Poems

A Free Man

He looks out on the world

Slightly disdainfully.

He is quite unselfconscious, neutral, objective,

Or maybe just unconcerned, simply comfortable,

Something  he has earned of course

Through his realism, his lack of illusions.

Happy?  For sure. If it weren’t

Slightly unrealistic for him to think so.

And he has nothing to add to the world,

Nothing at all. He is someone who thinks he is free

Because he has no idea

What freedom is.

                        December 2019

Eclipse

Now is the moment of oblivion

The hoarding away of the sun

Now is the eclipse of love

Blood-red moon on the rise

Now is the seed of rebellion

The fist that punches through the earth.

                            December 2019 

Received into Itself

This old book,

A translation of Cavafy by Rae Dalven,

A translation that reveals, with sensitive phrases, with empathy,

Something of Cavafy’s life, of his soul,

Of the warmth and sounds of an Alexandrian night,

This old volume

Seemed quite forlorn when first I took it in my hands,

Without that magical quality I sought, just a book

Bleached along the spine by the sun,

By years on some shelf touched by the sun,

Until I had read and reread the poems many times

Picking it up again and again

Turning the pages again and again

As it seemed to grow heavier, more substantial,

More numinous….. and proud to receive back into itself

The mind of Cavafy that had come alive in my mind

In the union of our minds.

                                               November 2019

Bid Her Farewell

After Cavafy The God Abandons Antony

When suddenly in the night,

You look out and see the stars passing

With exquisite music, with fire,

Do not mourn for the future lost to you now

The struggle that has failed, the resistance

That has turned out to be an illusion;

As if long prepared for this

As if fearless, bid her farewell

The world that is leaving;

Above all don’t be fooled,

Don’t tell yourself there is time,

That the science is inconclusive,

Don’t give way to these denials;

As if long prepared for this,

As if fearless

As it becomes you who are worthy of such a world,

Walk calmly to the window, and look with awe,

But not with the vain hopes of the coward,

Look up at the exquisite movement of the stars

And bid her farewell

The world that is leaving you now.

                          November 2019

Kestrel

Kestrel

Colours of a Raphael saint,

Mute, alchemical,

Rose-ochre, calcined blue,

And a billow of flight

Buoyant as blown hair, perfect

As a gesture of Christ’s hand,

Innocent as the day of adoration.

         October 2019

Book

e e cummings

Who showed poets how to play

Volume II of the Complete Works

Containing one of those poems that

Made our world……

Genius enough,

But most are the quarry

Not the cathedral.

The book

A quality cloth-bound hard-back,

Fifty years old.

Smell it

Feel the paper between your fingers

Run your finger along a line

And feel the indented typeset print

See where the endpaper

Has been glued by hand to the board

And is raised in relief by the cloth binding.

The book opens like an oiled door…..

Shut it, and it says

“Book!”

Heft its weight

A sword is no more finely balanced,

Nothing contains more complexity in a span

Than this world refracted by mind

Alchemised onto organic filaments, finely wrought,

With a little ink, nothing there of any meaning

Without another mind….. the poetry

Is only ever in a mind.

Book....

Put into a computer

It vanishes into an instable medium,

Dependent, evanescent, immaterial,

Just another memory;

A physical book is mind, made matter,

An incarnation.

Hand…..

Your finger separates a page

By stroking along its top edge,

Delicate and precise,

A craftsman’s dexterity we forget we have.

The compositor picked up every letter

Placed it upside down in a composing stick

Stroked it into place with his left thumb

Every full stop, comma, question mark

Of the odd Cummings typography.

Feel the texture of the print,

The hand that picked the type

Was the last hand to touch it

Before it pressed into the page,

You are almost touching him……

Like Keats, he holds his hand towards you.

                                  October 2019

Stardust

In the valley of the moon

I find the cave where the stars sleep….

How intimately close they are!

Their crystal wings wrap round them

Their chill touches my face. Night!

Nurse of the stars!

Your children sleep out the day with the wolf and lion

Whispering like frozen angels,

When their claws loosed their grip on your breasts,

Thirsting for the milk of heaven they fell

Came rustling fast under the trees

Clung to the roof of this underworld

Leaving stardust enough

To fertilise asphodel fields

Until they rise

To suck the dugs of paradise.

                     September 2019

Kill

I walk beside the cathedral

See sycamore seeds

From high up over the tower

Spinning down

Think how strange it is

That a tree should evolve a wing,

Then notice they’re spinning too slowly,

They’re too large and pale,

And approaching beneath them

See they are feathers twisting down

Some stuck together with bits of flesh

Flight feathers, clots of down, bloodstained,

And it can only be a Peregrine

Tearing its kill out of sight behind the parapet.

I look around to observe the behaviour of other birds

But there are no birds in sight,

No pigeons or gulls,

The jackdaws have vanished,

And when the feathers stop coming

The sky is empty,

Only a white half moon

Immaculate,

Looking the other way.

                         September 2019

Seth 70

Graffiti on the limestone cliff

At the head of the Gully

Spray paint

Pale blue:

SETH 70

For fifty years I’ve watched it fade back into the stone.

Seth passed this way was all of it

He became an echo

Slowly I stopped being offended.

Below the place

Three trees have grown

A sycamore, then an ash, now a whitebeam,

The patch of falling rocky earth

Echoes “tree,” flows down away

Growing marjoram, mouse-ear, devils’ bit,

Slides down to scree, the herbs

Keeping their places like fish in a stream…

Mouse-ear hawkweed, acid yellow,

Blithe as the glint of a knife,

Marjoram, mouth-watering,

Rock-rose, pimpernel, black medic,

These unchanged,

Above, in a crack,

A solitary spring cinquefoil the size of my hand,

Just one or two flowers each year,

Stems no thicker than matchsticks,

Put on no growth in forty years.

Walcombe Slade,

“Tilio-acerion woodland

Of slopes, screes and ravines,”

Wych-elm, ash, lime, yew,

The cliffs and rocky brash

Fostering whitebeams rare as unicorns…..

One on the great slab athwart the base of the cliff

Tall as a man in 1970

Now just a yard taller….

We pass this way

Is all of it.

                   August 2019 

The Time-Being

“For the time-being the earth and sky.”  Dogen, The Time Being.

“I want dramatic summer to tie me to its chariot of fortune” Rimbaud.

For the time-being

The golden lap of summer

Lying among

June wreckage

Explosion of butterflies

Swifts falling south,

Red Antares, Scorpius,

Lost from the Solstice.

The axel-tree shrieks

Screaming falcons circle above the gorge,

O Herculean clouds!

Heroic season!

Being is time unfolding,

Summer is

Autumn, Winter, Spring.

                      August 2019

In the Penal Colony

“Guilt is always beyond doubt”

 Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony.

They are killing Julian Assange

They are killing Chelsea Manning,

Slowly, relentlessly,

The torture machine that Kafka saw

Is cutting the names of crimes into their flesh

Deeper and deeper:

“Collaborating with the Russians”

“Hacking” “Rape” “Failure to answer,”

Wheels turning, cogs on cogs,

The inscriber cutting like an ink-jet printer

In a news factory

Elaborate shapes of guilt, overwrought,

Baroque, insistent….

They are killing Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange

They are torturing them to death before our eyes

In the Penal Colony, in this hot valley

While we look on.

                            July 2019

Flame of July

After the solstice, silence;

The year wanes now,

Darkness seeps slowly in.

The woodland paths are marbled with hard sunlight,

St John’s Wort, flame of July, assembles

As summer advances like a plot unfolding:

Marjoram, pale as cloud,

Devil’s-bit, blue as the wind, blue as ash flame,

Bird’s-foot, hawk-bit, colours of fire and darkness,

Thyme, purple as the lap of God.

Where light coagulates to mass,

The bellies of June roses swell,

Pink and white to rose-hip-scarlet;

Among the grass… knapweed, thistles:

The violet haze of spring

Deepens to a purple glow.

                      July 2019

A Magical Light

This cold, dark June I have been recalling

Other rainy Junes, forty, fifty years ago,

So that this dark weather is made beautiful

By its association with youth,

By its association with the sensual delight of being young

And the present is enlivened with a magical light,

The cold, the wet

Made precious again.

                                               June 2019




I Have Come Through

Grown old now, I know

That I have come through,

That lost time turned always towards this magnetic pole,

Inclined to this moment, like a lodestone,

And with purpose, with feeling,

Coupling those distant summers, that ancient blackbird song,

That wild rose, undaunted,

With these blooming and singing now,

With this open horizon…..

Without injury or retreat

I have come through.

                         June 2019

Steep Night

Steep night

I quaff the moon

Sip stars

Sail among

Ecliptic archipelagos

Spice isles

Atolls of turquoise, coral,

Constellations

Of scent-dazed lazuli.

                   May 2019

Skylarks

Skylarks are singing over the mowing grass

With the sound of diamonds rubbing together

Rising like champagne bubbles

Out of sight,

Falling again

Like fallen angels.

             May 2019

A Mayday Night’s Dream

Day’s eyes, sun’s eyes,

Drifts and constellations of daisies

Flower of birth

Her eyes like the sun, like stars, O my lady!

A dream within a dream,

The sun in white, Freya,

Flower risen from the earth

In green and white

To do observance to a morn of May

Risen from a dream to ask

Is her virtue in the flower or the leaf?  

                           May 2019

Summer Stars

Orion down, the summer stars are more distant,

The stellar sphere expands,

Deneb and Vega,

The white and ice-blue stars

Of the Swan and Lyre, are high overhead

Slowly circling up from their midwinter stations on the northern horizon

To cross the zenith at midsummer

With Regulus, the tawny star in Leo,

Arcturus in the Herdsman, like sunlight,

Antares like a ruby

Just above the southern horizon in Scorpius

A glimpse into Africa on the solstice.

                          April 2019

A Few Moments Only

April

Mixing bitter roots

With sweet wine

Small rain

With new green.

To see

Is to grasp

A moment

This brilliant leaf

Like a flame

That cold blue

Like a word.

Old age,

These flashes

Of April mind,

A few moments only.

April 2019

Orion Passes Behind the Sun

Orion melts into the thin air

Of a green April afterglow,

Follows the sun below the horizon

As night brightens the stars;

Like Oedipus he walks blind into the light,

Steps down beneath the earth.

He passes behind the sun,

Returns at the end of summer, faint

In the first light above sunrise,

Climbs slowly, night by night,

Away from the sun

Deeper into the night sky,

Returning widdershins in sidereal space

Back in diurnal time

From dawn to midnight.

                                           March 2019

Political Violence

Bullet-head bourgeois

Bland as a ram

Bunker-suburb boyo

Votes for war

Lives in the real world

Calm as a smart-bomb

Burns house-price rocket fuel

Runs the program

Shuts his face

Like a bomb-bay.

            March 2019

Asphodel Fields Forever

On the occasion of Richard Branson singing Imagine

at his concert in support of the Venezuelan opposition.

Puer Aeternus

Billionaire

Nothing on his face

But teeth

Sings

“Imagine no possessions”

Sings

“Imagine all the people

Living life in peace”

For Death Aid

For war

Civil strife…..

Invokes the shade of John Lennon

Who is Hermes

Guide of the dead

Let me take you down

‘Cause I’m going to…..

Parasite privateer

Rash, hubristic

Calls down….

Hear them!

The Eumenides

Erinyes

Daughters of Nyx

Night-running Furies

Hear them whistling!

No luxury private island

Will ever be far enough now…..

                 February 2018

The Wrath of Demeter

Erysikthon, earthbreaker, tyrant,

Desecrated the forest of Demeter,

Came with twenty men, warriors in their prime,

When the People of the Sea lived in Aeolia,

Felled the ancient trees for a hall to feast his friends,

In praise of gold, too, and wealth,

Reckless, arrogant.

Some say he was deaf to the dryads,

Didn’t hear their cries,

See them flowing like black water into the earth

When the oaks fell

Until Demeter herself came,

Gentlest of the immortals,

In the shape of her aged priestess Nikippa

The great temple key slung from her shoulder

Poppies in her hand, grandmotherly,

A protector of the forest, pleading as if to children,

And the tyrant threatened to cut her down with his axe.

Then Demeter grew tall, towered over him,

Her face a second sun, her robes

The pyroclastic flow from a volcano

And she cursed him while his men ran.

What is a soul if it is not a story?

The soul of a god, a man, this age of iron?

She cursed him with insatiable hunger, starvation

That consumed without satisfaction,

He ate and grew skeletal, made a wasteland of his world,

Sold his daughter into slavery,

Mestra the shapeshifter who learned the art of Nereus from Posidon

Who was stolen by the thief Autolycus, ancestor of Odysseus

To thieve for Erysikthon.

What is a soul if it is not a story? The soul of this world:

A desecrating tyranny that makes slaves bought by thieves

To feed endless hunger and consumption…..

The poets tell us that in the end

Erysikthon ate himself.

                     February 2019

Hesiod on Mount Helicon.

His father came from the Aeolian coast near Lesbos

A country of soft air and harsh poverty,

Sailed the sea for want of a livelihood,

A poor man’s Odyssey,

At last came ashore in Boeotia,

Settled in a miserable village under Mount Helicon,

Freezing in winter, foul in summer, good at no time,

Broke some virgin land to the plough,

Gathered possessions and fathered a son. 

The old women said the boy sang like Apollo,

But he grafted like his father

Tended the lambs on the high pastures

Haunted by wolves and lions that ranged

Through the mountain hollows, haunted

By the immortal gods of wild places,

Until one day, singing alone near the spring of Hippocrene

(Struck from the rock by the hoof of Pegasus),

The Muses of the place, aroused,

Encircled him unseen like hungry beasts, loving his song,

And pounced, overwhelmed him, seized his mind,

Breathing powerful voice into him, singing:

“Shepherds who camp in the wilds

Low-life, mere bellies, who conjure up

Lying tales and fantasies,

Learn better than any

How to reveal the truth!”

And they showed him where to find a branch

Of springing bay to cut for a staff, told him

To sing of the family of the gods who are immortal,

And most of all to sing always first and last of themselves.

He enlarged his father’s farm

Avoiding the judgements of a parasitic nobility,

Built a fast ship to export his harvest,

Crossed the sea to Chalcis in Euboea

Where he won a bronze cauldron,

Some say in competition with Homer,

And dedicated it to the Muses of Helicon.

From him we know of the triumph of Zeus in the war against the Titans,

Of the birth of Aphrodite from the sea 

And all the lineage of gods and mortals:

The daughters of Nereus who live beneath the waves,

The nymphs of springs woods and mountains,

The lovely Meliae who inhabit ash trees,

The night-running Furies, descendants of Nyx,

The birth of the world,

The Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron ages of mankind,

The rebellion of Prometheus who stole fire from Olympus

And brought the curse of work upon mankind….

And so the Muses prompted him also to sing of works and days,

The rising stars when it is time to prune vines,

To plough when Arcturus appears before dawn,

And when to go to sea in safety to ensure your prosperity.

                                                    January 2018  

Water is best

An old man who looks back to his youth

Looks at the gods, it’s said.

                                              Back then,

Under Olympus on the road south,

A broken-down Skoda, a wrestler (Heracles)

On the way from Prague to Athens for a fight;

No jack, he lifted the car up

I placed rocks under it

We worked for an hour,

Did something right I suppose…..away he drove.

“Water is best” sang Pindar,

(Brighter than gold, more useful)….

Just off the road

A spring in the shade of old plane trees,

Fast water flowing,

Written there

“Spring of the Muses.”

No man escapes death.

Violet-haired muses!

Don’t hesitate

Give my words the same clarity

The same life!

                            January 2019

Metamorphoses

There were lions in Greece until 100 BC

In the dry oak forests that still grew then, hunting

Red deer, fallow deer, wild boar, the roe.

Back in the dreamtime of heroes,

Cadmus killed a monstrous snake deep in such an oak forest,

And sowed its teeth for warriors…..

There, centaurs and dryads settled,
There Actaeon wept in the shape of a deer, cursed by Artemis,
And Thisbe fled from a lioness bloodied from the kill
Dropping her scarf for the beast to worry.

Forest of Metamorphoses,
Where wolves and lions once lamented for Daphnis

Frisked at the heels of Aphrodite among the shadowy combes

Until the forest started slowly to warp, to mutate,

The civil gods withdrew,

Dragons shrank to gilded snakes,

In Arden, where Shakespeare poached props off Ovid,

Where the wildwood encroached to the outskirts of town,

And Jaques saw Actaeon weep by the brook where Artemis once bathed,
The bloody cloth that bound the wounds of Orlando

Was Thisbe’s scarf, rummaged from the props box,

The lioness that wounded him, a little threadbare,

Half-starved so far from Greece.

                                                       December 2018

Were We Dead as Dodo

Were we dead as Dodo,

Nothing would be lost from all

That assembled us.

Artifice of natural forms!

Aphrodite’s coral sea-gown

Dresses the ocean,

Her cell-life breeding

Imagination, language, music,

The green world’s sudden glance.

Parrot tribes people the forests…

Their inherent making, their design

Their pattern, their emblazoned colour,

Their display, posture, ritual,

Their shamanic frenzy!

Elephant nation, buffalo nation,

Confederations of whales;

The lion’s sullen, outcast melancholy.

The long, gliding, circumpolar chaconne

Of the albatross.

The golden civilisations of the bees.

Cursed Arachne weaving, weaving;

The scorpion’s crooked vengeance.

Tiger! Imagined!

Syntax of sun shadow, bamboo shadow,

Word shadow.

Leopard!

Swarm of spots. Illusion.

Fatal suspension of disbelief.

The world

Megalopolis of beasts

Beast-shapes in the stars,

The bull, the bear, the swan,

The scorpion,

And Orion….. rising again.

               December 2018

Perdix and Oenoe

No moon

An Aegean island harbour in profound darkness;

In a dark tavern

A roast partridge is put in front of me, fragrant,

With a bottle of tawny Icarian wine

And an oil lamp set beside them

A gift to a stranger

Hermes at my shoulder

Starlight on the sea among the fishing caiques

Low voices outside from the unseen fishermen

They might as well have been centaurs.

Icaria, in the old days before electricity

Before the coming of the barbarians,

Evdilos harbour, once Oenoe,

Sea nymph, wine nymph, nymph of Pan….

Oenoe…..wine.

Icaria, was on the edge of the ancient world then….

Wine-bringer Dionysus born on Mount Pramnos  

Where the first vines were cultivated on the heights of Icaria,

Pramnian wine, known to Homer,

Which Circe drugged and gave to Odysseus’ companions…..

Mountainous Icaria rising from a dangerous sea.

When Icarus fell from the sun

And Daedalus buried him on the island

And named it after him

A partridge called and mocked his grief:

Perdix, the low flyer,

Perdix, the pupil Daedalus threw from the heights of Athena’s shrine

In Attica, envious of his invention of the the saw,

The boy whom Athena, admirer of devices,

Turned into a partridge as he fell.

Island of echoes

Partridge calling all day among the rocks with a sound like laughter.

I slept that night on the table in my clothes

Head in the crook of my arm,

To the sound of Athena’s owls outside*

As Odysseus might have done, or any traveling stranger down the years,

Woke to see the fishing caiques putting out.

They wore the sun like a hat, those fishermen,

And the island like an old coat,

Like my host, setting coffee before me

Who picked a couple of worthless aluminium lepta coins from my hand

For the wine.

                                                     November 2018

*The little owl athene noctua.

Otter River

Otter river snouts the flood

A thin ream licks the banks.

Between what is known

And what is obscure

Lies a film of mere nothing,

A sliding pane of surface tension

Enclosing a bronze world

As hollow as a bell.

The trees drop their leaves upon the stream

Like losing hands thrown down

Jacks and hearts of autumn

Swept away.

                   November 2018

At First Bat and Owl Howl

At first bat and owl howl

The river runs.

At mouse creep and rat swim

The bent grass nods and bows.

At moon rise and wind creak

The night gulps down the stars.

At fox yap and owl light

The river snaps a fish.

At owl glide and bat blink

The vixen screams.

At worm cast and mole heave

The loam licks your feet.

At dew fall and moth fall

The river greets a ghost.

At blind dark and badger grunt

The otter dives.

At otter splash and fish ream

The greenwood thicks.

At owl foot and mouse squeak

The silence grips.

At last reach and ear prick

The bats hang down.

At last bat and owl howl

The river runs.

          October 2018

All Along the Wasteland.

A sort of naked Stone Age Tierra del Fuegans

Squat by their fires

Under a charcoal sky.

Dystopian litter mars the scene

He searches for shelter

A dry mattress under a tin sheet

Some place to stay,

There are flames along the horizon……

He finds a sleeping woman,

The colour of grey earth

A blunt, plain, naked woman beside a dead fire.

He watches over her tenderly

He loves her

She must be the earth

She is nature

And when she wakes she is wise

She is Sophia

Her eyes shine like obsidian.

They laugh

This tremendous comrade knows him well

All along the wasteland

The Fuegans build intricate wicker shelters.

He marvels at them.

Made strong now, uplifted,

He continues to search

For a dry mattress, a sound roof,

A place to squat,

Anything.

                         October 2018

Cypris   
A lost fragment from Sappho

Cypris!  Goddess!  Come!  Be with us when we dance

In the meadow held sacred to you, crushing

Beneath our feet the flowering grass, girls

Who braid dill and apple blossom into the hair

Of the girl they deem most lovely. Come!

And let us feel your soft fingers at work among ours.

                                            July 2018

Otter II

Sitting at nightfall on the roots of the sprainted alder, among the bats;

Too dark on the river, no otter….just hushed intimations.

I get up to go home,

And there is otter jauntily crossing the grassy Leigh between the bridges….

He sees me of course.

Four fifteen next morning;

I’m cycling past the lake when a bat crashes into my face,

Hits the little rear-view mirror attached on a slender wire to my spectacles.

Not a hard impact.

A felt rattle of wings,

The small, vibrating mirror askew.

Down under the overhanging cliff I await the otter as it gets lighter.

A big fish, the size of my fore-arm, swims under me.

The singing of blackbirds and thrushes does little to lift a habitual dawn melancholia…..

Dawn. Time of the firing-squad and the noose!

The fish-splash waves that furrow the glassy river look suddenly a bit larger coming up from the weir.

It’s light.

The sun is in the tree tops across the Leigh.

Otter smell?

And he’s thirty feet away, swimming along, head up, chewing on a fish;

He seems unaware of me.

It feels like a reprieve!

He submerges, makes a ream, a swirl,

Slips up into the alder I was sitting in last night,

Out the other side….gone.

It’s mid-July but cold and misty.

The temperature on my phone is down to 13 C.

                                        July 2018

Otter

He’s scent-marking the same riverside alders
As he heads upstream in the uncertain high-summer dawn;

Always the same routine

You could set your watch by him.

Follow the rules of his world

Sit quiet as a shadow

Smell him coming

Sniff out the sharp otter stink of him

That clings to the cold air flowing up from the falls.

No bright water here,

A lowland river shouldering a limestone cliff,

Gripped, overhung with trees, a tunnel

Upstream of the Slaver’s Weir,

Drowning water, mud coloured, or old copper.

A shadow seems to flake off the night….

An owl perches, looks back at me, drifts away again.

The water-bats, flickering over the river like ghosts,

Evaporate into another indefinite morning.

He’s surfaced at the same place!

Stealthy as a submarine

Wet as a drowned tomcat

Wetter than the river

The soaked fur of his head and shoulders

Gathered into leaf-points

As he glides up-river, submerges,

The sliding pane of water closes over him,

Leaving a crease in its surface, a moving ream,

A wake without a source.

He turned his head and saw me before he sank…

A sudden small intimacy.

Another time, in pouring rain, the river roaring,

Crowding my feet as I sat in the shelter of the overhanging cliff,

A splash, and beneath my toes a tail went under;

He had surfaced there,

I could have touched him.

                              June 2018

Note:

“Ream,” meaning the wake left by a submerged otter, is a usage only found in Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter so far as I can discover.

Already the Year

Already the year has drifted into June

And we, eddying round, are torpid flotsam, lethargic,

Limp arms borne up, drowsily turning we have sunk,

Hopelessly drowned in the flowing fields.

Under the rose-briar in the shade

He makes eye-contact with the flowers;

Ancient man, in love with pink,

In love with the swiftly passing,

Don’t drop their gaze!

Wild roses, sweet and twenty,

They’ll slip away as quick as thought.

                           June 2018

Note: The first four lines of this poem were left unfinished nearly sixty years ago.

Sappho’s Death Poem

Memory of a lost fragment from Sappho

Sappho: It won’t be long now.

Gongyla: O Sappho, how can you know?

Sappho: Because Hermes came to me last night in a dream

And I said to him: “I can find no further delight in life

Nor pleasure in anything I have made

And only a longing for death possesses me,

I want you to take me down to the dew-soaked meadows

Where long ago you took Agamemnon and the flower of Achaean youth,

For I must leave this light of day.”

                                                  June 2018

A Rose in June

As evanescent as a blush, as transient

As the petals of the moon….

Sweetbriar, in search of lost time, like the moon,

Falling back in time, waning into the past,

Moving widdershins to sun and stars,

Dropping back into the night,

Its petals unwrapped, scattered,

No more than a remembrance of things past

As insubstantial as loss.

                                      May 2018

A Different Self

All I never owned

Now makes a space

For the May morning,

A different self,

The gap between then and now

That no one crosses

Crossed again.

Summer queen,

With a sound like the wind

The hive swarms,

It’s Summer…. arriving

The totality of Summer….

It’s all there is.

           May 2018

Across the Solstice

From Congo to the Arctic rim

Swifts pivot across the Solstice

Up in blue summer starlight

On the high edge of dawn

Cresting the midnight sun

The air pink with pheromones

Jupiter and Mercury

Hanging like lamps

And black wings, black arcs

Splitting the stars to shivers

To star spray, Solstice glow.

May 2018

Ice and Fire

Invisible above the cold clouds, Orion

Will sink under the western horizon tonight,

Deneb and Vega, rising in the east,

Begin their aimless cycle again,

Summer stars, of ice and fire, as beautiful

And meaningless as music….

Like the sough of the wind

Which is not the bear’s paw,

Not the ghost ancestor,

Just the wind, intimate and empty

As a touch of the self.

                         April 2018

The Rider’s Song

Cordoba

Far away, alone.

Jet-black pony, full moon,

Olives in my saddle-bag….

Although I know these roads

I’ll never get to Cordoba.

Over the plain, through the wind,

Jet-black pony, full moon,

Death is staring down at me

From the towers of Cordoba.

Alas how long the road!

Alas my brave pony!

Alas that death awaits me

On the road to Cordoba!

Cordoba

Far away, alone.

Translated from Lorca

April 2018

Resistance at the Pyramids

“Until the reign of Rhampsinitus,

So the priests said,

Honesty was universal in Egypt,

And the whole country enjoyed great prosperity……”

A likely tale…..

(Herodotus, for whom all men were scoundrels)

A conversation through one hot, Nilotic night 

Two thousand years after the event,

Down river, beside the Mareotic Lake, silted up, malevolent,

Walled in with an ancient megalopolis for priests,

The river’s course changed over millennia

Shrunk back to the desert bluffs.

Egypt....
The stink of mummy guts all over,

Boys carting brains and entrails down to the bank,

Feeding the crocodiles,

“Keeps ‘em sleepy,” it was said…..

No man is a god to his embalmer.

In Rameses’ day the tomb-builders went on strike,

Occupied a tomb

Pelted the priests with rocks,

Told them whose wives they were fucking....

The papyrus goes into detail

“If you don’t want to build your own tombs, pay up!”

And they did.

The Great Pyramid of Cheops,

The scoundrel who succeeded Rhampsinitus,

(Cheops the strike-breaker)

Was already grown shabby by Herodotus’ day,

Its limestone facing decaying at ground level,

And it was hated by the locals…..

“In total, then, there was a period of one hundred and six years

When the Egyptians were put to every kind of misery.”

When Herodotus passed through

Two thousand years later, around 450 BC,

People still refused to speak the name of Cheops.

They said that to pay for his pyramid

The Pharaoh sold his daughter for a whore,

And they called it “The Pyramid of Philitus,”

Who was the shepherd whose land Cheops had stolen

To build his Great Pyramid upon.

                                               April 2018

In Memory of Anna Campbell

“Anna is with us. We fight on.”

Beneath the black waters of the dream

Horizontal tide-race avalanche, shoulder high;

And a contrail, way up in the blue,

Up in aerospace, a granular white filament

Spun out, lengthening, like a data stream.

Futile?

No. Not wasted.

Although futility becomes a warrior

Fighting for dignity,

Not victory or power.

To walk freely into futility

Is a warrior’s grace;

All others are executioners, like the pilot

Processing data

Up above.

                   March 2018

Bare Weather

Hamlet in the wilderness

Fretted with elemental fire, strides

Like the angel of death

Down on Elsinore

The castle, roof blown off,

Open to the animal clouds, the storm

Heaving at the arras.

Lear crouched in a doorway

Begging from the Wolf,

Mad as the sea and wind, raging,

Raging on the blasted Mall.

The time is out of joint,

Helter-skelter catastrophe unleashed;

The Clymat’s delicate,

We are left to bare weather

Rain in the High Arctic.

            March 2018

Elder

Childhood….. bomb-site summers,

Nettle-stung, bloody-kneed, sap-sticky, wild

Under the bitter green wreckage.

And always, at midsummer,

Titania rides the creamy flowers:

Elder moon, white nights,

Puck, fashioning pipes from her hollow stems…..

Elder, ellern, “hollow,”

The flute tree.

“Never cut an elder” he said,

The old Somerset farm-labourer

Who remembered the funeral of Queen Victoria,

“My mother was a herb-witch!”

He drank elderflower tea

And laboured into his eighties

Forty years ago

When we layered hedges and let the elder stand.

In the Himalayas too,

I found it by the wayside,

The same witches’ tree

Hanging around the same scrubby land

Looking like it spoke another language

Harboured other ghosts.

Wood of the true cross in the Shires,

Gallows tree, hung with

Outgrowths of soft Jew’s ear

Judas fungus…..

(Puck’s hollow laughter).

Do it no harm 

And you will sleep deep under an elder tree

On a midsummer night,

Dream mysterious dreams;

So cram your mouth with berries

When the season ripens

She offers you

Hippocrene draughts

Purple-stainéd mouth, sweet lips.

                   February 2018

Faustus

Everything you see is you

The surfaces you touch

Are your own surfaces

Beyond the horizon

There is nothing….

The world is shut out

When we dream.

In dream’s deathless kingdom

We are eternals. It is a drama

Where nothing falls apart,

Acts, scenes, imagined, performed:

We are the play the actors and the crowd.

This is what the afterlife would be:

An entertainment;

A willing suspension of disbelief….

Until the thatch is all aflame

Until the actors see onstage

That unknown player  

Standing beside Faustus.

          February 2018

Kindergarten

“Then consider those petty self-indulgences

We call freedom.”

Kindergarten of Capital.

The goat coughs at night

In the killing-fields over the school-yard….

Coal-tip mudslide.

Choice!

Conkers, hop-scotch, dead-leg

Hair-ribbon, AK 47, “fuck you n----r!”

“My mother said I never should

Play with the gypsies in the wood……”

Blue-nosed dame-school school-ma’am 

Hankie in her knickers-band

Doling out coloured counters, tiddlywinks,

Snot-daubed Bakelite

Smartphone touch-screen Nano-tech.

Kindergarten of Capital.

The goat kneels in the killing-fields

Under the radar.

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world

Than the end of capitalism.”

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking

Thinks we should find a new planet orbiting another star.

It would take seven hundred thousand years to get there

At the speed of light.

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world

Than the end of capitalism.”

Kindergarten of Capital.

An algorithm

Discovering all the things that matter

In YOUR world.

“In my life / I’ve loved them all.” 

                                January 2018  

Rabo de Nube

If you force me to wish

I’ll choose the tail of a storm

A whirlwind touching the earth

Anger, uprising,

Blowing away the pain

A downpour of vengeance

And when it passes,

Hope.

If you force me to wish

I’ll choose the tail of a storm

That will take the ugly

And leave us the cherubic

The pain, blown away,

A downpour of vengeance

And when it passes,

Hope.

Note: Rabo de Nube is a song by the revolutionary Cuban poet and singer Silvio Rodrigues.

                                  January 2018

Languedoc

Yes, I remember Languedoc,

One June, traveling alone,

Playing Thelonious Monk songs in the villages

For wine and gas; in love with the names,

Driving the old road

From Minerve to Château de Termes,

Up in the blue air of high limestone country,

Mudguards brushing the star-thistles.

The ruined Cathar castle was as silent as the sunlight,

Its past purged away, vanished into the light,  

Its rock outcrops, battlements, juniper scrub,  

Graced by patrols of big gold and black butterflies,

Aware and watchful, the particoloured  

Souls of the lyric poets of Occitania,

The minstrels, the courtly lovers, the troubadour knights.

                                                    January 2018

Kith and Kin                

Always Orion delights me

Like catching sight of kith and kin….

Narrow hips, massive shoulders

A Hercules from a black-figure vase,

Off balance, dogged by Sirius,

Tilting at the Pleiades.

Kinsman!  Fool on the Hill!

Of your bones are comets made,

Those are stars that were your eyes…..

                            December 2017

Idyll II Acis

After Theocritus and Ovid

“While you lie there in the heat of the sun, shepherd,

Gazing after Galatea,

The dog is taking your flock

Up to the Spring of Acis

Where the river rises in the shade of old plane trees.

Come, let’s follow them,

Galatea has touched your soul 

And like a bee that probes a flower

She sucks her sweetness from it.

Come away. I have brought you a gift,

A syrinx tuned in the Temple of the Muses

With scented beeswax.

Let’s sit in the shade

And I’ll teach you a song.

“The Cyclops Polyphemus desired Galatea

And mad with jealousy
He crushed her mortal lover Acis beneath this great rock 
Where now a spring flows

And these ancient trees work with their roots

To lift it from him.

The blood of Acis that once flowed here

Ran tawny, then silty, then clear and sweet.

She, whose home is in the depths of the sea,

Transformed him into water

And now he seeks her forever.

“Let’s rest here on soft fleeces in the shade

While I teach you a melody that will evoke

The god of this place

And your dog brings down those stray rams

That have wandered up there near the cave

Where it is said Polyphemus once lived.”

                                               December 2017                            

Idyll I Galatea

After Theocritus

“Look at that girl down there

Where the apple trees overhang the shore

And the sea hisses into the sand.

She pelts your dog with apples!

She drives him away, fearless of his snarling,

Because he went for her as she rose from the sea.

Whistle the dog off!  And keep out of sight.

Don’t gaze at her for too long.

Her name is Galatea,

A Nereid famed for her milk-white skin.

If she sees you, graceful shepherd,

Handsome as Endymion, your troubles

Will not soon be over…..the gods crave beauty above all.

Best choose a mortal lover!

There are many girls as lovely and as brave

As goddesses among us.

See where she vanishes into the reeds!

There, where the river enters the sea,

The place where Pan likes to sleep out the heat of the day.

The poor dog whimpers at her going.”

                                                November 2017

Dawn Chorus

I was Rimbaud then,

Waiting for the summer dawn at the wall of the park

Where a bay of the North Downs

Reached into the suburbs like an arm of the sea;

Misty island bowers, breasts of the Surrey Hills,

Blake’s shadow there; and soon,

The mermaids calling each to each; the Sirens

Yelping in the bustling trees, whistling

Like knives sharpening, keening like the Eumenides,

A furious racket, and all the leafy streets,

The lawns, the Tudor fronts and leaded windows,

Blind, absent, pale

As sleeping princesses.

                                    November 2017

Fox

Red fox

With yellow eyes

Your thin pupils

Like shards of panic

Trapped in amber.

Head down

Looking up at me

Unblinking

Waiting to jump.

On the run for seventeen million years….

Old fox of the apocalypse

Dystopian city fox,

What empty mind behind that frozen gaze,

What drawn-taut syntax of feints and hits,

What perilous chances,

What furious fortune brings you here?

                                  October 2017

Venice

Rapt, she walks on water,

In silken billows,

Her rosy feet, her touch,

Gracing the wavelets

With liquid gold, turquoise, ruby,

The undulating marble limbs

Of submerged facades,

Drowned halcyon domes.

Ankle-deep at high-tide.

Green weeds wash to and fro;

Herculean slaves heft aloft a golden globe

Where dancing Fortune turns with the breeze.

The city seems to float on the sea

Conjured up on a sunken forest

By the founding Magi

Those muscular models

For painted saints and heroes.

                               October 2017

Blake’s Paradise

Two mothers with sleepy children at their knees

Sit under a curious mushroom-shaped oak tree

On a village green

Enclosed in an echo of saffron light.

Beside them are two old men

With long white hair and broad-brimmed

Eighteenth century hats, and at a distance

Some slender boys and girls play cricket

As if body-painted in Raphael greens and blues.

Looking into a Blake illustration

Is like looking into a crystal

And you see

That paradise is very small,

You can hold it in your hand

And watch the angels of moonlight arrive,

The lion weep jewels of guilt

The stars descend into the trees.

                                   September 2017

Acroterion

The central acroteria on the Parthenon

Were ornamental unfolding palm fronds

Like peacock’s tails

Sculpted in Parian marble 
That seemed to curve back from the roof in the Aegean wind.

They stood above the friezes

On the apexes of both pediments of the temple

And were a completing gesture by Phidias,

As subversive as stray locks of Athena’s hair,

That dissolved the hard Hellenism of the building

Back into nature again,

And whispered the place to ruins.

That civilisation may not sink

We have striven the world to extinction.

The babe upon the mother’s breast

Gone to war.

Honour, coin, empire, slavery…..

The wise tell us

It would be better never to have lived.

Phidias’ fragile marble palms

Were unlikely to have stood for long above the gods on the pediments.

The fragments that survive are unweathered.
He must have known

That the first slight earthquake would have thrown them down.

                                           September 2017

Villanelle for a Blind Horse 

Will you ride a blind white horse,

Get up, and ride behind the wind,

Will you ride the darker course?

And if you turn back to the source,   

Passing beyond both hope and time,

Will you ride a blind white horse?

When you the darkness start across

Leaving your self-worn life behind

Will you ride the darker course?    

When you birth and death rehearse

As men have done, time out of mind,

Will you ride a blind white horse?

And when that centripetal force

Grips your heart, what will you find?

Will you ride the darker course?

And will you then your time endorse

Or must you leave all time behind?

Will you ride a blind white horse?
Will you ride the darker course?

                         August 2017

Island

“When you start on your journey to Ithaca”  C P Cavafy

When first you set sail for the Island,

Imagine another world,

Summon up into your mind, into your soul,

The Fortunate Isles, the Islands of the Blessed,

Imagine freedom, autonomy, a world held in common,

Imagine the Age of Gold.

Fear neither gods nor masters,

The Laestrygonians nor the Titans,

The anger of tyrants nor the pursuit of the Furies,

If you do not lose hope they will have no power over you.

And should you be driven onto Cyclops’ isle,

Do not give way to despair,

You and your companions will overcome him.

Remember that the enmity of the giants

Towards dreamers like you

Will only guide you onwards

If you let it arouse your heart,

If you let it awaken your courage.

Anchor at many old harbours on the way

In Ionia or the Cyclades, in Phoenicia and Egypt,

And bring to them the intoxication of rebellion,

Add to your crew

But do not seek rich merchandise

Bought with enslaved hours and days,

Turquoise, coral and amber,

Perfumes, jewels and fine silks.

If you are free,

The quintessence of their beauty will cling to you,

In mid ocean, or ashore on desolate headlands,

It will never desert you.

Always remember the Island,

Carry it in your soul, in your imagination,

Voyagers such as you are its truest citizens.

So enter Alexandria and Athens,                        

Cities of the civilisation that feeds on lives

To learn from those who have knowledge,

And to study all those books

Which, emanating from such cities,

Are like maps of lost Odysseys, charts

To steer past the Sirens, to sail beyond

The island of the goddess of illusions.

Understand you will gain nothing from the voyage,

For freedom calls,

That scornful song the wind has taken:

Everything for everyone. Nothing for ourselves.*

Pull offshore with joy and rage,

Knowing that where you are heading

A mysterious new island is rising out of the sea.

                                     August 2017

Note: After Cavafy, Ithaca, and Auden, Atlantis.

*Para todos toda. Nada para nosotros.  Declaration of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. 

Sea of Dreams

Only consider how far down the beautiful islands go…..

Ikaria, thyme scented, forested Samos, pink Fourni,

Patmos, white on the horizon,

Falling steeply into that sea of dreams

Where Icarus sank

So inky blue you could dip your pen into it

And write what the old caïque-masters told

Of a drowned city:

How they hauled up their nets

And the sea poured off stone heads,

Sightless eyes, shattered marble….

How Ikaria was cast down from Olympus

To make a birthplace for Dionysus,

Took root in the sea,

A broken mountain,

Shaking with earthquakes,

Pine-crested, fractured,

Overrun with vines,

Its boiling mineral waters                

Upwelling in the sea caves

From Persephone’s wounds.

                                   July 2017

Note: The first line is taken from the Greek poet George Seferis translated by Edmund Keeley.

An Alien Spaceship, Landed.

In memory of John and Jaki

It draws the warm night in

Like a faultless musical phrase

A walking moment

Scent of hay

Silent crowd blocking the road

A globe of light

A village bar in the south of France.

You said on the phone:

“We’re gigging.

Come along

Bring your horn”…..

And it draws the warm sounds in

Like an alien spaceship, landed,

A walking moment

A golden voice, closer, singing,

A brilliant interior, white light,

The spellbound earthlings crowding up….

And she’s the Oracle of Soul, no less,

Interstellar Sister

Singing for all uncorrupted dreamers

Sitting on a low stool

Hunched over the mic

Hair covering her face         

And she’s soaring….

Sublime.

Like a moth to the flame, I,

Over the heads of the crowd?

Levitated to the stage?

The sax on my shoulder

The ship’s drive notching up

My hands on the controls now

And you’re beaming at me, John,

Behind that synth-command-console,

Shining out of the light,

Head nodding

Like we’re sharing some ineffable secret

As I turn towards the mic

And the ship lifts off…..

You said:

“That was perfect!”

Twenty five years ago

On the solstice,

And you knew because you made it so.

And now you’re both gone;

Only the memory of a love beamed down,

Maybe a mysterious scorching of the grass?

Overhead…. the welcoming stars.

                           July 2017

The Lacadaemonians at Delphi

“Believe me,

Here at Delphi we saw just another Archon,

Sprightly, leaning on a staff,

Accompanied by the usual guard,

(Chosen, of course, for their beauty as much as anything)

Carrying finely-worked bronze spears

And silent, watchful,

Even modest….

Lacadaemonians from the south,

An intractable race, it was said,

Bearing an impeccable gold statue of Apollo for the sanctuary

And another senseless question to the Pythia,

Snake Sister,

Concerning dominion and honour…….

She sent them on some fool’s errand,

Something about laying ancient bones to rest,

A hint, to be sure,

Echoing the unsleeping horror of Atreus’ matricide,

A crime that has been laid at our door,

As they always are,

Pinned on us from time out of mind,

Who simply teach asking the right questions…..

  

We heard they rummaged the length and breadth of the Peloponnese

For years,

Having the excuse, you see,

But spies more like,

Those modest Lacadaemonians,

Until, as always,

Back they came with more expensive gifts,

Bronze tripods, cauldrons,

Looted from who knows where,

Cluttering up the place,

Seeking more information

To furnish their simple, upright minds.

This time she surpassed herself

Our noble kinswoman

Uttering faultless dactyls worthy of Homer herself

Describing a modern forge

‘Where two winds roar

And blow is met by counter blow

Grief piled on grief’…..

Evoking the never-ending calamity of war.

Eventually one of them thought he saw through it

Standing one day in an iron-worker’s smithy

In a town in Arcadia

Marvelling at the size of the bellows

At the intensity of the heat

At the properties of the strange new metal:

Do not the lords of men always wonder

At the artisan’s skill?

Of course he asked for bones,

And lo! bones had been found nearby:

Where is the earth not filled

With the bones of the victims of war?

So they carted them all back to Sparta

After doing a deal with the smith,

Without a second thought for the forge.

They missed the point entirely, you see,

And, to be sure, they did very well for themselves for a while,

Even here against us (although they respected the Oracle).

Yes, the ascendancy of the Lacadaemonians

Can be traced to the moment they seized those bones;

Without a doubt, they missed the point entirely.”

                                       June 2017

Mycenae

I walked up the dry river bed at Mycenae

Like a criminal, out of sight of the road,

Through a landscape the colour of a lion’s pelt;

Drowsed in the shade of a rock,

Drank brackish water from an army water-bottle

Dreaming lion paws in the dust……

Inarkhos, river of dust,

Dried up by Poseidon’s hatred of Argos,

Swallowed by the sea.

Even then…..on the outside,

Owning nothing,

Waiting like a fox for the visitors to leave

For the attendants to shut the great beehive

Tomb of Agamemnon and leave;

Waiting for the silence.

The cistern in the citadel was dry

The flight of steps into darkness

That terrified Henry Miller

Ends in organic rock

As if the wound had healed over.

O black night, you who nurse the golden stars!

Dog-like I lay in the dust

Of the house of Atreus,

The night occluded,

The roaring of the stones silenced,

No snake whispering in the dead grass,

Dead water to drink

And the red glow of a cigarette

My beacon-flare.

Seferis and Kerouac

Signed up for their bourgeois regrets,

In the visitors’ book

Of Hotel Belle Helene de Menelas

The furies whistling.

I brought no furies with me.

The stones were dumb mouths,

The stars turned away their faces.

The dust slept as well as I.

                               June 2017

Nostalgia for the Present

A dark, momentary summer

Ten or fifteen years ago,

Listening to the piano music of Ravel

In the garden

In days of sudden heat….

Miroirs, a reverie,

Awakening a drowsy nostalgia

For the eternal hour

While the bees stumbled in the lavender

The blackbird’s song

Dreamed time away

The swifts tilted about the sky;

A nostalgia for Summer

As if that present moment

Were somehow also

Deep in the past…..

And now, so soon,

It’s a long time ago,

Almost forgotten.

                     May 2017