WINTER
January –
But a blue sky
Wakens this fly
From some narrow winter sanctuary
And black, fat, out of season
It tups our windows with a warty snout.
Oh put the horror out –
Let the rasping demon
Die
Adoring the flawless winter sky.
TO MY
YOUNG WIFE
Written in
her Christmas card
She buys these flimsy clothes and shoes,
Unsuited to our northern
skies.
She has a secret dream to use
These follies where her future
lies.
She’ll taste a hanging wreath of vine
And sniff the hidden truffle place
And tread her meadow’s boundary line
In floating silk and trailing lace.
She’ll sleep till noon and talk all
night
With easy tears or heathen joy.
She’ll be the postman’s sly delight
And terrify the baker’s
boy.
Her crazy sisterhood will tell
Tales from the whole world wide
Of faithless men they loved too well
And kindly men they cast aside.
“Alas, les dames
folles come once more,”
The town will cry to see them call,
And lock the church and close the store –
And she’ll be the maddest dame of all.
Shake out this lace and shout, “Ah oui!”
Put on these foolish shoes and dance.
Oh but I love to think of thee
Glad in the golden fields of France.
CENTRAL RESERVATION
Most nights,
In the glare of oncoming lights,
A thing I refuse to feel
Tugs my hand on the wheel.
Some rage or loss
Perhaps, and I think to cross.
HUNGOVER
To drink is to borrow
Joy from tomorrow.
Now who’ll repay
My great loan to yesterday?
THE POET’S PRAYER
Let the bitch, Success,
In her red dress
With a glass and a laugh and a smeared kiss
Briefly a friend for life
Out-shout my wife
Who says, “We can’t go on living like this.”
TIGER, TIGER, NOT SO BRIGHT
Gorillas
Understand mirrors,
And brush off grass
Stuck to the cheek of their ass.
Less clever
The tiger, however,
Overlooks little
Bits of stuff unless they tickle.
Unreflective, he’s
Inseparable from what he sees:
Today he ate
His hate;
Tomorrow he’ll feed
On greed.
Below
His red paws come and go.
His ear is which
Breeds an occasional itch.
And fleas attack
What he does not know is his back.
But his idiot head
By divine right strikes us dead.
A LANCASTRIAN’S TERROR OF TODMORDEN
God
keep us out of Todmorden
Where
folk will stand you drinks and then
A
pickled egg – excepting when
They’re
Yorkshiremen.
For Tod, astride the Calder’s banks,
Is half in Yorks and half in Lancs.
Oh Todmorden, oh lord, no thanks.
In
Todders folk will say, “Well met!
How’s
t’gout? Are’t courting yet?
They’re
open: shall us have a wet?”
Or
sell their kids on th’internet.
They’ll greet you with “Ey up! Grand
morning!”
Or kick your shins with zero warning
Depending on which bit they’re born in.
Oh
Todmorden, oh fearsome spot
Where
folk will give you all they’ve got
To
ease your lot
Or
maybe not –
For even when they’re worth a mint
Yorkshiremen will say they’re skint
Then scurry off to skin a flint.
Oh
Todmorden, oh fearsome site,
Where
folk are breezy, blythe and bright
Or
else prefer their roses white
And
wads shut tight.
They’ll say “God bless you” when you
sneeze,
Or else forget their “Ta” and “Please”
Then creep away to pare a cheese.
For
Todmorden’s two-faced like Janus:
One
bloke does owt to entertain us
The
next along need not detain us,
The
anus.
So Lanky Todders, grab your bikes
And flee this tribe that no one likes,
The Tykes:
Whose scowls inspect us
And then reject us;
From
Todmorden, oh lord protect us;
Whose smiles unnerve us,
Who don’t deserve us;
From
Todmorden, dear god preserve us!
AN
ENGLISH SPINSTER, 1928
“Having lost
their men, Englishwomen busy
themselves with mankind” – Benito Mussolini
We are the patient sisterhood
Of church bazaar and village hall.
We spend our lives in doing good.
We sweep the nave. We tend a stall
With penny
scones and ha’penny teas
For the poor
heathens overseas.
We are the ones who knit and bake,
Who calm the old and soothe the sick.
Down every lane for Jesus’ sake
Our bicycles go tick, tick, tick.
And
willingly we lend a hand
For orphans
in some distant land.
So when the squire or vicar says,
“I knew we
might rely on you,”
Unruffled at that fearsome phrase
We bow the head, we vow to do
What only
Englishwomen can
To ease the
cruel trials of
Thus engaged we do not miss
The comforts of the married state.
Girls in so-called wedded bliss
With husbands plainly second-rate
Unwillingly
at last will learn
The best of
men did not return –
But thought of “England, home and beauty”
And marched to meet the wicked Hun.
Each unflinching to his duty
Faced the fatal gas or gun,
And dreamed,
perhaps, that there might be
A girl, in
England, much like me.
MY
Where
the autumn wind whips round
Four
floors above ground
I’m
an old man upside down.
Storms
in the far north
Gather
for their going forth,
And
since such beasts can slip
A
blade through the least nick
No
mere measuring will do
To
make my windows tight and true.
Therefore
I hang
And
shape and shave and smooth and sand –
Quickly,
quickly, since I race
The
planet’s winter-turning face.
Yes
its old face turns winterward
But
still my darling will be warm
If
I’m away, and can’t get home.
AT RING O’ BELLS
This is the English light, I like to think,
That showed our fathers’ fathers when they made
Canals lacquered with sky, rails that
gripped
Distance in cutlery – and cast their grain,
For the
green splash patient. At their bucket’s brim,
The gleaming
mirror reeled but did not spill.
Shadowless light! Here where their furrows rolled
Over like swimmers its straight-edge lay;
Their file found it under rust; it rode
The new nail hammered home; and blazed
Spat in the
ditcher’s hand. Pacing his map,
Bright
dividers mocked the sailor’s step.
But look: mum is coming from the cancer wing.
On this canal bridge her neighbour says,
“Crows crossed your roof today. I think
Your man can’t live.” And the x-ray stain,
Black birds,
and wicked old poisoner of light
Were right,
were right.
ILFRACOMBE
(Burying a coffin displaces a coffin-sized volume of
earth, which must
be wheelbarrowed away. At Ilfracombe cemetery, this
was a long
haul. When we buried someone in their spouse’s grave,
we
smashed in the old coffin to fill it with earth)
It must have seemed like Judgment Day, the din,
When me and Charlie stamped their coffins in –
But yet they
did not stir, despite
Torrents of the long-lost
light.
Now I am old. I see these sleepers will
Keep their council underground until
Charlie, me
and worlds are gone.
Undeceived,
they’ll slumber on.
MY WIFE IS BEAUTIFUL
Written in her birthday card:
You
say that beauty lasts a day.
I
say a day’s what we inhabit.
The
fact her beauty cannot stay
Confirms
how wise I was to grab it.
So
though her looks are merely mortal
I’ll
frolic like a love-struck lad
And
seize the fleeting joy and chortle:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
You
say I mustn’t judge her worth
By
chance genetics. But you see,
I
merely like her lucky birth:
I
love the way she married me.
And
though this disconcerting kindness
Makes
you shout, “She must be mad,”
I
celebrate selective blindness:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
It’s
true we make a funny twosome,
She
all loveliness and I
An ancient wrinkled wart, so gruesome
You
declare, “In god’s name why?”
But
I reply: This silly spite,
Resenting
what you’ve never had,
Promptly
doubles my delight:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
I’m
glad, though mortal flesh is sinful
And
outer grace defers to inner.
Of
beauty’s balm I’ll sink a skinful
And
reel around, a blissful sinner.
I’m
sorry if your wife is ugly.
I’m
sorry if my boasting’s bad.
I’m
sorry but I’m sorry smugly:
My wife is beautiful and I am glad.
(With a hat-tip to Clive James’s “The Book of my Enemy has been Remaindered”)
LOVE
She’s in love with Hate and wants to be alone.
She’s drawing the curtains and locking the door.
When Hate loves her up with a dry old thigh bone,
“Yes!” she instructs him, and “More, darling, more!”
Her friends sniff keyholes and rattle the cat-flap.
They listen at drainpipes and climb the wisteria.
Why are two bony footprints pressed in her bath-mat?
What’s that xylophone smile in the dim interior?
But she turns from their words with a deaf and a dumb
shrug.
This “friendship” garbage they’re shouting fools no
one.
With x-ray eyes for humanity’s humbug
She takes Hate to bed for a fast then a slow one.
“Oh Hate, my bone idol, you’re past all improving,
Your kisses as cool as a bone china chalice!”
And she begs him incessantly, “Darling, do move in
Your doggie called Danger and moggie called Malice!”
And she’s squeezing his hand like a handful of dice,
She’s softly locking her boudoir door.
Her nipples get stiff in his whispers like ice,
And she’s not coming out, no never no more.
SONNETS
I
Remember how we met. Didn’t we each
Laugh at the light in our animal eyes
And smile and pose and see no need for speech,
Both in our pride convinced, “I am the prize –
An accomplished lover, this my small sport.”
So we laughed, and for fancy pleased the beast
Without risk: how could a giver go short;
How could the host not be fed at a feast.
So what brought on this viciousness and glee?
I know: your double-dealing was the start;
Then came the clever cruelties from me,
Till each perceived we held a hostage heart.
Now with
what vigour, what alarms love lives:
Each day,
new ways of killing the captives.
II
Such a bitter delicious wit – except
We grieved a bit that he sneered at his wife,
And she so kindly, smiling, not adept
At spearing with satire a squirming life
As he was. A catlike playing, saying
She was martyred and glad, she stroked the spur;
Laughing, laughing at her more for staying,
Until we grieved, who had not seen like her
This big man, blubbering, down on his knees,
His arms out, follow her down the hall –
His tears, and the hatstand falling, his pleas,
And seen his humour’s finest stroke of all:
Self-haters
disrespect us till we show
A proper
judgment and decide to go.
Written in
his Christmas card, 2009
Cousin Dave, your cheeky wit
Is wasted on a prostate tumour.
The growth that grips your wedding bit
Ignores all pawky northern humour.
For cancer’s
dull – a fool that fills
Our lives
with boredom, pain and pills.
In fact the thing itself’s a bore
With cells that replicate and then
Repeat the thing they did before
Then re-enact it all again.
A
carcinoma’s only mission’s
To grind us
down with repetitions.
A bore of bores that furthermore,
Settled like a dreaded guest,
Hopes to provoke an endless snore,
To bore us all to boundless rest,
And feels
defeated till it’s drawn
Our jaw to
one eternal yawn.
And in the end, when thee and me
Decline in time as all men must
To grey anonymous non-entity,
Homogenised to nameless dust,
Then cancer
knows it’s done its bit
Since we’ve become
as dull as it.
So lad, no waggish chat diverts
The blob your knob is nobbled by.
The lump that thumps you where it squirts
Is stumped by that ironic eye.
Old friend,
they’ll mend your end, meanwhile
We’ve missed
that wink, that pirate guile:
Forget the
fool that cramps your style –
It’s us that need your rascal smile.
(Dave Heaton
is fine now. I said: “You’re back
to your old
self, unfortunately.”)
ON THE PROPOSITION THAT ‘PAIN IS
TRUTH’
I
stubbed my toe.
The world said, “Told you so.”
MOON
MADNESS
The moon broke free
From racing clouds and she
Tearing her clothes followed me there
Through the black streets with her mad hair
Till I turned again home –
Where I have known
My heart’s safekeeping
But now the woman weeping.
FOR HIS NIECE
Cruel!
To send little Charlotte to schoo-el.
Let her run about in
Her red hat, laughin, shoutin.
**
Metre, I suppose, is just the French for yard,
Which is how I walk you to school.
But centipedes and millipedes are hard –
All those little black legs down the edge of my rule.
**
“My
daddy can whistle”
With
crimson cheek and bulging eye
Your
daddy stuns each passer-by.
His
Schubert song and Mozart air
Make
double-decker drivers stare.
And
braking hard on Blackpool Road,
Ten-ton
lorries shed their load.
Indeed,
so cunningly your dad employs
This
ancient skill of butcher boys
And
farmers in a turnip cart,
The
ploughman and the thatcher’s art,
That
most of all his talent stills
The
local birdlife’s tweets and trills
With
angel fluting that equates
Their
artistry with squeaky gates –
For
walking you in Ashton Park
His
music mutes the tuneful lark,
And
under shrubs on Tulketh Brow
The
rowdy wrens are silent now.
Oh
see that sulking sparrow turn
Resentfully
to chew a worm!
**
Here come the winds of the world
To your lips to be woven to words,
And stars of the sky
Swarm to your eyes
To be looked upon:
Let it be done.
Here, these boxes of light
In a line are the days of your life
To be opened on trust:
Yes, and you must.
Out on the slope of the globe
Now you will go –
To walk, outwalk, this world, these limbs
Till you are nothing else but movement like the winds
And would cease if you stood
Like the winds would.
W.H.S. 1913-1950
Father, I might call you son –
You, dead so young,
And I grown old. I picture you
In cap and clogs and boiler suit
Tending the great eight-wheeler,
And me, some hale old wheezer,
Lonely perhaps,
Who stops a while and asks
About the road you’ll shortly take –
With a baffling paternal gaze.
But, fond of the young,
Doubtless I’d talk too long –
And might advise,
Being so very old and wise,
The proper, careful course
For some young fellow setting forth.
Eager to go,
You’d only think, “I know. Aye, I know.”
So I cannot delay,
Even in dreams, your hasty going away –
Handsome and young –
That made in time a father of your son.
ON THE HUBBLE
DEEP FIELD IMAGE
All gone, those all-wise fools
Who said
that souls
Cavort on
coals
Down in the Devil’s dancing schools.
And imps will pinch and twist, they said,
To entertain
With witty
pain
Endlessly the yelping dead.
But might those folk have argued thus:
“Such
tireless toil
With boiling
oil –
Oh see Eternity’s concern for us!”
Now, drowned and dispersed,
Lost in the vault this light traversed,
We are the
first
To know
death’s worst.
AT ST LEONARD’S
Cold on the graveyard wall, I sit
Watching till the wheezing sexton says: “Maybe…”
And passes the ledger. Yes, this is it:
Dad; a stray great aunt; some baby –
Getting a
stone at last. And – as I thought –
Mum,
climbing the sharp hill, brought
Grief to the wrong grave for forty years.
Lord what a joke! Her on her knees (my god),
The scissors, kitchen spoon, and doubtless tears,
Titivating that other poor sod
Also with no
stone. Two rows down the hill,
Dad was thinking:
“Gormless. Gormless still.”
She needn’t know, I think – she’ll make the climb
Up that sharp hill only one last time.
SONG IN
SUMMER
Well, for an old man on a summer afternoon
To sleep is
sweet.
Full as skirts, the curtains lift and swoon.
Beside me on the bed a brazen slab
Of bare sun. The clock stares; from the street,
Birds, the cries of children, and a passing cab;
But every interruption comes too soon,
For with a
sigh
I’ve vowed to let the rowdy world go by.
Lord let this resolve for once hold true.
Reconciled
I’d drift unthinking through a world made new,
Instead of fearful, disbelieving, bitter
That I never roared, broke glass, ran wild,
Maimed a neighbour, shagged his babysitter,
Cried ‘We’re dying!’ at the bus-stop queue –
Too scared
to see
Death is an absolute, so life must be.
Good luck to all such nutters in the gutter
Declaring
woe.
Not for me their hopeless furies, but a
Life-long, smirking, cowardly parade,
Choked with politeness till at last I go
Apologetic to the butcher’s blade,
Considerately lift my chin, and mutter
Last
beg-pardons
For my birth, breath, blood, heartbeat, hard-ons.
Therefore this sleeping says, “The world has won.
Now let me
hide.”
This is age. This is what days have done –
While all those frightened heroes who can smell
Death in obscurity, and suicide
In self-restraint, sing in a prison cell,
Punch their children, snivel, steal a gun,
While
passion roars
Through the house of the heart, slamming doors.
No thanks. I’ll wake, sleep and wake once more,
To savour
sleep.
The clock is twitching through its semaphore,
The sunlit curtain curtseys, flirts and sways,
But once again I’m diving deep, oh deep.
Calmness like hatred in the clock’s blank gaze
But my answer to its staring is a snore.
Asleep, half
waking,
Lord let me yawn through the great leave-taking.
THE
LIZARD
Over again this tale is told:
An ancient lizard’s coils enfold
The flawless maiden bright as gold.
Handsome heroes once so bold
Lie around him, torn and cold,
For what he cannot have he’ll hold.
Pity the maiden unconsoled,
Alas for the lizard grown so old.
THERE IS NO BETTER
There is no better
Way than mine to don a sweater.
I’m an utter
Genius at spreading butter.
No one but me
Knows how best to turn a key.
Not for toffee
Can you lot make coffee.
And when I take a tap apart
With my incisive secret art
Oh what pleasure fills my heart!
I will not show you what
Way I tie a granny knot,
Or how I do
That little thing to wipe my shoe
Or drive a screw
And then to have the screw run true.
I’ll take my secrets where
Others wait who did not share
Their sly delighted private tricks
For cleaning wigs or swinging picks
Or knapping flints or killing ticks
Or shining swords or laying bricks
Or trimming smoky candle-wicks,
And hid their skill
And hide it still.
CLEARING HEADSTONES, BANKSIDE
Against the black, cracked, Jack The Ripper bricks
Prop these worn
Milestones on the Glory Road.
The Londoners crumbling under them are dumb
With the boss
Of Cockney glottal stops.
If any soared to the Lord’s front doors
From their nest of bones,
They’ve long since flown.
Licked biscuit-thin in the river wind,
With names
The river rain has wept away,
Like well-oiled old bow-legged boatmen sloping home,
Their shoulders roll
As they rock to the rotten wall.
And if the Resurrection robes of those below
Were stopped by a stone toe,
Now they can go.
Life
is too long
Oh
it goes on and on
I
was young but that’s gone
And
all day the sun
Shows
what I haven’t done.
FOR MY FATHER, WHO DIED YOUNG
What
should I reply –
Lost
between living and dead,
Meeting
his kindly eye –
If
he, insistent, said:
“How do you fill, my lad,
Years I never had?”
“Oh,
sleep and eat,” I’d say.
“Work,
too, alas;
And
friends in their fond way
Help
the years pass.
Much like, it’s true,
A million others do.”
But
what then if he
In
the dim daybreak
There
by the grey sea
That
slides between sleep and awake,
Seemed with his quiet air
Doubtful, watching there?
I’d
say: “Look what I made:
Roads,
that railway track;
Seven
years with spade,
Sweat,
and bent back;
And books, god knows –
Though there’s never a shortage of those.”
But
then, feeling my days
Of
thin stuff dismissed
Under
his troubled gaze,
At
last I might resist:
“Born provincial, poor and plain,
I built a life with back and brain –
“What
more could I give,
What
could any man do,
That
your old bones might live?
Could
I fill the years for two?
Rejoice how far I came
With neither money nor name.”
But
the dawn is silent now.
And
I wake to that same task –
To
wonder again how
I’d
answer what he cannot ask,
Feeling still that I
Somehow should reply.
UNCLE SIDNEY TUCKS YOU IN
My child, for once I’m feeling kind,
So
now you’re washed and dried and goodnight-kissed
And tucked-up snug
With one last hug,
I’ll soothe your anxious infant mind
With
this good news: monsters don’t exist.
Yes, in the night-time children think
Armies
of hungry dark come hunting you,
And smell your fear
And creeping near
Will rip your heart, and eat, and drink.
Now,
now, don’t cry: these nightmares just aren’t true.
And if for all your fearful screaming
Dad
just stirs and swears and stays asleep;
And even mum
Forgets to come;
And granny thinks, ‘She’s only dreaming;”
And
Uncle Sidney smiles to hear you weep,
Keep calm, my dear, be good.
No
scaly horrors come on leather wings,
No dripping jaw
Will eat you raw,
No ghouls with tubes remove your blood.
So
stop your sobbing, child: there’s no such things –
Nothing with hooks in either fist
And
gloves of blood to either hairy wrist
Has come to kill you
And splash and spill you,
And stab and bite and rip and twist.
Good
night! Sleep tight! Remember: monsters don’t exist.
HOME
AFTER CHRISTMAS
Our cold house will not forgive us.
Water perks in the pipes but still it is cheerless,
The phone as cold as a conch when we say, ‘Thank you
for our lovely Christmas.’
How slowly the kettle boils and how its breath
billows
Up to the ceiling, and weeps down the windows
As we hug cups two-handed, in our coats indoors.
O house, sulky house, you were left alone
And winter crept in and soaked to your bones.
But wake up, cold house, because your friends are home
–
Hallooing through the caves of your corridors,
Dancing from
the toilet on the cold floors
And the bowl was as cold as eskimo ice holes
And we didn’t quite sit in case our bum froze,
But we stamp and bustle and hurry about
Into every room and chase the winter out –
So hurry up and stop your pouting, house, O
house.
Oh let’s go to bed and leave the house warming,
And snug and warm with only our noses showing,
With our hot water bottles all night snoring,
Then get up all warm and stare out at folk in the cold
morning.
I
I
see a gourmet eat his lips,
A
waitress carve her fingertips.
The
butcher’s window makes me come,
Above
a plate I bare my bum,
And all distinctions stretch like skin
And thin and thin
Across the horrors coiled within.
But
more and more is best forgot:
My
hopes erode, my parents rot.
The killing years
Demand
more scabs between the ears,
So let me, mounted well astride
My turdish tide,
Be
once again self-stupified.
For
though the surgeon’s screwing on,
While
knowing what he lies upon,
For
all his lust it’s certain if he
Thought
at all would lose his stiffie –
Yet how I always picture this
Cask of piss
While sucking up a hungry kiss.
So
let me then at least be good
To
other blinded bags of blood,
And try to think
Sick
with the stinging charnel stink,
And swear my love grows deeper, truer
Though through and through her
Drains the dismal double sewer.
I
see we cannot lift our chin
Above
the filth we’re buried in.
I
see our brains must marinate
In
bloody soups of dread and hate.
I see the warning
Dropped
from bottoms every morning.
I
see it all through frightened eyes
Whose gormless orbs like bubbles rise
To briefly flit
Adrift across a latrine pit.
Terror
ahead and grief behind,
Pray
god becloud this raddled mind,
Half deaf, half blind,
To
walk with filthy humankind.
HITTING THE WIFE
That’s not it.
Never a hit.
No kind of blow so much
As a flick or tap or pat or some such –
Though it came
From what I can’t recall or name:
A black roar
Bursting the door.
All this on a day
When the woman drives her mate away
With “Old goat.
Bald, thin legs, old turkey throat.”
And I
Wretched, a thorn in her side.
We sit now
And hope for peace somehow,
Having known those roaring places
Where the lonely claw their faces.
But flick or tap or hit
Yet I admit
The blackness behind it.
Tony Blair
Says it’s unfair
That people ask him about Iraq:
They should look forward not back.
George W Bush
Hot from “clearing brush”
Sits in his Crawford orchard
And thinks of the men he tortured.
Tony and W
Said, “Lord, does war trouble you?”
But God had no issues
With the tearing of human tissues.
Richard Cheney
Has angina again. He
Says, “For a start,
Don’t say I’ve got no heart.”
Barack Obama
Couldn’t be calmer
About Guantanamo Bay.
“What the hell,” he thinks. “Let it stay.”
**
Warmongers
“Our neighbours stink,” my dog declares.
Our neighbours’ dog repeats the line.
I leave my dog to shout like theirs
Because they leave their dog like mine.
And if they leave their dog thuswise
It proves their dog and they agree.
I’m glad therefore my dog replies.
I’ll let my dog speak out for me.
But oh this shouting night and day
Day and night inflames my head
To hear a dog insanely say
The thing another dog has said.
But still my dog must speak since he
With doggy loyalty defies
By day and night so doggedly
My neighbours’ dog’s relentless lies.
I hate my dog for shouting so
But hate my neighbours’ dog the worst.
I’d love to kick my dog although
My neighbours have to kick theirs first.
But oh this shouting night and day
Day and night is never done
And drives my dizzy brain astray
And can’t go on and can’t go on.
**
Cheney Limbaugh Bolton Bush,
George John Dick Rush,
Long ago were called to war –
And swiftly hid behind the door.
But soon they grew too old to fight
And promptly altered overnight:
“We must endure. Just one last push,”
Say Cheney Limbaugh Bolton Bush.
In Vietnam when bullets flew
His comrades cried, “Where’s Double-you?
Oh see behind the door he stands
With John and Richard holding hands.”
With current wars they huff and puff
And boldly cry, “We must hang tough.”
But long ago they said, “No no,
Nam’s not for us: the poor will go.”
And thus they hid while others died
And in a final vision cried,
“Oh see behind the door, oh see
Bolton’s boots fill up with pee!”
Says Bush, “Once settled on the use of force
We’ll see it through, we’ll stay the course.”
The dead rise up demanding, “Who
Is this ‘we’ who’ll see it through?”
Cheney Limbaugh Bolton Bush.
George, Dick, John, Rush;
When the bugles blew for war
Swiftly hid behind the door.
**
On the nine Afghan children machinegunned by
a NATO helicopter while gathering firewood, March 2011
What brought
This bit of lead to the child’s throat?
Here’s what an exile dreamed, a pundit thought;
This is a letter, this what a scholar taught;
Here’s what the statesman said, the expert wrote;
Here they made the gun, here loaded the boat;
Here’s where a general planned, a soldier fought;
And here’s what poisons everything they sought –
This bit of lead in a child’s throat.
**
Sick with rage I did not speak
Of Blair’s wars against the weak.
Only now I voice this hate –
Too late, too late.
O Lord preserve
The savour of sea on her undercurve –
Anchovy, oyster, ambergris:
And Lord
deliver
My lips to
her nether
Kiss.
Thine was the care
That numbered (like mine) her maidenhair
As salt as Sinbad’s beard, and fell
Through buxom waves
Down to her
sea-cave
Smell.
Thou art the Lord.
Thy finger has folded her firth or fjord
Or foamflecked loch. Oh let me be
Leviathan
Drinking her
inland
Sea,
And my devotions,
Sure as the loom of Thy woven oceans,
For this be thus: securely glued
Here on my knees
Adoring her
own sea
Food.
NIGHT
WIND
I am awake because
A night wind is bullying the house.
Shall I get up now
And tiptoe down?
Beyond the bedroom door
Dark is at home,
Crowds the stairs
Sits in my chairs
While I wait and listen
And hear a rope tighten.
I shall go down
Through the pool of the night-time house
Along the hall,
Where darkness lines the walls,
Where the door
Shakes to the tongueless roar,
Where the draught through the keyhole feels
Cold as a key
That I might turn
To make the wind’s insanities my own.
BURSCOUGH
What
Adam of our family found this place;
Laboured
around its cage of lanes; abed,
Stretched
across its fields; became
All
of the local clay that made his bread;
And
then was old, with rain for miles, and days
With
no one in the lane except the breeze
That
bared his bones at last like winter trees?
How
he would dream – but in the end
Was
frittered into England once again.
**
You
were our Adam and Eve – all foretold,
The
water droplets numbered, dust motes known,
Gestures
weighted when you poured
Light
from the water jug. Such years in store
To
fill with naming of a world!
Now
one lorryload
Carries
us kids, the broken home,
And
you to fifty years of widowhood
Through
flat Fylde pasturelands that show
How
far you came, and now must go.