A One-Year Gull

Well, don't get me started on the lunacy of the lock downs which wrecked the economy and what was left of the social life of this country. And all to "deal" with a virus which was harmless to well over 90% of the population and whose victims were largely people in their eighties and older - i.e. well past their sell-by date. I write that as an elderly person myself.

   Back to the poem. The incident is true, occurring after an early morning visit to the supermarket, followed by a quick stroll along the deserted promenade to say hello to the sea. In the first stanza the rhyming lines have feminine endings, and the unrhyming lines masculine endings; then in the second stanza the rhyming lines have masculine endings, and the unrhyming lines feminine endings; and so on, the two stanza forms alternating, to the poem's end.

   In my first period of poetry-writing decades ago I wrote very little about the animal world. But already, with many others, I was becoming concerned about the horrors of industrialized farming and wrote "Mr Longley's Dream," a ballad specifically about factory farming for eggs. I posted it here on 9 May 2013.

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Monday 20 April 2020 at 8.30 am

In virus time, locked down, the streets denuded,
Hurrying home with food bags, thinly stocked,
Just off the prom a crise obtruded:
The cold-wind, blue sunned sky poured early light
Upon a gull be-snooded

In fishing gut. This lashed-up one-year gull,
Its fawn-brown plumage like a mattress’ ticking,
Was wrapped round pink-stick legs and skull
By line which trapped its wings in half-spread angles:
It stood there, waiting cull.

I paused, rested my bags, and weighed my options;
Its unresponsive eye haughtily stared:
He’d edged some yards with hobbled actions,
Traced by a trail of gut, but now was leant
Breathless on the street stanchions.

Could I unpick the line? I’d need a knife
At home, but gull and bags could not be carried
Both. Anyway, what price a life?
Pledging return, I took my bags, offloading
That gull’s tight-knotted strife.

I thought: let nature do its work; some hunter
Will sink its jaws – gulls deal death, suffer death,
All’s fair; nature knows nothing gentler.
So, home-reached, the day’s business filled my mind,
Letting no self-doubt enter.

Yet pity, special to what’s human, hissed
“Go back.” I didn’t. Fallen man’s hard-hearted
When self’s convenience is grist.
I failed a test. Why mourn if at death’s taking
I also am not missed?

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© March 2022

The Good 'Un

This poem is in trochaics. In the first two stanzas lines two and four share a rhyme; in the final two stanzas lines two and four share a different rhyme. And in the fourth and final stanza a second rhyme is introduced to give finality to the poem. 

   I wrote this simple poem whilst musing on my friend Barrington Millson who died in his early sixties of rapid Alzheimer's disease in 2004. Ten years later I wrote an elegy for this extraordinary man, "In Memoriam: Barrington Millson," which I posted on this blogsite on 9 December 2016. It is linked here. Both the poem and a brief prose introduction give more details as to why those who knew him found him so remarkable.

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All the good ’uns are taken early,
Leaving the also rans behind:
Those who glowed like a high June sun
Fulsome on the crabbed and chined.

Says the Scripture, God coud’na bear
Simplitude of the seeing mind
So to sully in world’s contempt
It might stagger and grow opined,

So He took it to final bliss:
Age is not grey hairs and skin,
No, but insight cored from life’s
Fleshed and deadlocked stop/begin.

Barrington, so soon to go,
Sanctuaried now as Being’s kin,
Aid in night-hints us below
Crawling Truthward shin on shin.

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© March 2022

Many Years Ago

The first line of each stanza has a feminine ending; all other lines have masculine endings. All fourth lines end with a colon - I forget if that was deliberate or not. 

   Re the third stanza: in the heady 1960s (what a disastrous decade that was) I was indeed a "peace'n love-ist", and the Rev. Donald Soper was extremely well-known as both a Methodist leader and pacifist. He was very helpful to military types who wished to leave the armed forces on conscientious grounds, but he was no push-over: he inquired carefully whether someone was genuine or simply "swinging the lead." The fact that he is now totally forgotten is an indication of the speed of de-Christianization in Britain, enforced by our political and cultural "elite." But a heavy price will be paid: there is no such thing as a genuinely secular or atheist society; and in the West, Islamization will be the demographic result.

   I see this poem largely ignores mention of man/woman relations. To show there were such moments here's a link to an early poem, "To His Wife," (actually four sonnets) written in January 1980 and posted on this blog on 15 April 2013.

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Ah, dinghy sailing in the Solent’s waters,
   The rain-specked wind athwart your cheeks,
Rolling and yawing in the steepling waves,
Tacking for shelter in the sandbanked creeks:
   With childhood friends I now no longer know,
      I did that many years ago.

Girlfriended at the Tate to look at pictures,
   Shamming a tout I barely felt;
A hand on back or arm to test my luck,
But fearing what her calm indifference spelt:
   It was a crash course in the female “no” –
      I learnt that many years ago!

A twenty-something peacenik, I abetted
   A squaddie’s wiles to leave the force,
Pleading his tale to Donald Soper who,
Hard-hatted, quarried what was true, what “sauce”:
   Fooled and turned-over by that squaddie’s show
      I felt hate many years ago.

Then love! For chancing to the western wetlands
   I found Penzance ensea’d and grey,
The damp winds, gleaming streets, even the mists!
Engulfed my heart and hold it to this day:
   Life’s "once" – pure gift – stark at the land’s far toe,
      Remade me many years ago.

Well, this or that I did, the list is endless,
   In age there’s much that crowds the mind;
All, though, comes welling from the years long past,
There’s little recent that seems gold and vined:
   The old live severed from time’s busy flow –
      Their present’s many years ago.

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© February-March 2022

The Fly

There is a complicated scheme in this poem. Within each stanza the rhyme scheme and line lengths are easily seen. However, the DEF lines in the first stanza become the ABC rhymes of the following stanza. And so on. In the final stanza the DEF lines rhyme back to the ABC lines in the first stanza. Further, all line endings are single syllable masculine, except line 9 in the first stanza which is feminine. Because of the "carry over" rhyme scheme this means lines 3, 6 and 9 of the following stanzas become feminine endings except in the last stanza where only lines 3 and 6 have feminine endings: (because of the link back to the ABC rhymes in the first stanza, line 9 of the final stanza becomes single syllable masculine). Finally, line 3 in every stanza is trochaic.

   For a spot of bracing iambic pentameter, and for contrast, here's a link to "A Blackbird After Rain," written in November 2013 and posted on this blog on 4 July 2016.

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      Who doesn’t cheer October’s sun,
      Weakling, gone pasty, but still warm?
   Standing at the kitchen sink who’ll not,
Side-glancing through the open door at autumn’s dun,
      Feel body-comfort (like a corm
   Amassing energy in its tight knot
      Against the winter’s frozen thrall)
   From sun’s delightful finger dabs on skin
   And clothes, gifting a wistful concilation
         That ice-and-dark time nears,
         Wringing with wind-sprung tears.

      But first, a sleepy fly made call,
      Slow-gliding at the door, then in:
   Tottering the air in vacillation,
It pondered round the kitchen then with buzzing drawl
      It bull-nosed to the hall – a jinn,
   Wary, not over-keen on exploration,
      But seeking resting space to sink
   In season’s fuddlement – a sleep, a death,
   To end its brief life’s gene-pushed concitation,
         Those days in searching spent,
         Prospecting ordure’s vent.

      Later, both here and there, in chink,
      On wall, it flustered like a breath
   Wandering the rooms to find summation;
Settled, if poked it wouldn’t move, instead would shrink
      As longing for the pupa’s sheath,
   All struggles, feeding, breeding, at cessation.
      Two days in windows, crept on chairs,
   It lasted, then, one morning’s clouded chill,
   Was found, brittle in death’s last habitation,
         A dropped speck on the floor,
         Swept up and then no more.

      Well, autumn-winter’s plangent airs,
      Tranquil, but lessing heat to nil,
   Mediate mind’s puzzled divagation:
All, no? are like that fly, though some be wheat, some tares,
      Less dozy but a’quest to fill
   With knowing life’s closed room, its oscitation;
      And at man’s end, despite the spun
   Bewail of obsequies with drums and shawm,
   Must not his corpse like any fly that’s swat
         Be tidied off, that days,
         Unfussed, pursue their ways?

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© December 2021

"Time is Merciless"

This is obviously a bit of persiflage. For a more substantial lyric treatment see my poem "Time" written in August 1980 and posted here on 12 December 2012.

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Time is merciless,
Time is flear:
Lose a minute?
Lose a year!

Slow it crawls,
Slow and then –
Spinning spalls! –
There’s no more “when.”

All must suffer,
All must fall;
Saint or huffer,
Waits the pall!

Works and days,
Loves and loathes,
Each one frays
Like old clothes.

“Mercy, mercy!”
Screams the slave:
Strait, per se,
Time digs his grave.

Coldness, blackness,
Life now ceased,
Mind is trackless,
All is least.

One day space,
Time too, will die:
Physics’ base
Prised like ply.

Till that point
See it sheer –
Time is merciless,
Time is flear.

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© November 2021

Lollai, Little Child

This is poem 82 from a wonderful little anthology, “A Selection of Religious Lyrics,” edited by Douglas Gray, in Oxford University Press’s Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series (1975). Written in Middle English, I have put it into modern English with a handful of changes/ "improvements" to enhance readability.

   The poems in this anthology are mainly not literary masterpieces; they derive from the faith of "ordinary" people or, often, the priests and friars who wrote them for use in preaching to unlettered congregations. They reveal how medieval society was completely saturated in the life and language of the Christian faith and, therefore, how disastrously far Western Europe has fallen into the intellectual barbarism of "secularism," i.e. social Marxism. But now there is a new swamping faith knocking at the door - Islam, which will deliver the coup de grace to the unfaithful, child-aborting snowflakes who constitute what is left of Western "civilization."

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Lollai, lollai, my little child, why weep so sore?
You needs must weep; it was prepared before
Ever to live in sorrow, and sigh for evermore,
As your elders did before, while still alive they were.
   Lollai, little child, lollai, lulloo,
   In an unknown world trapped are you.

Beasts and birds, the fishes in the flood,
And everything alive that’s made of bone and blood,
When they come into the world, they do themselves some good –
All but the wretched brats of Adam’s brood.
   Lollai, little child, by care are you fore-met,
   You are lost in this world’s wildness that’s before you set.

Child, if it chances you shall thrive in plenty,
Remember you were fostered at your mother’s knee;
Ever have in your heart’s-mind thought of these three –
Whence you came, what you are, and what shall come of thee.
   Lollai, little child, lollai, lollai,
   With sorrow you came into this world, with sorrow you’ll wend away.

Nor should you trust this world, it’s your foul foe,
The rich it makes poor, the poor rich also,
It turns woe to weal, and then weal to woe,
Trust not any man in this world while it turns so.
   Lollai, little child, your foot is in the wheel,
   You know not whether it turns to woe or weal.

Oh child, you are a pilgrim wicked-born,
You wander this false world, looking before.
Death shall come with a blast out of a sombre horn
And cast down Adam’s kin, as he was cast before.
   Lollai, little child, your woe was caused by Adam,
   In Paradise-land through the wickedness of Satan.

Child, you’re not a pilgrim but a foreign guest,
Your days are reckoned, journeys all imprest;
And whether you wend north, or whether east,
Death shall waylay you with sadness in your breast.
   Lollai, little child, this woe has Adam wrought,
   When he ate of the apple which Eve him brought.

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Put into modern English © November 2021

"Ah, Ah, Ah"

This poem derives from Jeremias 1:6 - "And I said: Ah, ah, ah, Lord God: behold I cannot speak, for I am a child." It also refers to David Jones's "I said, Ah! what shall I write?" in his "The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments" (Faber 1974). David Jones is the Welshman in stanza 5.

   I was impressed to learn from Douglas Gray's "A Selection of Religious Lyrics" (see my introduction to the following post of "Lollai, Little Child") that in the medieval age "there was a traditional belief that men when born cried 'A!', the first letter of Adam's name," i.e. in recognition of the disaster of Original Sin into which they had now arrived.

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“Ah, ah,” the new-born cried,
   “Adam, you have done me ill:
Safe was I in the squeezing womb;
   Now, in the air I chill.”

An apple’s bite brought psyche’s woe,
   Edginess in the self’s deep;
Pigs and swill are the crème of life:
   The dumbstruck children weep.

“Ah, ah,” the prophet said,
   “Words begrudge, but God-touched I
Waste and strike down the bellied cits –
   Their idols and their scry.”

But few there are face truth with will:
   Exile’s trek, task-master’s whip,
Bloody those who “coud’na fash”
   Begging for bite and sip.

“Ah, ah,” the Welshman wrote,
   God’s seven lamps gone flicking-faint;
“Nozzles pump and glass refracts,
   But purpose, form, are taint.”

The Lost in Action being lost
   Crassness fevers each man’s glance:
Turn, turn, but where, to what end?
   A dice! It falls askance.

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© November 2021