New and Selected Poems

by Hughes, Ted

  A whirling tree –

  Where he alights

  A skin sloughs from a leafless apocalypse.

  On his lens

  Each atom engraves with a diamond.

  In the wind-fondled crucible of his splendour

  The dirt becomes God.

  But when will he land

  On a man’s wrist.

  from SEASON SONGS

  A March Calf

  Right from the start he is dressed in his best – his blacks and his whites

  Little Fauntleroy – quiffed and glossy,

  A Sunday suit, a wedding natty get-up,

  Standing in dunged straw

  Under cobwebby beams, near the mud wall,

  Half of him legs,

  Shining-eyed, requiring nothing more

  But that mother’s milk come back often.

  Everything else is in order, just as it is.

  Let the summer skies hold off, for the moment.

  This is just as he wants it.

  A little at a time, of each new thing, is best.

  Too much and too sudden is too frightening –

  When I block the light, a bulk from space,

  To let him in to his mother for a suck,

  He bolts a yard or two, then freezes,

  Staring from every hair in all directions,

  Ready for the worst, shut up in his hopeful religion,

  A little syllogism

  With a wet blue-reddish muzzle, for God’s thumb.

  You see all his hopes bustling

  As he reaches between the worn rails towards

  The topheavy oven of his mother.

  He trembles to grow, stretching his curl-tip tongue –

  What did cattle ever find here

  To make this dear little fellow

  So eager to prepare himself?

  He is already in the race, and quivering to win –

  His new purpled eyeball swivel-jerks

  In the elbowing push of his plans.

  Hungry people are getting hungrier,

  Butchers developing expertise and markets,

  But he just wobbles his tail – and glistens

  Within his dapper profile

  Unaware of how his whole lineage

  Has been tied up.

  He shivers for feel of the world licking his side.

  He is like an ember – one glow

  Of lighting himself up

  With the fuel of himself, breathing and brightening.

  Soon he’ll plunge out, to scatter his seething joy,

  To be present at the grass,

  To be free on the surface of such a wideness,

  To find himself himself. To stand. To moo.

  The River in March

  Now the river is rich, but her voice is low.

  It is her Mighty Majesty the sea

  Travelling among the villages incognito.

  Now the river is poor. No song, just a thin mad whisper.

  The winter floods have ruined her.

  She squats between draggled banks, fingering her rags and rubbish.

  And now the river is rich. A deep choir.

  It is the lofty clouds, that work in heaven,

  Going on their holiday to the sea.

  The river is poor again. All her bones are showing.

  Through a dry wig of bleached flotsam she peers up ashamed

  From her slum of sticks.

  Now the river is rich, collecting shawls and minerals.

  Rain brought fatness, but she takes ninety-nine percent

  Leaving the fields just one percent to survive on.

  And now she is poor. Now she is East wind sick.

  She huddles in holes and corners. The brassy sun gives her a headache.

  She has lost all her fish. And she shivers.

  But now once more she is rich. She is viewing her lands.

  A hoard of king-cups spills from her folds, it blazes, it cannot be hidden.

  A salmon, a sow of solid silver,

  Bulges to glimpse it.

  Apple Dumps

  After the fiesta, the beauty-contests, the drunken wrestling

  Of the blossom

  Come some small ugly swellings, the dwarfish truths

  Of the prizes.

  After blushing and confetti, the breeze-blown bridesmaids, the shadowed snapshots

  Of the trees in bloom

  Come the gruelling knuckles, and the cracked housemaid’s hands,

  The workworn morning plainness of apples.

  Unearthly was the hope, the wet star melting the gland,

  Staggering the offer –

  But pawky the real returns, not easy to see,

  Dull and leaf-green, hidden, still-bitter, and hard.

  The orchard flared wings, a new heaven, a dawn-lipped apocalypse

  Kissing the sleeper –

  The apples emerge, in the sun’s black shade, among stricken trees,

  A straggle of survivors, nearly all ailing.

  Swifts

  Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts

  Materialize at the tip of a long scream

  Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone

  On a steep

  Controlled scream of skid

  Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.

  Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,

  Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

  For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing

  Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they

  Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,

  Then a lashing down disappearance

  Behind elms.

  They’ve made it again,

  Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s

  Still waking refreshed, our summer’s

  Still all to come –

  And here they are, here they are again

  Erupting across yard stones

  Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,

  Speedway goggles, international mobsters –

  A bolas of three or four wire screams

  Jockeying across each other

  On their switchback wheel of death.

  They swat past, hard-fletched,

  Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,

  And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,

  Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy

  And their whirling blades

  Sparkle out into blue –

  Not ours any more.

  Rats ransacked their nests so now they shun us.

  Round luckier houses now

  They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings,

  Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,

  Head-height, clipping the doorway

  With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,

  Their too much power, their arrow-thwack into the eaves.

  Every year a first-fling, nearly-flying

  Misfit flopped in our yard,

  Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.

  He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails

  Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly

  Till I tossed him up – then suddenly he flowed away under

  His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,

  Slid away along levels wobbling

  On the fine wire they have reduced life to,

  And crashed among the raspberries.

  Then followed fiery hospital hours

  In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage

  Nested in a scarf. The bright blank

  Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.

  Then eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.

  The inevitable balsa death.

  Finally burial

  For the husk

  Of my little Apollo –

  The charred scream
<
br />   Folded in its huge power.

  Sheep

  I

  The sheep has stopped crying.

  All morning in her wire-mesh compound

  On the lawn, she has been crying

  For her vanished lamb. Yesterday they came.

  Then her lamb could stand, in a fashion,

  And make some tiptoe cringing steps.

  Now he has disappeared.

  He was only half the proper size,

  And his cry was wrong. It was not

  A dry little hard bleat, a baby-cry

  Over a flat tongue, it was human,

  It was a despairing human smooth Oh!

  Like no lamb I ever heard. Its hindlegs

  Cowered in under its lumped spine,

  Its feeble hips leaned towards

  Its shoulders for support. Its stubby

  White wool pyramid head, on a tottery neck,

  Had sad and defeated eyes, pinched, pathetic,

  Too small, and it cried all the time

  Oh! Oh! staggering towards

  Its alert, baffled, stamping, storming mother

  Who feared our intentions. He was too weak

  To find her teats, or to nuzzle up in under,

  He hadn’t the gumption. He was fully

  Occupied just standing, then shuffling

  Towards where she’d removed to. She knew

  He wasn’t right, she couldn’t

  Make him out. Then his rough-curl legs,

  So stoutly built, and hooved

  With real quality tips,

  Just got in the way, like a loose bundle

  Of firewood he was cursed to manage,

  Too heavy for him, lending sometimes

  Some support, but no strength, no real help.

  When we sat his mother on her tail, he mouthed her teat,

  Slobbered a little, but after a minute

  Lost aim and interest, his muzzle wandered,

  He was managing a difficulty

  Much more urgent and important. By evening

  He could not stand. It was not

  That he could not thrive, he was born

  With everything but the will –

  That can be deformed, just like a limb.

  Death was more interesting to him.

  Life could not get his attention.

  So he died, with the yellow birth-mucus

  Still in his cardigan.

  He did not survive a warm summer night.

  Now his mother has started crying again.

  The wind is oceanic in the elms

  And the blossom is all set.

  II

  What is it this time the dark barn again

  Where men jerk me off my feet

  And shout over me with murder voices

  And do something painful to somewhere on my body

  Why am I grabbed by the leg and dragged from my friends

  Where I was hidden safe though it was hot

  Why am I dragged into the light and whirled onto my back

  Why am I sat up on my rear end with my legs splayed

  A man grips me helpless his knees grip me helpless

  What is that buzzer what is it coming

  Buzzing like a big fierce insect on a long tangling of snake

  What is the man doing to me with his buzzing thing

  That I cannot see he is pressing it into me

  I surrender I let my legs kick I let myself be killed

  I let him hoist me about he twists me flat

  In a leverage of arms and legs my neck pinned under his ankle

  While he does something dreadful down the whole length of my belly

  My little teats stand helpless and terrified as he buzzes around them

  Poor old ewe! She peers around from her ridiculous position.

  Cool intelligent eyes, of grey-banded agate and amber,

  Eyes deep and clear with feeling and understanding

  While her monster hooves dangle helpless

  And a groan like no bleat vibrates in her squashed windpipe

  And the cutter buzzes at her groin and her fleece piles away

  Now it buzzes at her throat and she emerges whitely

  More and more grotesquely female and nude

  Paunchy and skinny, while her old rug, with its foul tassels

  Heaps from her as a foam-stiff, foam-soft, yoke-yellow robe

  Numbed all over she suddenly feels much lighter

  She feels herself free, her legs are her own and she scrambles up

  Waiting for that grapple of hands to fling her down again

  She stands in the opened arch of his knees she is facing a bright doorway

  With a real bleat to comfort the lamb in herself

  She trots across the threshold and makes one high clearing bound

  To break from the cramp of her fright

  And surprised by her new lightness and delighted

  She trots away, noble-nosed, her pride unsmirched.

  Her greasy winter-weight stays coiled on the foul floor, for somebody else to bother about.

  She has a beautiful wet green brand on her bobbing brand-new backside,

  She baas, she has come off best.

  III

  The mothers have come back

  From the shearing, and behind the hedge

  The woe of sheep is like a battlefield

  In the evening, when the fighting is over,

  And the cold begins, and the dew falls,

  And bowed women move with water.

  Mother mother mother the lambs

  Are crying, and the mothers are crying.

  Nothing can resist that probe, that cry

  Of a lamb for its mother, or an ewe’s crying

  For its lamb. The lambs cannot find

  Their mothers among those shorn strangers.

  A half-hour they have lamented,

  Shaking their voices in desperation.

  Bald brutal-voiced mothers braying out,

  Flat-tongued lambs chopping off hopelessness.

  Their hearts are in panic, their bodies

  Are a mess of woe, woe they cry,

  They mingle their trouble, a music

  Of worse and worse distress, a worse entangling,

  They hurry out little notes

  With all their strength, cries searching this way and that.

  The mothers force out sudden despair, blaaa!

  On restless feet, with wild heads.

  Their anguish goes on and on, in the June heat.

  Only slowly their hurt dies, cry by cry,

  As they fit themselves to what has happened.

  Evening Thrush

  Beyond a twilight of limes and willows

  The church craftsman is still busy –

  Switing idols,

  Rough pre-Goidelic gods and goddesses,

  Out of old bits of churchyard yew.

  Suddenly flinging

  Everything off, head-up, flame-naked,

  Plunges shuddering into the creator –

  Then comes plodding back, with a limp, over cobbles.

  That was a virtuoso’s joke.

  Now, serious, stretched full height, he aims

  At the zenith. He situates a note

  Right on the source of light.

  Sews a seamless garment, simultaneously

  Hurls javelins of dew

  Three in air together, catches them.

  Explains a studied theorem of sober practicality.

  Cool-eyed,

  Gossips in a mundane code of splutters

  With Venus and Jupiter.

  Listens –

  Motionless, intent astronomer.

  Suddenly launches a soul –

  The first roses hang in a yoke stupor.

  Globe after globe rolls out

  Through his fluteful of dew –

  The tree-stacks ride out on the widening arc.

  Alone and darkening

  At the altar of a star<
br />
  With his sword through his throat

  The thrush of clay goes on arguing

  Over the graves.

  O thrush,

  If that really is you, behind the leaf-screen,

  Who is this –

  Worn-headed, on the lawn’s grass, after sunset,

  Humped, voiceless, turdus, imprisoned

  As a long-distance lorry-driver, dazed

  With the pop and static and unending

  Of worms and wife and kids?