Drill-Hall Threnody

Like spiders that you had not seen

The kids come out from in-between

Splashing the road with khaki green –

And how their pallid faces gleam

like blossoms on a Chinese stream

The drill hall hunches on the hill. 

the little soldiers gather still: 

The school, where they all learned to play

is only fifty yards away

And still they come, and still they come –

we do not  fight our wars at home, 

Gloucestershire versus Worcestershire,

armies cascading down the hills

to valleys full of boney loam.

The wicked men of Worcestershire

pursue their wickedness, and thrive: 

we don’t mind leaving them alive.

We don’t do War here any more; 

we send our children far and wide 

and visit all that shock and awe 

on lesser breeds without the Law.

And still they come, and still they come   

to take a shilling from the Queen-

They don’t read Hardy or Li Po:

they need to feel before they know

We live on history and fear, 

but they live in the now and here.  

They don’t use tabors when they drill

or scarlet when they dress to kill

but war’s a fashion driven thing:

so dappled coveralls provide

a uniform to wear with pride. 

A  skewbald rag will do as well 

to blow about  that foreign field    

where some poor squaddy leaves behind

a life, a limb, or just his mind.

The corner seat is always there

reserved for mutilés de guerre

The ones who bled, who we ignore.

As Byron  wrote to Wellington: 

who cares, then, when the war is done?

And will they come, and will they come

’till the extinction of mankind?

Will the last human toddler found

pick up a stick from off the ground

to point and say “Bang Bang, you’re dead? 

is it encripted in each mind?

is it engendered in our blood

by genes that cannot be denied?

And if they come, and if they come

The shining ones of space and time, 

will they accept us or decline?

Will our indomitable mind 

condemn us to be left behind

while sunlight falters and grows red

and every living creature’s dead

and all the oceans have run dry

and no-one’s left to see or cry

and all the stars have fled?

A Singing Tree

Leaving the town I see.

absurd, a singing tree

in Rorshach symmetry –

brow, bray, and tray,

and a bird on every spur

coos and clucks in a shower of sound

like leaves that fall on the ground

Fifty birds as I near

fly to the paddock beyond,

and back before I’m gone,

and their chuckling, soothing song,

slides all the way to the bridge,

where the melody’s finally drowned.

So I climb Dicky Hill again

as I’ve so often done before

past each Violet Plantation fir

that strains to catch the sky

and solitary satisfied oaks

stretch into the space they occupy

and I wonder how long it will be

before all my friends have died

or how they will feel to remain

if I’m first to leave them behind

but there isn’t any tree

that will remember me.

I walk home with that in my mind,

Like a flint caught in my shoe

back to our gnarl-branched sloe

where the finches and tits that speed to and fro

cross-hatch incessantly

as long as the seeds and the nuts remain

their flight-paths fade in the blink of an eye –

constant, immediate, gone.

It’s quiet now I’m home

and the window’s inbetween

I leave them there to thrive

out in the freezing air

like the ending of a prayer:

world without end,

amen.

On A Need-To-Know-Basis

I should have asked him: he’d have known

she says, years after I am dead

he’d so much stuff there, crammed inside his head

but all that’s left of memory is bone

Lament for the Elms

When I was young

I’d go into a field and draw

small boys would come to twitch and say ‘Are you a real

artist Mister?’ – if I knew I’d tell

I’d pull my bike

out of the hedge, re-pack my box,

& dawdle to the edge of town

past oak and dancing counterpoint of elm

the natural language of that place and time.

My student and my wander years behind

back in the city, on my bike again

I ride to Greengate House from Hanley Road

through Stratford’s acrid air, return

over the railway bump,

past the Precision Screw

Co Ltd and then

the Balls Pond Road to swing into Green Lanes

riding the traffic with a boatman’s skill

and wondering if ugliness can kill.

There’s pride in action; I am not aware

that trees are dying as I ride

the city gapes, a concrete trap

with me inside

while in some country lanes I once knew well

trees wither, get cut down, or fall

the country dwellers pick their sockets clean

there is no way to tell where they have been

– nobody sets a tombstone for a tree.

And was it you who forced me to discover

a tree-shaped absence in my mind?

to tell the truth, I really don’t recall

how the elms looked at all.

Why did it take me so long to remember

what I had so efficiently forgot?

It took me till I hit my head to know

the elms had gone.

I did not see them go

Three Poems About Life, Love and Sex

He Sees Her Break Her Arm

Again I see you trip, again your fall
freezes into a still –
there must have been a sound –
I can’t recall.

Spun from the wall,
there you are lying on the ground

“My arm is broken”
that is what you cry,
I know the words, but I
can’t bring your voice alive

Somebody holds your hand
the pavement’s hard
the ambulance has thirty miles to ride
your face is white with pain.

And now, though I retain
these fragments, which would make a moving picture
I could assemble, if I wanted to,
yet all these memories are stills –

it’s only later that I’m moved by you.

 

 

Together in the Shower

The shower turns me on, and yes
I never felt a hand cupping my breast
or felt a nipple tugged by what I held.
What do I know then? only this
that growing-up gives way to growing-down.

An intimacy we had not expected
binds us together in the cubicle.
What I’d have given, thirty years ago,
to slide myself against you, flesh to flesh!
now it’s because you need to wash you hair
and I must be your naked canephore

Dressing again, you say “I can’t quite reach,”
a wounded arm folded like card behind
“Can you do up my bra?” Hold hard,
The trick was meant to be
(when I was young) a sly
flick of the fingers on a silken back
no fuss, and cornucopia unleashed

But on this day I hold your bra-straps taut,
and slip the hook firmly into its eye
in memory of what I could not reach
and never may.

 

 

Little Priapic Ode

Stop these nocturnal visits, please
at inconvenient hours. It’s some dark corner of the night
when through the gate of horn,
your lewd mosquito trumpets in my ear,
calls action stations,

and soon as I’m awakening you play
your boring mime ‘Haephastos and His Limp’
and fade to grey.
Not funny, and no way
to earn libations.

This isn’t how you were when I was young:
nose stuck in my affairs,
you’d stick around all afternoon:
my flesh would crawl with honey and with bees,
my brain would freeze,

when I was young you had me on my knees.
It’s such a fall,
a mighty tyrant dwindling to a tease.

So summon up your ichor, little god,
and if you please,
either come hot and strong
or not at all