Selected Poems
Page 10
Teenage dole-wallah piss-up, then tattoos.
Brown Ale and boys’ bravado numbs their fright –
MOTHER in ivy, blood reds and true blues
against that North East skin so sunless white.
When next he sees United lose a match,
his bovvers on, his scarf tied round his wrist,
his rash NEWCASTLE RULES will start to scratch,
he’ll aerosol the walls, then go get pissed …
So I hope the TRUE LOVE on your arm stays true,
the MOTHER on your chest stays loved, not hated.
But most I hope for jobs for all of you –
next year your tattooed team gets relegated!
II
Wartime bunkers, runways overgrown,
streets named for the town’s two England caps;
cricket played with shovelblade and stone,
the daylight’s rotten props near to collapse.
HEALTH (H changed to W) FOR ALL
with its Never Have Another Haemorrhoid
is all that decorates the tap-room wall
of this pub for pensioners and unemployed.
The Brewery that owns this place supports
only the unambiguously ‘male’
Northern working class spectator sports
that suit the image of its butch Brown Ale,
that puts hair on your chest, and makes you fight,
and when you’re legless makes a man of you!
The Brown Ale drinkers watch me as I write:
one front door orange in a row all blue!
History Classes
Past scenic laybys and stag warning signs
the British borderlands roll into view.
They read: Beware of Unexploded Mines!
I tell my children that was World War II.
They want to walk or swim. We pick up speed.
My children boo the flash of each NO ENTRY:
High seas, and shooting, uniform or tweed,
Ministry of Defence, or landed gentry.
Danger flags from valley mills that throve,
after a fashion, on the Empire’s needs.
Their own clothes spun in India they wove
the Colonel’s khaki and the blue blood’s tweeds.
Mill angelus, and church tower twice as high.
One foundry cast the work- and rest-day bells –
the same red cotton ’s in the flags that fly
for ranges, revolutions, and rough swells.
Stately Home
‘Behold Land-Interest’s compound Man & Horse.’
(Ebenezer Elliott)
Those bad old days of ‘rapine and of reif!’
Northumberland’s peles still seeping with old wars –
this year’s lawful lord and last year’s thief,
those warring centaurs, scratch their unscabbed sores.
But here, horned koodoo and okapi skulls,
the family’s assegais, a Masai shield,
the head of one of Chillingham’s white bulls,
this month’s Tatler, Horse & Hound, The Field.
Churned earth translucent Meissen, dusted Spode
displayed on Sundays for the pence it makes,
paintings of beasts they’d shot at or they’d rode,
cantered grabbed acres on, won local stakes,
once all one man’s debatable demesne,
a day’s hard ride from Cheviot to sea –
His scion, stretching back to Charlemagne,
stiff-backed, lets us put down 40p.
Lines to my Grandfathers
I
Ploughed parallel as print the stony earth.
The straight stone walls defy the steep grey slopes.
The place’s rightness for my mother’s birth
exceeds the pilgrim grandson’s wildest hopes –
Wilkinson farmed Thrang Crag, Martindale.
Horner was the Haworth signalman.
Harrison kept a pub with home-brewed ale:
fell farmer, railwayman, and publican,
and he, while granma slaved to tend the vat
graced the rival bars ‘to make comparisons’,
Queen’s Arms, the Duke of this, the Duke of that,
while his was known as just ‘The Harrisons’’.
He carried cane and guineas, no coin baser!
He dressed the gentleman beyond his place
and paid in gold for beer and whisky chaser
but took his knuckleduster, ‘just in case’.
II
The one who lived with us was grampa Horner
who, I remember, when a sewer rat
got driven into our dark cellar corner
booted it to pulp and squashed it flat.
He cobbled all our boots. I’ve got his last.
We use it as a doorstop on warm days.
My present is propped open by their past
and looks out over straight and narrow ways:
the way one ploughed his land, one squashed a rat,
kept railtracks clear, or, dressed up to the nines,
with waxed moustache, gold chain, his cane, his hat,
drunk as a lord could foot it on straight lines.
Fell farmer, railwayman and publican,
I strive to keep my lines direct and straight,
and try to make connections where I can –
the knuckleduster’s now my paperweight!
The Earthen Lot
for Alistair Elliot
‘From Ispahan to Northumberland, there is no building that does not show the influence of that oppressed and neglected herd of men.’
(William Morris, The Art of the People)
Sand, caravans, and teetering sea-edge graves.
The seaward side’s for those of lowly status.
Not only gales gnaw at their names, the waves
jostle the skulls and bones from their quietus.
The Church is a solid bulwark for their betters
against the scouring sea-salt that erodes
these chiselled sandstone formal Roman letters
to flowing calligraphic Persian odes,
singing of sherbert, sex in Samarkand,
with Hafiz at the hammams and harems,
O anywhere but bleak Northumberland
with responsibilities for others’ dreams!
Not for the Northern bard the tamarinds
where wine is always cool, and kusi hot –
his line from Omar scrivened by this wind ’s:
Some could articulate, while others not.
(Newbiggin-by-the-Sea 1977)
Remains
for Robert Woof and Fleur Adcock
Though thousands traipse round Wordsworth’s Lakeland shrine
imbibing bardic background, they don’t see
nailed behind a shutter one lost line
with intimations of mortality
and immortality, but so discrete
it’s never trespassed on ‘the poet’s’ aura,
nor been scanned, as it is, five strong verse feet.
W. Martin’s work needs its restorer,
and so from 1891 I use
the paperhanger’s one known extant line
as the culture that I need to start off mine
and honour his one visit by the Muse,
then hide our combined labours underground
so once again it might be truly said
in words from Grasmere written by the dead:
our heads will be happen cold when this is found.
W. Martin
paperhanger
4 July 1891
Dichtung und Wahrheit
for Marcelino Dos Santos (Frelimo)
Dar-es-Salaam 1971
Frelimo’s fluent propagandist speaks
the cloven tongues of four colonial powers:
French and Spanish, Portuguese and ours,
plus Makonde one of Mozambique’s,
He speaks of ‘pen & sword’, quotes Mao’s phrase
about ‘all power’ the moment his guests gaze
on the 14–18 bronze with Maxim gun.
Dulciloquist Dos Santos, swear to them
whose languages you’ll never learn to speak
that tongues of fire at a 1000 rpm
is not the final eloquence you seek.
Spondaic or dactylic those machines
and their dry scansions mean that truths get lost,
and a pravda empty as its magazines
is Kalashnikov PK ’s flash Pentecost.
Art & Extinction
‘When I hear of the destruction of a species I feel as if all the works of some great writer had perished.’
(Theodore Roosevelt, 1899)
1. The Birds of America
(i) John James Audubon (1785–1851)
The struggle to preserve once spoken words
from already too well-stuffed taxonomies
is a bit like Audubon’s when painting birds,
whose method an admirer said was this:
Kill ’em, wire ’em, paint ’em, kill a fresh ’un!
The plumage even of the brightest faded.
The artist had to shoot in quick succession
till all the feathers were correctly shaded.
Birds don’t pose for pictures when alive!
Audubon’s idea of restraint,
doing the Pelican, was 25
dead specimens a day for one in paint.
By using them do we save words or not?
As much as Audubon’s art could save a,
say, godwit, or a grackle, which he shot
and then saw ‘multiplied by Havell’s graver’.
(ii) Weeki Wachee
Duds doomed to join the dodo: the dugong,
talonless eagles, croc, gimp manatee,
here, courtesy Creation’s generous strong,
the losers of thinned jungle and slicked sea.
Many’s the proud chieftain used to strut
round shady clearings of dark festooned teak
with twenty cockatoo tails on his nut,
macaw plumes à la mode, rainforest chic.
Such gladrag gaudies safe in quarantine
and spared at least their former jungle fate
of being blowpiped for vain primitives to preen
now race a tightrope on one roller skate.
A tanned sophomore, these ghettoed birds’ Svengali,
shows glad teeth, evolved for smiling, as macaws
perform their deft Darwinian finale
by hoisting the Stars and Stripes for our applause.
(iii) Standards
in hopeful anticipation of the bicentenary of the national emblem of the United States of America, Haliaaetus Falco Leucocephalus, 1782–1982
‘The bald eagle is likewise a large, strong, and very active bird, but an execrable tyrant: he supports his assumed dignity and grandeur by rapine and violence, extorting unreasonable tribute and subsidy from the feathered nations.’
(William Bartram, Travels, 1791)
‘Our standard with the eagle stands for us.
It waves in the breeze in almost every clime.’
(The flag, not Falco Leucocephalus
poised in its dying on the brink of time!)
Rejecting Franklin’s turkey for a bird that flies
Congress chose the soaring eagle, called,
for its conspicuous white head, ‘the bald’.
Now the turkey’s thriving and the eagle dies!
When the last stinks in its eyrie, or falls slow,
when the very last bald eagle goes the way
of all the unique fauna, it won’t know
the Earth it plummets to ’s the USA.
But will still wing over nations as the ghost
on money, and the mountainous US Post.
much as sunlight shining through the British pound
showed PEACE with her laurels, white on a green ground.
2. Loving Memory
for Teresa Stratas
The fosses where Caractacus fought Rome
blend with grey bracken and become a blur
above the Swedish Nightingale’s last home.
Somehow my need for you makes me seek her.
The Malverns darken as the dusk soaks in.
The rowan berries’ dark red glaze grows dull.
The harvest moon’s scraped silver and bruised tin
is only one night off from being full.
Death keeps all hours, but graveyards close at nights.
I hurry past the Malvern Hospital
where a nurse goes round small wards and puts on lights
and someone there’s last night begins to fall.
‘The oldest rocks this earth can boast’, these hills,
packed with extinction, make me burn for you.
I ask two women leaving with dead daffodils:
Where’s Jenny Lind’s grave, please? They both say: Who?
3. Looking Up
for Philip, Terry, and Will Sharpe and the bicentenary of the birth of Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869)
All day till it grows dark I sit and stare
over Herefordshire hills and into Wales.
Reflections of red coals thrown on the air
blossom to brightness as the daylight fails.
An uncharred cherry flaunts a May of flames.
Like chaffinches and robins tongues of fire
flit with the burden of Creation’s names
but find no new apostles to inspire.
Bar a farmhouse TV aerial or two,
the odd red bus, the red Post Office van,
this must have been exactly Roget’s view,
good Dr Roget, the Thesaurus man.
Roget died here, but 90 when he died
of natural causes, twice as old as me.
Of his six synonyms for suicide
I set myself alight with safe suttee.
4. Killing Time
Among death-protected creatures in a case,
‘The Earth’s Endangered Species’ on display
at a jam-packed terminal at JFK,
killing time again, I see my face
with Hawksbill Turtle, scrimshawed spermwhale bone,
the Margay of the family Felidae,
that, being threatened, cost the earth to buy.
And now with scientists about to clone
the long-haired mammoth back from Soviet frost,
my reflection’s on the species the World’s lost,
or will be losing in a little while,
which, as they near extinction, grow in worth,
the leopard, here a bag and matching purse,
the dancing shoes that were Nile crocodile,
the last Felis Pardalis left on Earth,
the poet preserved beneath deep permaverse.
5. Dark Times
That the Peppered Moth was white and now is dark ’s
a lesson in survival for Mankind.
Around the time Charles Darwin had declined
the dedication of Das Kapital by Marx
its predators could spot it on the soot,
but Industrial Revolution and Evolution taught
the moth to black its wings and not get caught
where all of Nature perished, or all but.
When lichens lighten some old smoke-grimed trees
and such as Yorkshire’s millstacks now don’t burn
and fish nose waters stagnant centuries,
can Biston Carbonaria relearn,
if Man’s awakened consciousness succeeds
in turning all these tides of blackness back
and diminishing the need for looking black,
to flutter white again above new Leeds?
6. t’Ark
Silence and poetry have their own reserves.
Th
e numbered creatures flourish less and less.
A language near extinction best preserves
the deepest grammar of our nothingness.
Not only dodo, oryx and great auk
waddled on their tod to t’monster ark,
but ‘leg’, ‘night’, ‘origin’ in crushed people’s talk,
tongues of fire last witnessed mouthing: dark!
Now when the future couldn’t be much darker,
there being fewer epithets for sun,
and Cornish and the Togoland Restsprache
name both the animals and hunter’s gun,
celebrate before things go too far
Papua’s last reported manucode,
the pygmy hippo of the Côte d’Ivoire,
and Upper Guinea’s oviparous toad –
(or mourn in Latin their imminent death,
then translate these poems into cynghanedd.)
¶
Facing North
‘The North begins inside.’
(Louis MacNeice)
God knows why of all rooms I’d to choose
the dark one facing North for me to write,
liking as I do air, light and views,
though there’s air in the North Wind that rocks the light
I have to keep on, all year round, all day;
nor why, despite a climate I profess to hate,
and years spent overseas, I stay,
and, when I start to pack, procrastinate.
The North Wind’s part of it and when it blows
my shutters rattle and the front door slams
like memory shutting out half what it knows.
Here I poured huge passion into aerogrammes,
the lightest paper loaded with new hope
that made the old pain seem, on looking back,
seen through the wrong end of the telescope
making it so small I soon lost track.
The window’s open to the winter’s chill,
to air, to breezes and strong gusts that blow
my paper lantern nothing will keep still
and let me make things happen in its O.
When the circle, where my hand moves over white
with red and green advances on black ink,
first swung like this it gave me such a fright
I felt I was on a ship about to sink.
Now years of struggle make me concentrate
when it throws up images of planets hurled,