In The Poetry

And now, some limericks.

Three Limericks…

A young man with wobbly eyes
used to muddle his g’s and his y’s.
When he said ‘guess’
I guess he meant ‘yes’
and ‘yugs’ was how he said ‘guys’.

There was a young man with a pimple
who said everything in life is simple.
For weeks and weeks
he sucked in his cheeks
and now his pimple’s a dimple.

There was an old man from Crewe
who wanted to know how to moo.
He studied a cow
to try and learn how
but all he could do was boo.

The Loving Game

A quarter of a century ago
I hung the gloves up, knew I’d had enough
Of taking it and trying to dish it out,
Foxing them or slugging it toe-to-toe;
Keen youngster made the going a bit too rough;
The time had come to have my final bout.

I didn’t run to fat though, kept in shape,
And seriously took up the loving game,
Grew moony, sighed, and even tried to sing,
Looked pretty snappy in my forty-drape.
I lost more than I won, earned little fame,
Was hurt much worse than in the other ring.

‘Snakeshead Fritillaries’. These are waterside plants that grow beside the Thames in Oxford, and very famously in the gardens of Magdalene College, and Geoffrey Grigson – I remember reading about them before I was aware of the flowers – saying that everyone should walk once in a fritillary field before he died, and that the best position to look at fritillaries was when the sun was low in the sky and you kneel down and get the light of the sun through their petals, which is quite true. They’re called Snakeshead Fritillaries because with the dapple they are supposed to resemble the head of a snake. The fritillary has this, as I’ve remarked, this curious habit of coming out first with its head laying close to the ground before it begins to raise it on the stem, and when I first grew them in our garden, I didn’t know this habit of theirs, and I thought “Oh damn, the children have trodden on them, and there I’ve lost another precious thing.”

Snakeshead Fritillaries

Some seedlings shoulder the earth away
Like Milton’s lion plunging to get free,
Demanding notice. Delicate rare fritillary,
You enter creeping, like the snake
You’re named for, and lay your ear to the ground.
The soundless signal comes, to arch the neck -
Losing the trampled look -
Follow the code for colour, whether
White or freckled with purple and pale,
A chequered dice-box tilted over the soil,
The yellow dice held at the base.

When light slants before the sunset, this is
The proper time to watch fritillaries.
They entered creeping; you go on your knees,
The flowers level with your eyes,
And catch the dapple of sunlight through the petals.

The Hill Fort
(Y Gaer)

On a clear day he’d bring him here,
his young son, charging the hill
as wild as the long-maned ponies

who’d watch a moment
before dropping their heads to graze again.
When he finally got him still

he’d crouch so their eyes were level,
one hand at the small of his back
the other tracing the horizon,

pointing out all the places lived in
by the fathers and sons before them:
Tretower, Raglan, Bredwardine…

And what he meant by this but never said, was
‘Look. Look over this land and see how long
the line is before you – how in these generations

we’re no more than scattered grains;
that from here in this view, 9, 19 or 90 years
are much the same;

that it isn’t the number of steps
that will matter,
but the depth of their impression.’

And that’s why he’s come back again,
to tip these ashes onto the tongue of the wind
and watch them spindrift into the night.

Not just to make the circle complete,
to heal or mend,
but because he knows these walls,

sunk however low,
still hold him in as well as out:
protect as much as they defend.

This poem is about a small girl called Irma who was flown from Kosovo to a children’s hospital in London but who died here in England. And the ‘I’ of the poem is the voice of Irma herself.

Enemies

I do not know who my enemies are.
Is he Shrap Nel. He is sharp
and he bites me. It was he
who opened the door to Menin
Gococci. You can see him
under a microscope, if you care to look.
They say I am fighting him,
But I don’t know who I am fighting.
Am I, then, an animal in a circus?
I can levitate, with others like me
and fly to In Tensive Care.
How do you say that?
My mother has gone away,
my father strokes my aching head
as I rush in and out of the dark.
I am called Irma, one of the chosen,
and I have an Oper Ation
named after me. Oper Ations
are what I know about, as they free me
from Shrap Nel and send in Anti Biotics
to fight the bad Menin Gococci.
If I live I shall be Muslim.
If I die, war will be my enemy,
culler of the cutest, PR job.
Is he an enemy too?
So many.

These are a series of short poems.

Ah, many, many are the dead
Who hold this pen and with my fingers write:
What am I but their memory
Whose afterlife I live, who haunt
My waking and my sleep with the untold?

My sight with the clouds’
Unimpeded rest in changing moves
Across the sky: the aged in endless
Unbecoming are at peace.

I could have told much by the way
But having reached this quiet place can say
Only that old joy and pain mean less
Than these green garden buds
The wind stirs gently.

In the high lonely hills
Long ago astray: why
Did the great merciless winds
Fill my heart with joy?

What have I to regret
Who, being old,
Have forgotten who I am?
I have known much in my time
But now behold
Procession of slow clouds across my sky.

This little house
No smaller than the world
Nor I lonely
Dwelling in all that is.

Young or old
What was I but the story told
By an unageing one?

I don’t know whether you believe in last words or not – I don’t. Spike Milligan once said to me, “Do you know the last words of Gladstone?” I said, “No,” and he said, “I feel better now”. But this is a serious love poem.

Last Words

Splendidly, Shakespeare’s heroes,
Shakespeare’s heroines, once the spotlight’s on,
enact every night, with such grace, their verbose deaths.
Then great plush curtains, then smiling resurrection
to applause – and never their good looks gone.

The last recorded words too
of real kings, real queens, all the famous dead,
are but pithy pretences, quotable fictions
composed by anonymous men decades later,
never with ready notebooks at the bed.

Most do not know who they are
when they die or where they are, country or town,
nor which hand on their brow. Some clapped-out actor may
imagine distant clapping, bow, but no real queen
will sigh, ‘Give me my robe, put on my crown.’

Death scenes not life-enhancing,
death scenes not beautiful nor with breeding;
yet bravo Sydney Carton, bravo Duc de Chavost
who, euphoric beside the guillotine, turned down
the corner of the page he was reading.

And how would I wish to go?
Not as in opera – that would offend -
nor like a blue-eyed cowboy shot and short of words,
but finger-tapping still our private morse,’…love you,’
before the last flowers and flies descend.

Summer of the Ladybirds

Can we learn wisdom watching insects now,
or just the art of quiet observation?
Creatures from the world of leaf and flower
marking weather’s variation.

That huge dry summer of the ladybirds
(we thought we’d never feel such heat again)
started with white cabbage butterflies
sipping at thin trickles in the drain.

Then one by one the ladybirds appeared
obeying some far purpose or design.
We marvelled at their numbers in the garden,
grouped together, shuffling in a line.

Each day a few strays turned up at the table,
the children laughed to see them near the jam
exploring round the edges of a spoon.
One tried to drink the moisture on my arm.

How random and how frail seemed their lives,
and yet how they persisted, refugees,
saving energy by keeping still
and hiding in the grass and in the trees.

And then one day they vanished overnight.
Clouds gathered, storm exploded, weather cleared.
And all the wishes that we might have had
in such abundance simply disappeared.

In 2004 I stayed in a hotel in Copenhagen for a weekend, and the emergency sign on the wall – in almost-perfect English – went, “The fire alarm sound – colon – is given as a howling sound. Do not use the lifts.” and I wrote this down thinking it was faintly amusing, and that I might do something with it. And then I wrote a poem which took a different direction entirely.

Hotel Emergencies

The fire alarm sound: is given as a howling sound. Do not use the lifts. The optimism sound: is given as the sound of a man brushing his teeth. Do not go to bed. The respectability sound: is given as a familiar honking sound. Do not run, do not sing. The dearly-departed sound: is given as a rumble in the bones. Do not enter the coffin. The afterlife sound: is given as the music of the spheres. It will not reconstruct. The bordello sound: is given as a small child screaming. Do not turn on the light. The accident sound: is given as an ambulance sound. You can hear it coming closer, do not crowd the footpaths. The execution sound: is given as the sound of prayer. Oh be caution, do not stand too near

or you will surely hear: the machinegun sound, the weeping mother sound, the agony sound, the dying child sound: whose voice is already drowned by the approaching helicopter sound: which is given as the dead flower sound, the warlord sound, the hunting and fleeing and clattering sound, the amputation sound, the bloodbath sound, the sound of the President quietly addressing his dinner; now he places his knife and fork together (a polite and tidy sound) before addressing the nation

and making a just and necessary war sound: which is given as a freedom sound (do not cherish memory): which is given as a security sound: which is given as a prisoner sound: which is given again as a war sound: which is a torture sound and a watchtower sound and a firing sound: which is given as a Timor sound: which is given as a decapitation sound (do not think you will not gasp tomorrow): which is given as a Darfur sound: which is given as a Dachau sound: which is given as a dry river-bed sound, as a wind in the poplars sound: which is given again as an angry god sound:

which is here as a Muslim sound: which is here as a Christian sound: which is here as a Jewish sound: which is here as a merciful god sound: which is here as a praying sound: which is here as a kneeling sound: which is here as a scripture sound: which is here as a black-wing sound: as a dark-cloud sound: as a black-ash sound: which is given as a howling sound: which is given as a fire alarm sound:

which is given late at night, calling you from your bed (do not use the lifts): which is given as a burning sound, no, as a human sound, as a heartbeat sound: which is given as a sound beyond sound: which is given as the sound of many weeping: which is given as an entirely familiar sound, a sound like no other, up there high in the smoke above the stars.

I keep a picture of my favourite phobia on the door of my study. It’s a fear of a road with a drop on one side, a corniche. And this poem is taken from that picture – it’s called ‘The Annals of Sheer’.

The Annals of Sheer

Like a crack across a windscreen
this Alpine sheep track winds
around buttress cliffs of sheer
no guard rail anywhere
like cobweb round a coat
it threads a bare rock world
too steep for soil to cling,
stark as poor people’s need.

High plateau pasture must be great
and coming this way to it
or from it must save days
for men to have inched across
traverses, sometime since the ice age,
and then with knock and hammer
pitching reminders over-side
wedged a pavement two sheep wide.

In the international sign-code
this would be my pictograph for
cold horror, but generations
have led their flocks down and up
this flow-pipe where any spurt
or check in deliberate walking
could bring overspill and barrelling
far down, to puffs of smash, to ruin

which these men have had
the calm skills, on re-frozen
mist footing, to prevent
since before hammers hit iron.