In The Poetry

I’ll end with a poem which, quite often, when I give a poetry reading, I end with – I don’t quite know why, it seems to be a sort of little credo of mine.

Simple Poem

I shall make it simple so you understand.
Making it simple will make it clear for me.
When you have read it, take [...]

Once, quite by accident, I opened a Bible with a postcard stuck in it at the story of Judith in the Apocrypha. Judith was the Jewish heroine who saved the Jews by killing Holofernes who was the general of the army besieging them. She dressed up as a prostitute and went to his tent and [...]

Purkis

The red king lay in the black grove:
The red blood dribbled on moss and beech-mast.

With reversed horseshoes, Tyrrel has gone
Across the ford, scuds on the tossing channel.

Call the birds to their dinner. ‘Not I,’ said the hoarse crow.
‘Not I,’ whistled the red kite
‘Will peck from their sockets those glazing eyes.’

Who will give him to his [...]

The Charge of the Heavy Brigade

1

[The charge of the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade!]
Down the hill, down the hill, thousands of Russians,
Thousands of horsemen, drew to the valley – and stay’d;
For Scarlett and Scarlett’s three hundred were riding by
When the points of the Russian lances arose in the sky;
And he call’d, ‘Left wheel into [...]

A Time of Day

A small charge for admission. Believers only.
Who present their tickets where a five-
barred farm gate gapes on its chain

and will file on to the thinly grassed paddock.
Out of afternoon pearl-dipped light the
dung-green biplane descended

and will return later, and later, late as
already it is. We are all born
of cloud again, in a caul

of [...]

The title of this poem refers to a bell in the great cathedral of central Krakow. The bell also sometimes goes by the name of Sigismund.

The Bell Zygmunt.

For fertility, a new bride is lifted to touch it with her left hand,
or possibly kiss it.
The sound close in, my friend told me later, is [...]

This poem is called ‘Hairless’ and it celebrates being bald.

Hairless

Can the bald lie? The nature of the skin says not:
it’s newborn-pale, erection-tender stuff,
every thought visible, – pure knowledge,
mind in action – shining through the skull.
I saw a woman, hairless absolute, cleaning.
She mopped the green floor, dusted bokshelves,
all cloth and concentration, Queen of the room.
You can [...]

Epithalamion

Singing, today I married my white girl
beautiful in a barley field.
Green on thy finger a grass blade curled,
so with this ring I thee wed, I thee wed,
and send our love to the loveless world
of all the living and all the dead.

Now, no more than vulnerable human,
we, more than one, less than two,
are nearly ourselves in [...]

One day walking in Argyll with my husband we encountered a wishing tree which surprised us a great deal because I didn’t know there were any in Scotland. I mean a tree people have bashed coins into for a wish or a desire – I knew they existed in Ireland but had never seen one [...]

The easel of Mantegna

Empty-armed, like a soldier,
waiting for the deposition
still to happen, watching

as the rough skin is stretched
across the squat square ribs
and stapled, scraped

with a palette-knife, before
the morbid undertaking
of the gesso and the paint.

Or say instead, you always
were inclined to play
an active role in [...]