each written in the month, each based on a close observation of the natural phenomena around me. All went well until June 2012 when the weather was so atypical I gave up for a couple of months, resuming the sequence in August and finishing in February 2013. Subsequently, the poems for June and July were written in June and July 2013.
   I now gather the poems together as a single sequence in the order in which they are meant to be read, i.e. from March to February.
   Why March? Before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in England, Wales and Ireland in 1752 the new year began in March which is also the month of the Annunciation by the Archangel Gabriel to our Blessed Lady. What finer point to begin a series of poems about the observed world?
   For the record, the poems were originally posted individually as follows: the poems for March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, January and February were posted on 24 February 2014, 21 March, 20 April, 24 May, 20 June, 29 July, 29 August, 27 September, 25 October, 24 November, 30 December 2014 and 24 January 2015.

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MARCH

The ache, the ache of existence: winter’s
Stupor irresistibly shaken, old bones
Groan, dry boughs stretch, splitting bark, shedding splinters:
Fecundity ignites in roots and cones.

Dawn light prises sullen sleep; tits and finches
Call greedily, bullying the early growth,
Ignoring winter’s shrunk fodder which pinches
The gut. Lichen bulks up like simmering broth.

Oh, but sinews are stiff, flesh grey, its sap
Barely moistening this slow cold body, galled
By the tug of procreation yet, hands in lap,
Stranded by lethargy, coffined and palled.

The air is lethal, unlocking its grip,
Swelling in warmth to bamboozle the fox
To break cover, the shambling hedgehog to slip
From the kerb, its blood stippling the road like pox.

Reversals are abrupt and perishing;
Viscous fog plasters the sun, throttles crisp shoots;
Puce morning winds curdle the sky, punishing
Shaven cheeks, wan fingers and thought of fruits.

Regardless, the brawn of being explodes;
Every night lithe stems and tendrils seize ground;
Stubborn leaves unwind from a tangle of woads;
Forsythia leaps at the low clouds like yellow sound.

Remorselessly, blood thickens: hide-scarred men
In anguish must forage, fight and build. Again.

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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