On A Hot August Day

The woods are bright with oaks’ new lammas growth,
   Cheering the swart, tight-fingered yew;
Wood wasps hover in soaks of sun like broth, 
   And tapping trunks for grubs the back-blue 
Nuthatch whistles. Tall ash sway in the breeze,  
Their crowns threshing like wrack on the sky’s seas;
   Dust bakes in the heat, tart as rue.

Beyond, the meadow barley blondly waves

   And the yoke-yellow trefoil glows;  
Woodchip crickets raspingly toil at lathes
   Danced at by cabbage-whites which pose
Like paint on the purple vetch. At the lake
Phosphorus dragonflies flash like light’s flake  
   Scorned by a heron in a doze. 

In eden-truce a pirate magpie sips

   The mud-thick water; cuckoos high 
In a copse pant meekly; a starling flips
   Path dust to cool its wings: a cry
From a child snubbed the muse on this hot day; 
Tooth and claw belied, the birds, it seemed to say, 
   Were heat-absolved like you and I.

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© September 2013

  

Months: Lyrics: December

The poems for March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October and November in this series were posted on 14 March, 13 April, 9 May, 15 June, 11 July, 8 August, 11 September, 9 October and 14 November 2015.
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   The morning air flares on the skin, 
   The sky is high and iceberg cold,
   The crimson sun, a too-close world,
Looms over rooftops that the day begin. 

   An ice-lump frost like frozen milk

   Plasters the grass and rigid oaks, 
A crow cracks the silence with rattling croaks; 
   Sun-touched, the frost glistens like silk.

   A split-pale fence begins to steam,

The sun’s heat creeping on its topmost bar;
   Like incense drifting near and far   
   The frost exhales a breath-thin stream.

Wet-black the fence; and now the grass and oaks

   Fume cloudily in the sun’s light;  
   Winter’s colours emerge from white –
   Ash-greens and dunnage like turned cloaks.

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© December 2014

 

"Come"

The poem was written in 2013 in extremely rugged blank verse, almost syllabic. In September/October 2016 I revised it to smooth out some of the knots and calluses. The new version is given below. In places it still teeters on the edge of my old failing of statement rather than image.
   The poem is 284 lines in length so for those who have busy lives here's a prose argument:

First Section: Recalls a persistent dream I had in adolescence of myself as an internally-exiled older writer, out of sympathy with the mores of his society, and allowing few visitors.
Second Section: Recalls the setting of the dream in the Rheidol Valley in mid-Wales where I spent childhood holidays with smallholding relatives in the 1950s/early 1960s. Recalls their hard lives and settled beliefs.
Third Section: Considers the state of the British now – destroying their own culture and religion, killing their young, living for materialism. Considers the inevitable effect of mass immigration resulting in the replacement of the indigenous culture, religion and society with those of the incomers.
Fourth Section: Considers the final fate of the British, marginalized and abandoned, identifying myself with them as an exiled figure trying to preserve what is left of the British ‘Great Tradition’, and draws the themes of the self-exiled figure in my adolescent dream, the sturdy folk of the Rheidol Valley in the 1950s, and the dispossessed and marginalized British, together in a final image of the isolated ‘sage’ giving audience to an enquirer seeking to understand the historical fate of a now dying people.

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I
Imagine, first, a sweeping valley, flattened
By age, patched with the strong-grass fields and climbed
By hawthorn hedgerows, combed complainingly
By the fresh west wind. Imagine, next, the steeper
Sides defiling back into the mountains,
With screes like builders’ rubble, with the crouchback
Hazel, and, far below, an intestine-folded
River scribbling its way towards the sea.
Imagine, last, a stone-built house with gables
And patterned chimneys, perching aloof on
The valley side, under the ridge but slapped
By the wind’s gruff hand. That was the bitter place
Which in an adolescent dream I saw
Persistingly; from which, a disabused
And long-toothed man of letters, I would send
Notes to suppliants seeking knowledge, harboured
In the damp town at the valley’s mouth: “Come.”
My novels, balefully delivered over
Many years, had scarified a portentous
Thin-root culture which, destroying icons
And cultic truths, attached instead to gods
Of self, big-bellied, had despoiled the temple’s
Vestments for gaudy party-wear. How I flayed!
Instead of brickbats, though, wealth and respect
Were piled on me by my excoriates
Until, heart-withered and repulsed, I fled
To my valley eyrie shrouded in a cloud
Both turbulent and turbid, forked by lightnings
Which clapped the rolling silence. There, refusing
All contact with the insurgent world below,
Provisioned by a live-in help and buoyed
By sight of the bleak high-wandering buzzard,
Fastidious and brutal, I composed
My jeremiads, fierce as mountain wind
Yet fresh as the jangling, rock-leaping stream.
Infrequently, someone with seeming sense
Would beg an interview, balked in the foot-
Of-valley town until my tardy scrawl
Released him to make pilgrimage these fourteen
Miles to my chilly, silent writing room.
Such was my aggrandizing dream! Mann’s Faustus,
Devoured in passion in my teens – its portrait
Of the cold, high-visioned Leverkühn in thrall
To purchased genius – was much to blame.

Months: Lyrics: November

The poems for March, April, May, June, July, August, September and October in this series were posted on 14 March, 13 April, 9 May, 15 June, 11 July, 8 August, 11 September and 9 October 2015.
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Mid-morning twilight is the brightest hour
And drab is any final rot-bruised flower, 
   The damp-drenched air is thin to breathe,
   Pricking cheek and spotting sleeve; 
      Slugs glisten in the mould,
      Half-stunned by the wet cold.

   The wagtail at the rain-brimmed ruts

   Dashes forlornly, flutters, tuts;
      A florid pheasant lands,
      Running for the stands 
Of filigree and white-bark birch now stripped
Of bile-spot leaves which all night long have dripped.

   The ash trees gape above the waste

   Of straw-blanched roughland grass – a paste
Of mud and water welling through its roots; 
A green-dark hemlock sags beneath its fruits  
      Of sullen rainfall drops –
      November’s bitter slops.

Mid-afternoon, a dusk like devil’s grog

Stuffs the weald’s valleys with creosote fog; 
      In fields and town mist climbs,
      Crisps pools and glass with rimes;
   Cold-thickened night solidifies:
   The wagtails roost with wary eyes. 

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© November 2014

  

 

 

Dawn Fox

In the second stanza "the docks" are weeds not places where one unloads ships.

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(5.00 am, 20 August 2013)

   Woken in pre-dawn gloom

   When gut uncertainties
   Harry the dusk-dark room,  
   A fox shrieked like disease;
My dulled bones stirred and shrank awry
From that cold anthem of a cry.  

   Though August heats were over

   This was my year’s first fox;
   Why had it broken cover
   Screaming beside the docks?   
Joy it had slaughtered for its fill
Or anger it had missed a kill?

   Worse, was its scream a warning –

   That stink and yellow jaw! –
   Fraught in the silent morning
   As the squealing of a door?
Was it for the past a reckoning,
And to some beyond a beckoning?    

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© August 2013

 

Months: Lyrics: October

The poems for March, April, May, June, July, August and September in this series were posted on 14 March, 13 April, 9 May, 15 June, 11 July, 8 August and 11 September 2015.
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A lime leaf, wind-whipped from its tree,
Switchbacked in air and plucked my wrist,
Its broad-faced green had blanched like cloth  
And rust had made its edges twist;
   Sick, with no remedy, 
   It fell like a struck moth. 

October’s like the grey-backed sea,

Brutal and languid under mist, 
Extracting life from summer’s growth
And crushing it as winter’s grist:
   That lime leaf guilelessly 
   Has blundered into truth.  
 

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© October 2014
 

Delphic Words

In Plato’s cave are shadows dancing like hands,
A roaring fire entrances the large-eyed  
Denizens; outside, the sun broiling the sands 
Proposes truths as tough as salt-cured hide.

In Darwin’s study, texts on writing stands

Agonise that turtles or finches, pryed, 
Might flash with that chemistry at the sea’s strands
Which jostled them into being like a tide.

What reconciles? Teilhard knits Plato’s Forms

With Darwin’s murderous facts to fling a spawn
Of consciousness through galaxies; while tough
Aquinas prises things to find the norms
Of the Mover, unopposable as dawn:
For both, the Word’s transfixion is enough.
 

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© August 2013