May Fragment

This is what it says. By way of comparison here's a link to 'False May,' a poem I wrote 39 years ago in May 1980 and posted here on 14 March 2012. I have also written two sequences of monthly poems on the months of the year; the poem in the first sequence, 'Months: May,' is linked here and was posted on 20 April 2014; the poem in the second sequence, 'Months: Lyrics: May,' is linked here and was posted on 9 May 2015.

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Grey days of rain and wind and cold
Mock thought that May has taken hold.
The hedgerow whitebeam, barely leaved,
White-flags as by the wind it’s heaved;
The blue-graped lilac, pinned to walls,
Is battered loose by rain and falls;
Looming, roaring, the sycamore
Like racing waves from shore to shore
Eddies in a seaweed-green
Now depth-black and now pure sheen.
The red-faced goldfinch, golden-flanked,
Is flung by wind and pushed and yanked,
Its song like water in a sluice,
Trickling chimefully, sweet as juice.
The morning air with lisps of mist
Binds chilly fronds on face and wrist,
And clouds like crumpled newsprint stain
The sky’s wet-grubby lunar plain.
That sycamore which fills the view,
Soaked with rain and morning dew,
And restless as a vat at boil,
Snaps its leaves with the crack of foil.
Its hanging flowers, like forcing bags,
Marzipan-green and stuffed as swags,
Lurch crazily in the wind’s brew,
Seasicked by the tree’s twist and slew.
That medusa crown of flashing eyes,
Kerchiefs waving and wind-snatched cries,
Later, in a gush of spring-hot sun,
Will steam and crackle, drenching done,
And, placid, those hung flowers display –
Girls’ ponytails all tricked for May,
Wet-bright and butter-yellow specked,
Artfully swung to coy effect!
But roiling clouds, puce-black with rain,
Wind-tumbled, clatter past again,
Dousing the sun’s brief torch of heat
With wringing rain swathes, pleat by pleat,
So that these days of wind and cold
Mock thought that May might soon take hold.

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© May 2015

Sonnet: John Donne

John Donne exulted in those jack-knife spasms

Of two-backed conquest which engorged his mind;

Sweat-hot confusion, gasping over chasms,
Thrust glow-skinned glamour on gruff womankind.
Old-aged, reneging bed-lust pomps as phantasms,
Limned in a shroud, his chalk-faced carcass blind
In penance, self-denouncing hesychasms
Flung purging fire on soul and sin entwined.
Donne knew that death-aroma’d time must force
Derangement of the healthful body’s joys,
And soul-won goods in loss must find their source
As intellect splits up to its alloys;
Wit-young or prelate-old, in death’s divorce
Truth is blatant; it saves or it destroys.

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© May 2015

Toolbox and Shed

I suspect I adapted this long stanza form from some of the poems of Jack Clemo, the now largely forgotten but fascinating Cornish poet who combined Calvinism with the grim landscape of the St Austell china clay quarries.
   The lines are pentameters except the fifth lines are trimeters and the ninth lines are trochaic tetrameters.
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My father’s toolbox like a seaman’s chest
Rests with its rusted handles on my floor;
In a blue moon I lift its lid and more
Than fifty years leap out to wrench my breast:
Those knocked and much-used tools,
The fretsaws, hammers, chisels, planes and drills,
Corroded, with split stocks and other ills,
But most that smell of putty, oil and stain,
Warm like summer-heated grease,
Recall the garden shed where deep in peace
That box through my long childhood years had lain.

The shed was rotted, sieved by breeze and rain,

Though dark and crammed with household casualties,
Cracked buckets, backless chairs, dust and dead bees,
And paint and creosote tins, a shattered pane;
The roof bore wind-spot pools
Where sags in the flat felting hinted at
Weak boards. Regardless, agile as a cat,
I would climb the roof and at my lookout gaze
Westward like Raleigh in thrall
To dreams of deep water and what might sprawl
At voyage end across the sea’s rough baize.

Now all that’s left of hope and thrill are days

And that scarred toolbox dragged at the cart’s tail;
Unsurely settled, limbs no longer hale,
I walk my garden in its May-time glaze
Unpicking memory’s wools;
A home long lost, a brother in decline,
No brash career or family to call mine:
Ah, blackbird chanting in the apple tree,
Blossomed white like the sea’s surge,
What piling cloudscape at horizon’s merge
Will rapture you but overshadow me?

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© May 2015

Open Ground

Garrow Tor is the second highest hill on Bodmin Moor after Brown Willy and is wonderfully harsh and elemental.
   Cape Cornwall, in the far west, is the only cape in England and Wales, and is a ferocious sight with a full gale blowing and the surf exploding over the offshore Brisons.

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I must get into open ground,
The city crushes me,
High on Bodmin to fling around
Or shout beside the sea.

Ah, the brown flanks of Garrow Tor,

Streaming under rain,
Whipped raggedly by the wind’s roar
Are to me pure gain.

And in the cove at Cornwall Cape

As the breakers leap and scream,
The slapping spray on the neck’s nape
Is like waking from a dream.

Oh, the high sky, the moorland track,

Rock, sedge and pool,
Are fresh as childhood given back
Hushed in the morning cool.

And wide-miled sands at slack of tide,

Tart with the water’s breath,
Are absence where the seagulls glide
Yelling of life and death.

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© April 2015

Long-Tailed Tit

April leaf-time, April sun-time,
   Squeals with the shout of the long-tailed tit;
When the oak branch greens and the blackthorn sheens
   And raindrops on nettles slide and sit,
      Then the tit, its tail longer than it,
Leaps through the holly, grabbing grubs,
Hangs in the hazel, worries through shrubs;
      Grey-white, a slick of pink,
   Its folded-fan tail well splashed with ink,
Cuffed by April’s field-boy wind,
Snapping up larvae green with juice,
Circling boughs at hide and find,
It bounces through branches, atop, behind.
      How the wide-eyed parsley gapes!
And bluebells giggle like huddled girls;
   Ah, the dandelions spill their yolks!
Hunger-sore, agog for mites,
   That tit with the red-ring eye, pokes
      At stalk base and lichen splash
That spiders will scurry in morsel-fret
For that snub bill of black jet.
Which-way like a leaf on the wind,
Crumpled as a child’s handful of wool,
Ceaseless it scuffs from branch to branch,
Its wings in a stubby blurring blanch,
   Upside down, shuttling the void,
   Greedy for the next oak’s basking ticks,
   By April’s urge, a creature joyed,
      Its song all sharps and quicks,
Unstoppable as the spring-wet year,
Here, fled, far, near.
 

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© April 2015

 

Me Too

This is in trochaics with alternating lines of five and four stresses. I wrote another poem about this chap, 'The Paper Seller,' and posted it on 18 July 2017. It is linked here.

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Whey-skinned, shrunken-faced, with ill-shaved cheeks,
Clothes like drabs, unchanged for weeks,
Twisted-backed by age, his eyes to ground,
Glum, the old man makes his round,
House to shop and then a rubbish bin,
Taking out and putting in,
Seeking papers which he hoards at home,
Window-piled like browning loam.
Bald on top though scarved with cobweb hair,
Temple-strung like dirty air,
Limping, sometimes groaning to himself,
Each step like a sort of stealth,
Too-short trousers flap about his shins,
And sockless ankles flash like grins...;
Busy men and mothers with their young
Shun him like a stench that’s sprung
Suddenly beneath their careful feet
From a carcass in the street.
Unaware or uncomplaining, he,
Focused on his ministry,
Last week’s papers crammed beneath his arm,
Glares at tots but means no harm.
I, his pupil by a few scant years,
Death’s droll whispers in my ears,
Drifting into that Sargasso way,
Isolate by day and day,
Stung by questings, meaning to confess,
Tropes to shape and words to dress,
Might with purposed pointlessness like him,
Tatters-hung and waste of limb,
Sift the tide-scum for a pearl of price
Though, palm-held, it melt like ice.

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© April 2015

 

At Edge

Estragon of town-edge accidie,
   Crux perplexed of any key,
Butt of self-horror and the world’s mocks,
   Thumb-scalded, whipped from the stocks,
Stranded in thistled sour-stench wasteland,
   Slapped often by my own hand,
Shouting “Crux, ave,” and “key, oh key,”
   Screaming “When, what, why, you, me?”

Screech you crows! You pompous magpies dance!

   Stung by briars and gorse I’ll prance.
Day and day, high day or self-harm day,
   Come and go. Moon-grinned I stay.
Crux ave! A wanderer with the key?
   Oh, cleansed lepers howl once free.
What if truth into my soul should blaze,
   Finding nothing, only days?

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© April 2015