Then and Now

The final stanza makes an obvious nod to Tennyson's mighty poem, 'Ulysses' - " 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world,/ Push off, and sitting well in order smite/ The sounding furrows..."

   Other poems about Penzance - the granite jewel of the west! - are 'A Penzance Ballad' posted on 2 March 2015 (link here), 'A Wild Penzance Night' posted on 11 June 2018 (link here), and 'John Davidson and I' posted on 23 September 2021 (link here).

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   Long years ago on Sunday afternoons
   I’d see an old-time fellow taking air,
      Limping the chill and granite streets
   Of old Penzance, a small and short-legged dog
Wrapped in a body blanket shuffling at his heels;
      His loves and any workplace feats
Now past, his look said life was cold, his days repeats.

   Young and in health, I barely spared him thought;
   Stiffly he walked a course from Penare Terrace,
      Down Barwis Hill to Caldwells Road,
   And then, who knows? Years later now, enraged
To find myself an old-time fellow taking air,
      I walk with pains from Caldwells Road,
Up Barwis Hill to Penare Terrace, pant and slowed,

   (Claiming no dog) on Sunday afternoons,
   Saddened my life is cold, my days repeats.
      These January days there’s few
   To stroll and all seem blatant in their youth –
Loose-dressed, hot-skinned, fluent of step and frank in knowing
      Their tide’s in flood; a glance or two
They spare then, mind-blanked, pass to what they have to do.

   Thereby they prove the truth: those things you did
   To others will be done to you. So be it.
      That man must long be in his grave,
   Perhaps the crowded ground on Madron Road
(Its pets yard burying his dog if death called first);
      How long then shall I spurn his wave,
Being past all loves and works, the shortlived joys they gave?

   From Penare Terrace, blocked between the houses,
   Downhill, the distant sea is grey; it’s waiting
      The west wind’s arbitrary slap;
   But I, Ulysses of the drab, will seek
No final jaunt, my boat’s oars chasing the full moon;
      For me mere housework, then a nap,
And last, coffined at Madron Road, the earth my cap.

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© February 2020

"I Feel it Deeply..."

Other very short poems of a similar sort are 'A Siren Calling in the Night,' written in December 1980 and posted here on 12 December 2012; 'July Days,' written July 1980, posted here on 14 July 2012, and 'Who Can Interpret a Broken Branch,' written in March 1980 and posted here on 6 February 2013.

   Turning 74 later this year, and beginning to feel the aches and woes of age, I marvel at the likes of Thomas Hardy who made it to 88, and even more remarkably Thomas Hobbes who made it to 91 back in the seventeenth century: both of them without any serious aid from medical science. I'm not aware I've written anything on Hardy but here's a link to 'Thomas Hobbes' written in June 1980 and posted on 9 August 2012.

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I feel it deeply and it hurts to say
That the hard-nosed Bible must have its way:
   At seventy we pass a border,
   And after that all’s out of order.

Cling on to eighty if your body can,
Pretending you’re whole as when you first began:
   But then the Gate Man crooks a finger,
   And none may any longer linger.

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© January 2020

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