December (the last in this 8 year collection)
What else but this? (a trinity of sung versions)
A Lynn Carol
‘This
creature had various tokens in her hearing. One was a kind of sound as if it
were a pair of bellows blowing in her ear. She – being dismayed at this – was
warned in her soul to have no fear, for it was the sound of the Holy Ghost. And
then our Lord turned it into the voice of a dove, and afterwards he turned it
into the voice of a little bird which is called a redbreast, that often sang
very merrily in her right ear.’
The Book of Margery Kempe
‘A crown of thorns to freeze your breath
The berried holly brings;
Through snowing sunlight chaste as death
The silent barn-owl wings
But now the ghostly holy dove
That bellows in your ear
Is tuned to robin-song by love
And cheerfully made clear.’
The only gift
left on the shelf
That nothing else
can rise above
Includes all
treasure, lasts forever,
And grows when
shared with others: love.
Now starry angels on the tree
Grow larger in the dusk
To heaven-blue and Eden-green
And gold and reindeer-musk.
And what was heard by
Margery,
The Visionary of Lynn,
Rings out on tills for
checkout girls
Who hear that robin sing.
The only gift
left on the shelf,
That nothing else
can rise above,
Includes all
treasures, lasts forever,
And
grows when shared with others: love.
A sacred Ouse of
honeyed sound
Above her dreaming
bed,
She wakes as one
in paradise
And leaps as from
the dead.
A thrilling robin in her ear,
A rose that’s heaven scent,
A man divine to earthly eye,
All music from Him lent.
The only gift
left on the shelf,
That nothing else
can rise above,
Includes all
treasures, lasts forever,
And grows when
shared with others: love.
November
1.
B. The Ballad of The Backwoods Cavalier
A. The Ballad of Little Jimmy (The Vicar of Stiffkey)
“Harold Francis Davidson (‘Little Jimmy’) was loved by the villagers, who recognised his humanity and forgave him his transgressions. May he rest in peace.” (epitaph in Stiffkey churchyard)
An actor cum rector,
His pulpit his stage,
Generous star of his parish’s
Unlighted age.
Serves his country and king
In the First World War,
Comes home to a wife
Playing the whore.
Spends his weekdays in Soho
With poor girls undone,
25,000 fallen
On the streets of London.
Stiffkey to the Gate
Of the kirk and pearlies,
His trial grips the nation
By the short and curlies.
To the Stiffkey faithful
He’s the open hand;
To the North Norfolk gentry
In the dock he stands.
RANDY RECTOR OF STIFFKEY’s
The Fleet Street shtick;
Bishop Norwich calls in
A muck-raking Dick.
All the fallen absolve him
Save the one Dick decants
Down a bottle of lies
Even she recants.
Stiffkey to the Gate
Of the kirk and pearlies,
His trial grips the nation
By the short and curlies.
The Cathedral Inquisition
Meets to pre-Judge him,
The Snob-jobbing Old Boys
Defrock and degrade him.
He returns to the stage;
At Blackpool he rages,
Pleads his innocence, preaches
To lions in cages.
At Skeggy, he treads on
The big tail of Freddie
The Lion who shakes him
And leaves him for deadie.
The crowd cheers the show
But the show is over
For this Prostitutes’ padre,
This Magdalene lover.
Stiffkey to the Gate
Of the kirk and pearlies,
His trial grips the nation
By the short and curlies.
A true life Stanley Holloway monologue. Hear it here
My father leapt upon his high horse
And galloped it hard into Lynn,
“I seize this Parliamentary town,
Declare it for the King!”
“You have no mandate!” cried Mayor and MPs
Laughed Dad, “Arrest those knaves!
Cavalier bravado has come to town
Which you from yourselves I’ll save.”
Though Cromwell’s preachies at the Gate
Of Lynn as at Heaven knock,
Our stained glass windows shoot all to hell,
Our royal passage block,
We are the laughing cavaliers
And we need a royal 'we'
Now its seeing down with cannonballs
And the laugh is on me.
Say I great king, your royal East
And we need a royal 'we'
Now its seeing down with cannonballs
And the laugh is on me.
Say I great king, your royal East
And loyal Lynn, I’ll re-seize ’em,
They’re rebels for Your Majesty
And I’m the man to lead ’em!”
The king he writes a broad letter
And thrusts it into my hand,
“Roger L’Estrange shall rule in Lynn
With phantoms I command.”
We live and die a chevalier’s life,
Have it all and spend even more
On a falconer, fool, on a fowl-mouthed fop’s
Black marble stable floor.
We are the laughing cavaliers
And we need a royal 'we'
Now its seeing down with cannonballs
And the laugh is on me.
And we need a royal 'we'
Now its seeing down with cannonballs
And the laugh is on me.
From Oxford Town to Norfolk woods
The four winds see me ride
And show my fine letter to a Jack
His poor coat to turn or bribe.
‘Captain Leaman’ is that seaman,
Cries he, ‘Er, we’ll talk anon,
I must now to Lynn awhile but will
Return here to Appleton.”
He rides to Colonel Walton and brings
Six redcoats in disguise,
“Show us His Royal Traitor’s hand!’
They pinch me as a spy.
We are the laughing cavaliers
And we need a royal 'we'
Now its seeing down with cannonballs
And the laugh is on me.
And we need a royal 'we'
Now its seeing down with cannonballs
And the laugh is on me.
Note: This is ballad 18 of 39 in my about to be published eighth book of verse 'Doin different - new ballads from the East of England. I have a Civil War novel in me, probably for children. I would like to demolish the myth that the cavaliers were the romantics in that war. I really think the spurred boot was on the other foot. I'm with the dreamers who wanted to build a new England in place of the cowherd reality their 'betters' forced on them - and who braved private armies, tyranny and arrogance to do so.
October
A poem in three genres for National Poetry Day, based on the vision in the browned leaves pictured-
.You can hear it here (the dirty version) and here (the clean)
1 The Night Train (The 007 to Bliss has been cancelled…)
CALLING AT DIS ENTRY, DIS PEPSIA, DIS TENDED, DIS FUNCTION, MUCH BINDING IN THE ANUS, DIS GRACE, DIS RESPECT, DIS AGREEMENT, DIS COURAGE, DIS HEARTEN, DIS PLACEMENT, DIS AFFECTION, DIS LOCATION, DIS SOLATION, DIS TRACTION, DIS TORTION, DIS TRUCTION, DISOMER MURDERS, FALL, DIS INTEGRATION, DIS CRIMINATION, CHARYBDISPUTATION, DIS HONESTY, DIS CEIT, DIS SONANCE, DIS PAIR, DIS ASTER, DIS BELIEF, DIS ORDER, DIS JOINT, DIS ULTORY, DIS TEMPER, DIS GUSTING, SUBWAY, DIS PLEASURE, DIS EASE, DAM UNDER WARE, DIS EMBODY, DIS STOPIA, DIS ASTER, DIS SPOIL, DIS UNION, DIS TRUST, DIS CORD, Dis Quiet, Dis Comfort, Dis Spite, Bottom End and Dis Dain. Please note the public Dis service to Peace & Plenty has been Dis-continued. There is a replacement Dis service to the Fundamental-Hospital and a private-eyed Dis-pensary on every street. Dis Connection for Khyber Backpass; Hell City FC (‘Going down, going down, going down’) the terraces of Dis United Dis-Association Rugby Football Club; Dis Member Wrestling Dis-Association; Dis Counted Cricket Ground; the Dis-tant Prospect of an English World Cup; Dis-mouth Folk Festival; the Dis-puted Dis Association of Sensibilities Awards sponsored by Stern Toilets (‘April- the Cruellest Month!’); the Nappy Brown Blues Festival, the Campaign for More Scheidt on Radio 3; the Head Orifice of the Dis-Servative Party and the Headache Q of O HELL Magazine. Dis-cend here for Depths of Profound Ditty; the Farewell Dis-appearance of Frank Sin and the Ego-Pivoting Dis-co. Dis is the platform for every kind of Dissidence, Dis Scent & Dis Charge so please tread carefully. No change here for your NHS Dis-Appointment with Doctor No; the Dis Self Unemployment Exchange; The Slough of Dis Pond; the Dis Missive Letter Drop, Pathologist; Snowball’s Chance; Hellsmouth Bottom & Dis Lodge. All Stools Are Reserved. DIS IS A NO HOPING STATION. Please Remain Seated For Fundamentalism On Edge.
Now was the day departing, and the air
Embrown’d with shadows… Inferno
The night train West voids a soiled brown note and leaves the downfall station;
Goodbye Cruel World - a vague wind of God and evacuation.
The Zoo-break heart-freeze sin-beasts of Dante shadow the Circle Line;
Paddle up shit creeks out in the Styx to Dis-on-Vacation.
Spine-chilling out dark half glasses of Daily Hell, Bank Holiday
Messiahs Dis-May my heart; Dis Troy, dim Dante’s Vision.
Blind scentless furies and self Dis-abusers hawk heart Dis-ease
As the Dis Mall burns: Dis-balled Cinderellas; Dis-simulations.
The OM begs the Quest. “Who’s this bare-cheeked ass we know from Adam
To demand six Paradise dream vacations each damned mission?”
The name is Bond. Adam in a Bond. The actor who can’t go on.
Wash off this do-do, Not Dis Not Dis, this anal retention.
God save me from Dis-consolation Dis-course; Fifty Shades
Of Grave; the pinched shrill of Avant-God; t’Verb Made Flush on Turd programme.
God save me from Hind-dos and don’ts! Is Lam allowed? Sikh-hide-whizzed-Om-
Wham-bam Faith – Balaam’s ass hawing from the heart of its bottom.
God save me from the timidity of pagans; who captain
Log-on, boldly trek the stars then dog-collar and Dis-infect them.
God save me from my Dis-tinted spectacles’ bewitching
Bewildering shadows of Dis-appointment Dis-guised as Eden.
Hell isn’t other people…….It’s ourselves, our self-fulfilling
Cock-up conspiracy clouds; our I-land’s alien nation.
Marx says to do is to be; Sartre to be is to do, Sinatra
Do be do be do this ‘Not’ only Love dares to tease undone.
Who to do or not to do? to be or not to be? Who’s that
At the tunnel’s end? Death. I embrace your oblivion.
Goodbye cruel world, Dis Consort, Scheidt Winds & Humdrum (a shot)
This Dante’s seriously Dis-turbed, O Who Ru!
It’s Dhervish, Doctor Who Am I. You’ve got to Orientate it. …Whirl it! Turn it to the East! Turn it to the Light!
But that’s upside down…. Ah! I see. … So Adam-in-a-Bond’s not dead?
Agent 00Heaven? No, but we are unless we can follow his trail.
And I see you speak whirling Dhervish. What’s a star like you doing on a baggage check?
Don’t be fooled by appearances. I was NASA’s top astronaut. Only the boys upstairs wouldn’t let women fly moon missions.
Because you might make love on Venus not war on Mars?
Yes! But it takes a real man to see past the dolly bird to the real woman like you do doctor. Through her own eyes.
And a real woman to see the real man, through his. But no doubt your Persian appearance Dis-stressed them.
In the Summer of Love, not so much.
Ah, more Orientated, tolerant, Eastern-friendly times?
That and the blonde wig and whiteface I wore back then. Well, shall we save the planet?
I thought the White House was doing that?
Western Air no longer runs a last flight to heaven. Too many terrorists and not enough baggage room. So I joined Persian Air. On a wing and a prayer.
No trouble selling heaven in the refugee East?
Every last flight is absolutely packed.
National Poetry Day 8 October
It's not every day the EDP publishes a poem but this National Poetry Day I am very chuffed to say it publishes my Ballad of Edith Cavell.
Last National Poetry Day, 2014, I wrote The Ballad of Turnip Townshend non-stop on a train to Brighton. That ballad has since been put to music by Warwick Jones and will be published with a link to Warwick's stunning performance in 'Doin' Different: New Ballads from Boudicca's Country' this Christmas.
For 2015, in honour of Edith Cavell, and deferring to the EDP, I'm just going to refer you back to September and my latest ballad.
September
The Ballad of Edith Cavell Hear it here
Hear it performed by Anto Morra as part of a folk event at Elsing Village Hall on 26 September here
Hear it as part of a combined arts tribute by the poet, the singer (Anto Morra) and the artist Brian Whelan here
Hear it performed by Anto Morra as part of a folk event at Elsing Village Hall on 26 September here
Hear it as part of a combined arts tribute by the poet, the singer (Anto Morra) and the artist Brian Whelan here
She sees the pale gold August wheat,
The oaken greens of home,
A mind’s-eye Norfolk harvest wrapped
Around October’s bones.
6 paces off, 8 rifles point,
Death scarves her blue-grey eyes,
The woman stands and prays and waits
And still no shot arrives…
Her life is flashing by, the days
With Eddy on the beach
‘When life was fresh and beautiful,
The country dear and sweet.’
‘Love of country’s not enough
And when they shoot me dead
Let bitterness and hatred die,’
Our Norfolk angel said.
… The clinic clean and welcoming
The poor and most forlorn;
A mother to her nurses clad
In angels’ uniforms.
A spider crawled across the floor,
One screamed, would stamp it dead,
‘A woman doesn’t take a life,
She gives it,’ Edith said.
The British held the line at Mons,
The French were in retreat,
All stranded men came to her door
Through Brussels’ conquered streets.
‘Love of country’s not enough
And when they shoot me dead
Let bitterness and hatred die,’
Our Norfolk angel said.
…One nurse too hot for German pride
Was bullied as a spy,
She sent her home – with army secrets
Bandaged to her thigh!
La Libre Belgique was her text,
The Life of Christ her God;
Said Pinkhoff, Bergan, Mayer, Quien:
‘Give her the firing squad.’
4 sneaks and spies to smoke her out,
3 days’ interrogation.
She wouldn’t lie…. They shot her dead
For love of more than nation.
‘Love of country’s not enough
And when they shoot me dead
Let bitterness and hatred die,’
Our Norfolk angel said.
Notes. Edith Cavell arrested 100 years ago on 5 August 1915. She was shot on October 12, in the rain.
August
July
This is God. On the highest of highs through the gulf of a tomb,
(This is God.) I’m on top of the worlds born of mind, spirit, womb.
I am not. Now the bubble has burst, there is nothing but sea:
This is God. I’m as drowned in His kiss as the bud in her bloom.
I’m in Love. All the pain in my heart’s disappeared like a dream:
This is God. I am dead to the worlds and awake to my swoon.
I am Him. Now the primal beloved and lover are one:
This is God. I’ve become Who I journeyed towards and from Whom.
Oh my love! He’s embraced me and brought me at last to himself:
This is God. Now I see there is only my Self in his room.
I’m the soul. “There’s no dark where there’s light, no unknown where one knows.”
This is God. Little mind has been razed with its search and its gloom.
O my God! You’re beyond the beyond but you’re found on the Earth.
This is Me, All in All, in the flesh: this perfection, this Home.
This was a wonderful duet to be performed with Taj Kandula at the Bicycle Shop Norwich on July 19, two days after she played God in one of my plays. 'God' had other plans and this one never happened - it probably will or it did on some level. Anyway, for Taj, here it is.
June
Good King John Rap (hear it here)
The Angevins were Very Bad,
And Worst of All was John:
‘As foul as hell is, it’s defiled
By Eleanor’s Little John.
Wicked, selfish, lecherous, cruel,
Insolent, shameless, wrong,
Kin-killing, vicious, spiteful, French, (pah!)
Dishonoured, grasping John.
Usurped his Lionhearted Bro,
The One Good Angevin;
Jugged Merry Freeborn English (yay!)
Forest-flying Robin.
Villain of the Good/Bad History
School and book and song,
‘Inadequate with some Capone’
John. King John. …Bad King John.
In 1216 at all time low,
His ‘soft sword’ half advanced,
His shrunk-crown empire Richard-pawned,
Normandy lost to France, (pah!)
Despised by all those Magna barons
Carting him to heel
Flinging him to French invaders
And Abdullah’s deal:
England given to Mohammed!
A rock moored off Morocco,
Hapless John at bay and 4 years
Excommunicado.
Villain of the Good/Bad History
School and book and song,
‘Inadequate with some Capone’
John. King John. …Bad King John.
From Lynn, he armied up to Lincoln
As the Wellstream rose+,
Despised by Emperor, peasant, guild;
His Rome-rule churches closed;
3000 men, wheels coming off,
Up creek without a guide;
The royal dosh lost in the Wash -
He never lost our pride.
For out in Norfolk we do different,
And his haven, it was Lynn,
Their domain he made our borough*,
Gallant little Linnet king.
Victim of the Good/Bad History
School and book and song,
His Brother’s Bad Book Good Book Keeper
John. King John. …Good King John.
+ http://www.edp24.co.uk/norfolk-life/norfolk-history/41_king_john_s_treasure_1_214293 *http://www.archives.norfolk.gov.uk/view/NCC110530
Notes: My contribution to the celebrations of Magna Carta's 800th anniversary in King's Lynn this 13-14 June.May
A. Mum at 80
So typical of you to hike a hill
Of steps at speed on half an artery
As sure as May, queen of the contrary,
Never mind doctors, a May bee that will;
Jail-breaking later from hospital
Implicating Dad on your anniversary
With me applauding off - though anxiously -
Against all judgement, with all our love. Beat your fill,
Kind, brave heart! we started out together
And grew apart - or I did - 60s child
From dream-rationed hungry 40s orphan,
Your head counting pennies, mine in the ether;
Same coin, the loved tales your lullabies smiled -
Kaiser Bills, Skye boats - pennies from heaven.
B. Our Long Tall Island Story
Far away and long ago
The land was divided and leaderless.
Barbarians invaded from north east and south.
A great king, a dragon head, was needed
To unite the people and drive out the invaders.
Such a king would prove himself
By drawing out from a weathered rock
A wondrous sword.
Many years passed and many men failed.
At last, a boy succeeded.
His name… was Farage.
Farage established a great fastness called Maidenhead
And trained a band of mounted warriors
Called The U-Kips of the Round Table.
Together, they drove out the barbarians.
Farage married Gwenhwyfar, white phantom,
First Lady of the These Islands,
The Most Beautiful Woman In The World,
And the land grew in peace and plenty.
But the hideous Steve - Milliband,
The Evil One, the Gangster of Love,
Tore the land apart again.
It was no ordinary armed rebellion
There was a fell and foul magic at its root.
Aided as always by the wizard Murdoch
And armed with Excalibur, the brand of Britain,
Farage overcame even this - but was mortally wounded
And carried from the field by three mysterious maidens
(Subsequently banished to the Conservative Party for financial irregularities)
They shipped him
Beyond the red dragon sunset to the mystical isle of Man…
The boy grows to knighthood, the heart learns to dance;
An eye for the ladies, an arm for the lance;
A foot for the stirrup’s blind date with chance,
A fag n' pint post-Suez pastiche of the cigar and champagne Churchill bulldog stance,
Lauding "our I-Land’s alien nation" in estuary posh consonantsh
Leapsh the last ditch of hishtory - for the lawnsh of romansch.
April
Bond- Adam Bond- unbegs Q’s half-buried Quest-ion ‘Who Am I?’ -
“The desperate riddle’s solved when the drop dissolves in the Ocean.”
Fly me to that OM at the start of creation - like the sudden
Cobra that moves our bowels or titters to hope and joy beyond reason.
OM makes the sound of the Universe beginning; hums with waves
Of a homecoming Ocean ‘M-m-m’ that sounds all emotion.
“Love’s silently breaking Ocean in the drop drowns your brief hour
On the stage; turns your upbeating heart to a broadcasting station.
“Each lonely bubble has rainbows; perfect vacations that fade.
Every last drop longs for week-without-end consummation.
“Love is the heart of life; your ego-propeller will seek it
Through six tail-spinning Dis-zying degrees of separation.
“O 07 Knights of Jacob’s Ladder and Shiva’s Cobra,
Turn East to a heaven to die for - forget Dis Orientation.”
March
A side/ B side - the single that won't be in the 'Hendrix' album
(revised as in April, above)
February
A/B side (twinned)
Beloved, To Please You
My Valentine is a picture, her painted eye like a rose,
Her body held in a soft flame of stillness, freed in a pose.
My Valentine is a dancer, unfastened hair like a tide,
Her fingers fly out of time's rut: and pluck my heart as it blows.
My Valentine is a priestess who trails her heaven scent
To hell and back round a navel the musk-deer endlessly roves.
My Valentine is a goddess, whose neck is softer than sky,
She turns to me like a planet, and everything else explodes.
O hart, this quest is your own end, you're lost and that's why you win,
You’re stripped of even your held breath and kiss what God alone knows.
*
Lover, what can I say to please You?
What tuneless song could I try to sing?
What note can I strive for to reach You?
In Your Presence words fail and are nothing.
Lover, what can I do to keep You?
Close to my heart as it beats out my time?
Close in the crowds where I speak with You?
In Your Presence words fail and are nothing.
Lover, what can I think of to praise You?
If I mastered expression in everything?
If I measured Your Grace in a poem for You?
In Your Presence words fail and are nothing.
Lover, what deepest bow could raise You?
Were the depths of humility sounded?
Were my debt to You found and expounded for You?
In Your Presence words fail and are nothing.
Lover, what heights of beauty could touch You?
Could the world rest in laurels at my feet?
Could I sing like Orpheus in the deep for You?
In Your Presence words fail and are nothing.
Lover, what kind of love could I utter You?
Would my drop were an Ocean pouring?
Would my life were an answer to Your calling for You?
In Your Presence words fail and are nothing.
Lover, what can I know to impress You?
Should all of my moments come clear?
Should all my inspirations come together for You?
In Your Presence words fail and are nothing.
Lover, what kind of sense can I make for You?
Can I open my heart and reveal my ALL?
Can I seek to know Your Word and express it for You?
In Your Presence words fail and are nothing.
Beloved, these questions I ask of You,
Yet Love asks no questions, and answers none.
I am lost, but in love I am lost in You.
In Your Presence my failings mean nothing.
The A side is a ghazal, an imitation of the form of a Persian love lyric reverenced all over the East and usually written (and sung) in Urdu. I made a valentine's card of it and my dad gave it to my mum for valentine's day 2013 - you can't say fairer than that. The second was always referred to as a ghazal by Indians while I was in India and regarded as my most successful ghazal. Typically, it is not a ghazal in form at all but certainly in spirit. It was completely inspired: I worked out the form like an intricately fashioned wine cup and then the love kept pouring. My cup runneth over, as the sinner with the lisp said.
A Side
A Job To Remember
Originally published in ‘Coming Home’ in 1991 (King of Hearts Publications, Norwich) as “A Jewess In Bristol, 1941.” Peter Finch singled out the long sequence in “New Welsh Review” as “Calway’s best piece...crisp, comprehensible and moving.’’ As – incredibly - empathy with or even knowledge of the attempted genocide of European Jews fifty years before composition cannot be assumed, I post it here for Holocaust survivor day.
The speaker of this poem really existed. My father witnessed the events described in her class and his mother recorded the Bristol Blitz described here in ‘pyred horizons.’ The rest is holocaust documents. You don’t have to be Jewish to find this story the black hole of the love-lyric – I’m not – but...
“Let the day perish wherein I was born…” Job Ch.3
I
F.R Reich, Dental Surgeon, S.S.A,
Runes pressed in the cold
April blond plate outside,
Drilled in my child’s memory.
Swallowed like blood, his earnest
Jokes of sweet-toothed Fräuleins
But with us he was noted for kindness,
Treated me, thus, as a child
Right up to ’36, when all ended.
JEWS TO LOSE VOTE in headlines, heels
Clipped together, he courteously ‘regretted’
Our family could not in future be treated
By him as Germans. I ran
A dry tongue across the rotten ache,
Finding the gold he’d foot-drilled in
Four years before to my girl’s empty head
While I counted…in, in, in, out, out,
The rings on the lamp overhead;
He in bright mood at Hindenberg’s win,
His hand, and smiling political chitchat, made light
With That Austrian’s drubbing.
II
More rain – don’t they ever get tired of it?
Sweat from Mexico
Distilled by this creeping
Cold from Europe, damping
My spirit. Light washing over
Stone steps before blackout
Brings no comfort; the railing licks
Cold my supported hand.
A dark dumb terror articulated
Too many times, interned in files
Screaming with figures, birthdates, deathdates,
‘Family in Custody’, ‘deported’ ‘evicted’ arrested’
Begins to be meaningless,
A little crazy – one of Father’s
Hysterical jokes. Resistance,
Capitulation and at last, escape,
All broken down in the shabby
Second hand language of this race
Interned in a Crypt, peaceful Sundays
Smashed by the hideous wail of sirens, explosions,
Gun-bursts, pyred horizons.
III
I came here in ’38, just before
The Vengeance Pogrom.
Mad, but when the Nazis
Kicked in from the cold first
(The Elections in ’30)
I thought ‘Jews’ was just a
Vote-catching gimmick. The Storm Troops
Came out of the gutter
But their ideals sang: Germany the strong
Stirred heart of Europe, a nation
Which astounded West, and humiliated East
In the War made Great by that Valkyrie spirit
Our enemies failed to explain
Away as mere ‘organisation’.
Father won the Iron Cross, the
Fatherland its world destiny…
One thousand million per cent
Inflation, then the four, five, six
Unemployed millions: a Reichstag
Of Bolsheviks. Who cared, then, if a few Reds asked
For broken heads and got them?
IV
The Elections of ’24 were wild. We
Saw the first Nazis
And we boycotted
Eve, the Communist’s daughter.
Nothing seemed absolute
Then. Over in England
The first Workers’ Government; at
Home 60 Reds, and ‘No
Guns to keep out the Soviets!’
Vater said. I’m still appalled by how cruel
I was to Eve, how exhilarated, though I was
Only ten and yearning, perhaps, to be accepted.
Then the reversed cross I’d watched
On my sixth birthday, when the Free corps
Marched on union Berlin, brought
Back excitement again. Breath-taking, too,
That red and black swathe, armbands, boots.
I almost wished them to single me out
(Aren’t Hitler and Freud from the same place?)
Conceived a brief crush on the eagle-eyed schoolboy
Who drilled our local Jungfolk.
V
Many friends of our class voted Nazi
Through the depression.
Some, to better themselves
Or their chance of a job
Joined them. But it was only
When The Corporal goosed in
To be chancellor that the dream
-Unhealthy, adolescent-
Turned into the nightmare you can’t repress.
We dodged the first persecutions,
Protected by Vater’s high rank in the army
(There were five hundred thousand others besides, then.)
Nationality was lost
By one or two, humiliating
And unnerving, yet we still thought
‘Once Chancellor… President… Hitler got
Economy and unions
Under control, it would all blow
Over!’… but der Störung continued,
Came marching the streets looking for us. New regulations
Each week, reduced to ‘subjects’.
VI
Our newspapers were stopped and Otto spared
The new conscription:
Poor exchange for my loss
Of a second year place
At the University.
Gretel couldn’t wed Hans
Now: she was, they said, an ‘Ayran’.
The queue for passports grew
Desperate and with War in the air, I knew
It was time to uproot while we could.
To Austrian relations - soon not far enough,
Nor then Czechoslovakia. We beat the trap
On the 4th of October
1938, the day before
They marked our passports with a J.
Terrified friends in the office helped me,
Dropped the new ‘Sarah’ from my name.
‘Helga Sarah Helbrow’ sounded
So oppressed – as ‘Israel’ Einstein would have,
The way ‘Israel’ Freud might have analysed
Goebbels’ Vienna, newly Doctored.
VII
‘Stateless’ – starving- Jews went first, to Poland
We heard, land of slaves.
In Paris, I cheered as
The Nazi Attache
Was shot by a Jew. Goebbels’
‘Spontaneous’ pogrom
Followed all through the Reich. Even
In Paris, I feared it.
In its wake, financially crippling laws,
Curfews, closures, exclusions, spoils,
All goose-stepped up and up then marched into Poland
With yet more kick declaring veltsturm, blitzgrieg…war.
Last winter (1940)
I heard that Vater, too proud to run,
Unpensioned, with unprotected
Rent, un-couponed, dispossessed, no
Radio, phone, ‘reparations’
Unpaid, chose ‘protective custody.’
I heard he went in a cattle truck…
Wheeled six million sub-zero degree separations
Through seven degrees of love.
VIII
I never thought much about Being A Jew
Till I found myself
Cowed on a train screaming
Out of Berlin. Hidden
With our remnant of luggage
Was a Rabbi Wanted
By the Gestapo. My cousin’s
Family are synagogue-
Goers, festival observers, too other
Worldly for me and quite willing
To risk the whole exodus for this priest. Although
Even Mutter had grown more orthodox by then.
I listened while he intoned
The Chosen People’s star role, to lead
The world from the wilderness, to lead
From totem to civilisation
In art, science, finance, comedy, song.
In fidelity to God His
Foremost nation; in losing his faith’s way
The butt of slaves; our gift for survival the true badge
Of David. And then they came.
IX
Jews had to call themselves ‘Unbelievers’, those
Two hundred thousand
-And falling – left behind
For ‘The Final Solution.’
But I remember the wailing
Along the corridor
When they dragged the Rabbi away,
Power-hate on their death-
Chiselled faces, stone-eyed as bunker bats;
I heard the voice of a people,
A great and greatly suffering people, wailing
All the way back to David, and Moses, wailing
All the way back to Jacob,
Abraham, wailing all the way back
To God. Sweating blood, I wailed too.
And it was breath-taking. Like coming home.
We call it –kinah. Not surprising
In the circumstances: my home
And whole life wheeling back towards
The darkened heart of Europe, Mozart’s discipline shot.
One had to keen then. Or die.
X
Mutter naturally wants to forget
Germany, but, lately,
It seems, the West as well.
Since coming to England,
She’s taken up Hebrew
Scripture and lore, though (as
They say, even here, even now -
You can’t keep a Jew down)
Not yet so unworldly she couldn’t get
Work for me in the bombed out school.
It’s hardly Goethe, but helps my English, and to
Build a future. A divine spirit of defiance
Moves these peoples, allied to
Their deep suspicion of foreigners:
Two little boys screeching JEW JEW
In my class today, like hardened Nazis,
Shook me as much as that thousand
Pounder cratered in the churchyard,
Tombstones, decay, rubbled through windows.
Nationhood, race – all the past – is dead. Only
God is now worth fighting for.
Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz
After Auschwitz, what heart lyrical?
After our Heimweh of everyday hell, what rose-desk and quill?
After our Heimweh of everyday hell, what rose-desk and quill?
Trenched in fury, contempt, fossilised,
Petrified, faith-robbed, beaten, numbed, exploited: dark art be still.
Through the barbed wire, your Smile radiates,
Making my thorniest garland thrive; the bloom makes me ill.
Our affair’s hopeless. Stop asking a
Man to start dying of love whom all his life’s trained to kill.
Yours a Zeitgeist of such subtlety,
Stopping the cork is futile, against the triumphant will.
Yours to take home the heart’s ultimate
Victory, conquer the blitzed out ‘I’, the real Self fulfil.
Master a heart-race past all dreaming of,
Lebensraum wine by the Ocean- ah, but who’ll pay the bill?
Answer, “Heart speech is love’s melody.
Tune in. My rhythm will work yours free as no other will.”
Love’s the sole song so stop glorying,
Gold Lyre, graves under foot; get started up Lovers’ Hill.
December - the un-Christmas single!
A. It All Comes Out In The Wash
Dirty December
sunset spilled
on the rippling Ouse
like oil.
A factory -its
smoke clouding
the English sky -
And seagulls,
faces like free-fall
angels
screaming on the grey.
B. ‘Anniversarie for John Donne on St Lucy’s Day’
I’ve been watching the fairy bulbs grow into the gloom
Of this Guildhall-gilded, Hanse-seagulled Middle afternoon
And it made me think of you.
Poets are finding it hard to get a place,
Like chided late schoolboys but still see Lucy’s face
A dark looking glass through.
It’s been a long time since 1631
Since metaphysics met a physics you never knew
But what you didn’t do remains undonne.
Note: Two King's Lynn poems. The A side imagines December/ midwinter on the town's south quay without any kind of festival. The B side addresses the metaphysical author of On St Lucy's Day by John Donne in which he creates the anti-world of 'the day's deep midnight, as it is the year's' (Dec 21? using a grammar of negatives like 'I am none'. The Festival of St Lucy is a Christian version of ancient pagan solstice festivals (eg in honour of the goddess Freya) created long ago in the frozen north to fill this void. Both poems be performed in the Hamburg Suite of Hanse House near the start of A Hanse Christ Mess on St Nicholas Day, Dec 6.
November - a double 'A' side for Halloweeen
A. The Ballad of Fiddlers Hill (Find out about the legend here
Ye feasters up on Fiddler’s Hill
Where crossroads meet the harrow
Take care you don’t disturb the sleeping
Bronze Age burial barrow.
O shun this ground between dusk and dawn
Or live a dreadful tale
Of a Black Monk at the tunnel’s mouth
To turn your red lips pale.
Don’t follow the fiddler and his dog
To Walsingham under the hill
To lay the foul Benedictine ghost:
That fiddler lays there still.
“I will play through the tunnel!” cried the jolly fiddler
To the cheering local crowd,
“Stamp time and follow my tune above,
For I play both brave and loud.”
And so he fiddled and so they stamped
His three mile course underground
But his fiddle stopped under Fiddler’s Hill
In the silence of the mound.
Each dared the next down the tunnel’s mouth
But none would dare themselves
And at midnight the fiddler’s dog emerged
Like a hound bewitched by the elves.
His tail thrust down between his legs,
His frame a shivering wrack,
He howled and pined at the dreadful hole
But his master never came back.
“I will play through the tunnel!” cried the jolly fiddler
To the cheering local crowd,
“Stamp time and follow my tune above,
For I play both brave and loud.”
A violent storm drove everyone home
And when they awoke from sleep
The entrance was gone, the fiddler too,
Into a Nameless Deep.
The moral of this, and it’s old as the hill,
Is that mounds aren’t for tunnelling,
If a grave tune plucks the strings of your heart,
Keep the devil under your chin.
In this county of beet and barley and beer,
This county of fish and farrow,
There’s folk you can trust, there’s London folk,
And there’s folk who come out of a barrow.
“I will play through the tunnel!” cried the jolly fiddler
And half his boast came true,
“Stamp time and follow my tune above!”
But he lost them half way through.
A. The Ballad of Susan Nobes
‘Come out in the dark lane, lonely boy,
Leave your laptop and play with me.
Leave your father and mother and holiday home
For my wildwood and wicked sea.’
A gone-tomorrow full-moon face
In bonnet and Sunday best;
A goose ran up and down my flesh,
My hair stood stiff as a crest.
‘I’d die to hold a girl like you,
So fashion-hungry thin
But fear there is no heart behind
That sly come-hither grin.
‘There’s maggots in your Sunday best,
Your bony heroine chic’s
A shade too grave about your mouth,
Your vulture-grinning beak.’
‘I’ve been Death’s bride two hundred years
And much too young to die,
Let me take you back to 1819,
The Fifth Day of July.’
The Squire rode down my father’s door
‘All hands to the pump!’ honked he.
‘Sir, I’m weary from working your bone-dry fields,
‘My family hath need of me!’
‘You’re weary from working my golden fields
But my House expects a neighbour
And my Stream has dried in the lower field
And my Pump demands your labour.’
Our childish shrieks filled the heaven-blue
Played hide and seek round the paves
Laughed under the leaves of Eden-green
And kiss-chased through the graves.
The tardy teacher at the gate,
Seized my pretty lobes,
My spray of pretty graveyard flowers:
‘You’re a hell child, Susan Nobes!’
The sunlit schoolroom candle burned
A flame that barely lightened;
A stroke before the clock struck nine
It devilishly brightened.
A growl and rumble at the door,
As dark as pitch in the room,
A sizzling hiss, like a snake on the roof,
An ear-exploding boom.
‘Prayer,’ scorned the teacher, ‘is stronger than rain!’
The dark began to splinter
In lightning tongues as bright as noon,
It grew as cold as winter.
‘God save us!’ screamed the children all,
The teacher tore her gown,
The rain came down in ice and hail,
The sky turned upside down.
A stained glass window-angel smashed,
I kneeled and tried to pray,
A fiery crack of sulphur took
My girlish breath away.
The flickering lightning licked the tower,
Scorched a yard-wide hole in the wall
And from where my Saviour hung on high
Great blocks began to fall.
‘O Robert, our Susan’s lost in the storm.
What kept you away so long?’
‘The Squire needed water, he got his wish,
But where is our daughter gone?’
‘I sent her to Sunday School, oh Robert,
And I fear my choice was cursed.
For none alive has seen such a Flood
Of gravesoil in the church.
He forged the cross under baked Dove Hill
Its Wash rolled like a tide,
He climbed over hill to the rain-drenched crowd
And took the teacher aside.
‘Where’s Susan?’ he said, as quiet as Death,
‘I believe she is with her Saviour.’
‘You left her alone in the schoolroom and fled?’
His question got no answer.
He waded past the porchway Flood,
The font they’d named his daughter
And into a schoolroom as chill as the tomb
Awash with blocks and mortar.
He found me lifeless upon the floor,
My temples charred with flame,
He clenched me in his arms and wept
A tide he’ll never stem.
‘Come out in the dark lane, lonely boy,
Leave your laptop and play with me.
Leave your father and mother and holiday home
For my wildwood and wicked sea.’
October
A. The Ballad of Bob of Lynn
and see my Lynn news feature on Sir Robert Walpole and Houghton Hall here
Knight of the slightly drooping Garter,
King of Bankrupt Hall,
Lord of the Backstairs Tower Tryst,
Stout Adam of the Fall.
Richeldis, Julian, Sawtrey, Nelson,
Boleyn and Boudicca tall,
Margery, Fanny, Horace, Turnip,
Old Tom Paine and all-
Norfolk and good our heroes stand
With something pure about them
But none more Norfolk King-ing good
Than Dodgy Bob of Houghton.
Sir Robert Walpole, King of Sink,
The Pharaoh of the Flaw,
The ruddy cunning Norfolk bumpkin
Loophole in the Law.
The first Prime Minister and still
Unequalled in that office;
The backwoods front-man, laughing loud,
The Prince of Peace – and Profits.
The Age he named is hero-free,
No killers boldly go,
They keep it off the syllabus,
No children need to know.
No Bonnie Charlie anthems, saints,
No bagpipe calls to arms;
Just German Georges 1 and 2,
Enlightenment and farms.
The beau, the rake, the dandy, fop,
The mistress-paying knights,
The hypocrite with itchy palm:
‘All these men have their price.’
Sir Robert Walpole, Count of Cash,
The Pharaoh of the Flaw,
The ruddy cunning Norfolk bumpkin
Loophole in the Law.
‘Too far from London’ raised his Babel
Under a Norfolk bushel
The Neptune and Britannia Rampant
Counting House as Castle.
His bust and Caesar hairdo placed
A British cut above
The classic Mantle he assumed
Of Wisdom, Justice, Love.
Removed the timber duty while
He ordered his supplies,
Avoided Finished Buildings tax
With one unfinished frieze.
Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Ease,
The Pharaoh of the Flaw,
The ruddy cunning Norfolk bumpkin
Loophole in the Law.
Our burly boisterous backhand Bob
Was bawdy in his cups
Had heart-to-hearts with kings and queens
And kept the common touch.
Yet when the South Sea Bubble burst
And drowned both Whig and Tory,
He saved the country with a speech
And rode the tide to glory
Avoided War for eighteen years
Of Profit weighed with cost,
‘They ring the bells, they’ll wring their hands,’
He said when Peace was lost.
Sir Robert Loophole, Laughing Bob,
The Prophet of the Flaw,
The ruddy cunning Norfolk bumpkin
Loophole in the Law.
B. The Ballad of Turnip Townshend
He took the job that couldn’t be done.
By God, he couldn’t do it!
He ploughed against his inner grain
And stuck his foot right through it.
His fits of spleen were legendary
At cant and contradictions,
A bladed feather-spitting lord,
‘A slave to brutal passions.’
‘Perplexed and slow in argument,
Inelegant in language’,
They sent him to the House of Lords;
He spoke like Wurzel Gummidge.
The voice of Norfolk at the court,
Its Lord Lieutenant he;
He’d die of apoplexy but
He lives in every tree.
For where the peasant cock is plucked
By peasants on internships,
He turns the Earth in cultured hand:
He’s wonderful with turnips.
As Foreign Secretary he schemed
Though briefed to keep the peace
Alliances against our friends
And with our enemies.
A diplomat who spurned to spin
A web of subterfuge,
He told it bluntly as it was,
Offensively and huge.
When Walpole, brother to his wife
Presumed to doubt his words,
He collared his old bon ami
And both went for their swords.
‘Usurping Bob!’ ‘You Viscount, Sir!
And haughty in your carriage!’
And haunted by the Raynham ghost,
The relic of his marriage.
She walks the corridors at night
In brown dressed as his wife;
They say he killed her in his wrath
Who loved her more than life.
But where the peasant cock is plucked
By peasants on internships,
He turns the Earth in cultured hand:
He’s wonderful with turnips.
He led the Revolution from
A rich man’s high estate
Made model farming a la mode,
Enlightened stall and gate.
He made a science of the sod,
An Athens of the yard,
Went Dutch with clover and sainfoin,
He barned and hedged and marled.
He showed the world his meat and veg,
His four rotation art
And made a well-bred vanguard of
The Norfolk cattle cart.
‘What small proportion of your farm,
Stout yeoman, is in turnips;
This ought not, cannot, be allowed,
Make hedges of your churn dips!’
For where the peasant cock is plucked
By peasants on internships,
He turns the Earth in cultured hand:
He’s wonderful with turnips.
I wrote this ballad on two trains from Cambridge to Brighton on National Poetry Day 2014. A musician who read the EDP Weekend feature has since asked to put this ballad to music and I'll be gutted now if he doesn't.
National Poetry Day Anthem Oct 2
After Auschwitz, what heart lyrical?
After our Heimweh of everyday hell, what rose-desk and quill?
Through the barbed wire, your Smile radiates,
Making my thorniest garland thrive; my bloom makes you ill.
Our affair’s hopeless. Stop asking a
Man to start dying of love whom all his life’s trained to kill.
Yours a Zeitgeist of such subtlety,
Stopping the cork is futile, against the triumphant will.
Yours to take home the heart’s ultimate
Victory, conquer the blitzed out ‘I’, the real Self fulfil.
Master a heart-race past all dreaming of,
Lebensraum wine by the Ocean- ah, but who’ll pay the bill?
Answer, “Heart speech is love’s melody.
Tune in. My rhythm will work yours free as no other will.”
Love’s the sole song so stop wandering
Jugend, away from the foot; get started up Lovers’ Hill
read the full sequence here
After our Heimweh of everyday hell, what rose-desk and quill?
Through the barbed wire, your Smile radiates,
Making my thorniest garland thrive; my bloom makes you ill.
Our affair’s hopeless. Stop asking a
Man to start dying of love whom all his life’s trained to kill.
Yours a Zeitgeist of such subtlety,
Stopping the cork is futile, against the triumphant will.
Yours to take home the heart’s ultimate
Victory, conquer the blitzed out ‘I’, the real Self fulfil.
Master a heart-race past all dreaming of,
Lebensraum wine by the Ocean- ah, but who’ll pay the bill?
Answer, “Heart speech is love’s melody.
Tune in. My rhythm will work yours free as no other will.”
Love’s the sole song so stop wandering
Jugend, away from the foot; get started up Lovers’ Hill
read the full sequence here
September
SCOTCH MIST
(Culloden 1746)
Hear it here
So this is how it ends, Silent and Slow,
Upended in these Marshes, Letting Go.
The Pain twists red but greys into the Sky
And soon will fade, like Life’s Brief Mist, and Die.
The Way I’m fleeing no MacDonald harrows,
No claymore in my Scarlet Target burrows.
I Retreat, without Regret, from this Life
Leaving daughters, an Unprotected Wife,
A Mother: ‘Son you’re all I have’ she said,
‘It’s hard to Let You Go’ and still I’m dead.
The April Blows hard, the hills stream with Song,
My gorsed Path keeps going, but I am Gone.
I fought for a Country, though not to stay
And maybe for Duke, but mostly for Pay.
The Ape who struck off my Name from the Roll
Does it for Clan-Chief and with his Whole Soul,
For Soil in which all his Tribe will be laid
While I enjoy a Private Grave.
Keen as Thistle, they hunt Us like Game
Then, drunk with Victory, go Home again;
Yet they break the first Rule, cardinal Sin:
Never Give Combat Unless You Can Win.
And Die by One Law, One Protestant Line;
One Uniform Road to run Unchanging
Over my Body, through Heather and Fens,
Prehistoric Stones and Scotch-misted Glens
And all Ancient Haunts of kilted Clansmen:
A Race gone West, and my Spirit with them.
Wherever you go, it’s still you,
The wind maun blaw the same.
This Scottish moon must mourn my bones,
Her nightingale my name.
Notes: An English soldier is killed at Culloden, the battle that decisively settled the future of Britain... (though watch this space). The close-knit tribal society of the Highland Scots, Romantic and attractive in many ways, was defeated by a mercenary one, organised around capital and paid labour, that would soon be imposing itself on colonies all over the world. I will probably do this at the Wolf Folk Club this Thursday Sep 18. The poem was broadcast and discussed here in a 1992 BBC Radio interview with Iain Meikle.
August
A. The Ballad of Sedgeford
He came from the north and killed my kin
And I curse him with my bones;
Cuthbert and Carl confronted him
For their husband-hood and homes.
Cuthbert was kingly, stood strong and straight
And he spoke the stranger fair,
‘Wanderer, you’re welcome to fire and food
But your seax must stand out there.’
‘Brave words for a bondsman, no soldier you,
Your nose and your knuckles unbroken!’
‘We are farmers and freemen,’ called Carl at his shoulder,
His axe held a threat unspoken.
‘Who’s the woman behind you?’ the stranger spat
And Carl’s face blushed with blood,
Cuthbert restrained him with kingly hand,
Then grovelled into the mud.
A hack from the heel had hobbled his ham,
Broken his pride at the knee;
Another shattered his jaw from his head,
No face any longer had he.
Carl hoisted axe like a hulk to an oak,
The oak heaved a blade of its own,
Crowned Carl like a cowering coney caught
In the hole of its hearth and home.
‘Meet the thegn of your village, hall, ovens, gate,
You’re now all working for me!
The run of the mill, port, sedge, ford and stream
And defences I oversee.
‘Wench with that frown on your face like a stone
In your lengthening tooth, take heed!’
He cut off Carl’s head from its grounded corpse,
Held it high for the village to see.
He heaved off Carl’s ear and threw it at me,
Took Cuthbert’s and did the same,
‘Knit me a necklace of killed coward ears,
Then tell me your pretty name.’
‘Carl was my blood-kin; I’m Cuthbert’s wife
By priest and the Christian God.’
‘Bring me this priest and his high-throat by Thor,
I’ll throttle and throw to my dogs.’
‘We serve the monastery up on the hill ’
The priest said, his high voice lost
In the thundering laughter of Seax the Dane,
‘By my village it will be bossed!’
The villagers came up from river, from woods,
From oven-sheds and from smelting,
From barley fields, wheat-fields, sheep-hill and plot,
From kitchens and chapel-praying.
‘In these dread doubtful days of burning barns
And ovens and houses raided,
I will head and protect you, my weald on the Wash
Will never be invaded.’
‘Now wench, to my bed, your master and mate!’
The priest kneeled to beg his mercy,
‘Sir, widows must mourn and women must choose
The master they will marry.’
Thegn Seax the Dane had an answer that had
The little priest thinking double,
A blade to the brain and a broken skull
To thank him for his trouble.
I buried my kin as East as I could
At night in the ancient boneyard
And tended the priest for four raving weeks
Till he took his bark to the stars.
Now I serve my master Seax the Dane
In a life that has lost all reason
And his steaming oysters and coneys I cook
And with nightshade daily season.
Cuthbert and Carl confronted him
For their husband-hood and homes;
He came from the north and killed my kin
And I curse him with my bones.
B. The Ballad of Susan Nobes
‘Come out in the dark lane, lonely boy,
Leave your laptop and play with me.
Leave your father and mother and holiday home
For my wildwood and wicked sea.’
A gone-tomorrow full-moon face
In bonnet and Sunday best;
A goose ran up and down my flesh,
My hair stood stiff as a crest.
‘I’d die to hold a girl like you,
So fashion-hungry thin
But fear there is no heart behind
That sly come-hither grin.
‘There’s maggots in your Sunday best,
Your bony heroine chic’s
A shade too grave about your mouth,
Your vulture-grinning beak.’
‘I’ve been Death’s bride two hundred years
And much too young to die,
Let me take you back to 1819,
The Fifth Day of July.’
The Squire rode down my father’s door
‘All hands to the pump!’ honked he.
‘Sir, I’m weary from working your bone-dry fields,
‘My family hath need of me!’
‘You’re weary from working my golden fields
But my House expects a neighbour
And my Stream has dried in the lower field
And my Pump demands your labour.’
Our childish shrieks filled the heaven-blue
Played hide and seek round the paves
Laughed under the leaves of Eden-green
And kiss-chased through the graves.
The tardy teacher loomed at the gate,
Seized me by my pretty lobes,
Snatched back my posy of burial flowers
‘You’re a hell child, Susan Nobes!’
The sunlit schoolroom candle burned
A flame that barely lightened;
A stroke before the clock struck nine
It devilishly brightened.
A growl and rumble at the door,
As dark as pitch in the room,
A sizzling hiss, like a snake on the roof,
An ear-exploding boom.
‘Prayer,’ scorned the teacher, ‘is stronger than rain!’
The dark began to splinter
In lightning tongues as bright as noon,
It grew as cold as winter.
‘God save us!’ screamed the children all,
The teacher tore her gown,
The rain came down in ice and hail,
The sky turned upside down.
A stained glass window-angel smashed,
I kneeled and tried to pray,
A fiery crack of sulphur took
My girlish breath away.
The flickering lightning licked the tower,
Scorched a yard-wide hole in the wall
And from where my Saviour hung on high
Great blocks began to fall.
‘O Robert, our Susan’s lost in the storm.
What kept you away so long?’
‘The Squire needed water, he got his wish,
But where is our daughter gone?’
‘I sent her to Sunday School, oh Robert,
And I fear my choice was cursed.
For none alive has seen such a Flood
Of gravesoil in the church.
He forged the cross under baked Dove Hill
Its Wash rolled like a tide,
He climbed over hill to the rain-drenched crowd
And took the teacher aside.
‘Where’s Susan?’ he asked, as quiet as Death,
‘I believe she is with her Saviour.’
‘You left her alone in the schoolroom and fled?’
His question got no answer.
He waded past the porchway Flood,
The font they’d named his daughter
And into a schoolroom as chill as the tomb
Awash with blocks and mortar.
He found me lifeless upon the floor,
My temples charred with flame,
He clenched me in his arms and wept
A tide he’ll never stem.
‘Come out in the dark lane, lonely boy,
Leave your laptop and play with me.
Leave your father and mother and holiday home
For my wildwood and wicked sea.’
July
A
The Ballad of Fiddlers Hill
Ye feasters up on Fiddler’s Hill
Where crossroads meet the harrow
Take care you don’t disturb the sleeping
Bronze Age burial barrow.
O shun this ground between dusk and dawn
Or live a dreadful tale
Of a Black Monk at the tunnel’s mouth
To turn your red lips pale.
Don’t follow the fiddler and his dog
To Walsingham under the hill
To lay the foul Benedictine ghost:
That fiddler lays there still.
“I will play through the tunnel!” cried the jolly fiddler
To the cheering local crowd,
“Stamp time and follow my tune above,
For I play both brave and loud.”
And so he fiddled and so they stamped
His three mile course underground
But his fiddle stopped under Fiddler’s Hill
In the silence of the mound.
Each dared the next down the tunnel’s mouth
But none would dare themselves
And at midnight the fiddler’s dog emerged
Like a hound bewitched by the elves.
His tail thrust down between his legs,
His frame a shivering wrack,
He howled and pined at the dreadful hole
But his master never came back.
“I will play through the tunnel!” cried the jolly fiddler
To the cheering local crowd,
“Stamp time and follow my tune above,
For I play both brave and loud.”
A violent storm drove everyone home
And when they awoke from sleep
The entrance was gone, the fiddler too,
Into a Nameless Deep.
The moral of this, and it’s old as the hill,
Is that mounds aren’t for tunnelling,
If a grave tune plucks the strings of your heart,
Keep the devil under your chin.
In this county of beet and barley and beer,
This county of fish and farrow,
There’s folk you can trust, there’s London folk,
And there’s folk who come out of a barrow.
“I will play through the tunnel!” cried the jolly fiddler
And half his boast came true,
“Stamp time and follow my tune above!”
But he lost them half way through.
The Mission
Faith, give Hiroshima’s Homer and Dante inspiration.
Love’s ailing craft tardis-drones in its base like a dying swan.
"Ego’s the aggregate of ages of ignorant action
Dying by Love," tweets a Faith that involves Evolution.
Thunder and lightning is blasting Creation, Eve and Adam
Hitting the deck, but your Eye of the storm is my safe haven.
“Earth has been Wasted,” croaks Pelles the Maimed king, “the Grail removed
Deep into Inner Space, angels retreating from mass destruction.”
“Find me the Grail and the Earth will be Saved,” trills Pelles’ fair
Daughter, “and I’ll be your Queen for all Time. All else is vacuum.”
“Show us your route map,” old History retweets, “of Love’s ascent
IN to the lover, through heartland’s unveiled desolation.”
Death twitters “Name?” And I see it engraved, all it stood for, in
Immortal places…But Love is the self’s uncreation.
“Who? who are you? skypes Your forefinger. - “Nothing, without loving
You! All I am’s what I’ve done and can’t undo to unbecome.”
“You are the Ocean of Love’ You spell out, to my broken but
Unbursting bubble of dream, “I have come to awaken.”
“Father of Auschwitz, the ant and the sparrow that falls, what love?"
Avatar Silence howls. "I am as One there with All, and None.
Love whispers, “Dance off your spy-story ‘Who’ in a seven-veiled
Thrilling romance of divinest Whodunnit detection.”
“Who?” as my platform is churned into bubbles by Cyclonic
Rain, “Find Nirvana from Auschwitz!” You howl through the station.
This is from a sequence called "Dr Who and the Zen Trails of Hafiz" which itself is part of a new book called "No Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, or Six Degrees of Separation; Seven Degrees of Love". It's what happened instead of other plans I had for July.
June
Balls and Bras
Football is balls: needs pumped up balls to play
And all the hype comes down at last to balls
And as that US star Reveals Her All
(Well, sponsor-labelled sportsbra anyway)
To breathless world photographers, to say
WE’VE WON THE WOMEN’S FIRST WORLD CUP! it’s all
The culture of the buck, sharp market stalls
Of bluff and thrust, done derring deals, wha-hae!
But, O, when Stuart Pearce was on the spot
He’d failed to hit in World Cup Italy
(His name in running blood on England’s walls)
And flew across the Wembley turf and shot,
A nation’s trembling heart in mouth, to see
The world he kicked thump in, what - massive- balls!
Note: And so to Bra-zil. Will it come to another penalty shoot out this time? And THIS time will we be ready...?
The Beautiful Game
Football is art’s reflection of oneness
In a world of divisions; of beauty’s truth
Leaping muscle-bound fouls; the dreams of youth
Without its injured ordinariness
Or age’s silting of its genius;
The Best without its thickening uncouth
Slurred self-disgrace or bruising disproof
By yobs in boots; the angel dance of studs:
- Like Pele’s pass, to gift a certain goal
He’d made his own, to some more mortal bloke
He knew without a call or look was there;
- Or Maradonna’s second that turned a whole
Defence, a childhood’s poverties, to air
More light than hand of God or head of coke.
Football's Coming Home (ie England get the plane home from the World Cup early)
My daughter loves Thierry Henry
Not only for the same reasons as me.
And when we go away, she brings her brain
And shops for cool clothes on the day of the game
And girls can look great in ways Rooney doesn't
And blokes can be prickly and smell unpleasant
But "Three Lions On The Shirt" always makes me cry
And I know it's all balls but I'm England till I die.
Note: and I die whenever I see Micky 'This is all about Me' Rooney's face sending us all down the Suarez. This title was suggested by Adrian Tebbutt at Gin Trap Folk.
May
The May King
I am the May King, sometimes called Arthur.
My nemesis is Mordred, the winter king,
God of darkness, death and evil, betokened by Mordor.
My strength waxes and wanes like the summer.
I die but I always return when you need me.
I am the Light at the end of the world.
At the end of the world,
Death-cries in long-axed waves on the wind,
The howling of sea-wolves
Breaking from thick throats like heart’s hope
At the end of the world,
The cry of a thousand farmboys dead...
Surrendering ground for thundering hooves to sunder the Saxon.
Space to die in
Or my name’s not Arthur...
The May King, the Winter King, the May King…
The Green Man
A lost summer country hollow Inn,
The Green Man, cheering on a Great British win
An Avalon that isn’t there in the morning…
A red dragon flying down the wing
making a green May
Of midfield, defence and keeper
Before cutting loose
An unstoppable angled drive,
Then holding aloft the Holy Grail…
A dream awoken to this light’s cold day
Where in spite of my shin-struck, wounded need
For Arthur to return like a lost summer
On thundering hooves in defence of these islands,
He doesn’t come back…
Goodbye green man, goodbye lost king of May,
European grail winner, Best knight.
Goodbye red dragon on a green field.
Nothing could un-mast your glory,
Your beauty’s truth leaping muscle-bound fouls
The dreams of youth without its injured ordinariness
Or age’s silting of its genius,
The best without the thickening uncouth
Slurred self-disgrace, the bruising disproof
Of the mean,
The tarnishing insinuations of time,
The drip-drip discrediting
Of a hero.
And he was never called ‘Arthur’.
And he was never mediaeval and never a king.
And who cares? Not Me. I stand on this tumulus
Of boyhood, his monk-buried legend
Scarred in my flesh, his doubt-defying
Desperate defence of wonder (which
Is what he was) an earth ditch like mine;
His weapons, toys of tin and strapped wood and skin,
Like mine, on a May hill that may have been Badon
Scene of the final Battle of Light over Darkness,
And may have not, blades of peaceful grass troubled only -
And not just now - by rain, wind and ghosts
And a White Horse, God-large in memory,
God-large still.
This sequence tells the story of The May King as represented by King Arthur, King of The Lost Land, and of The Green Man. Old legends tell of a character who stumbles into a perfect evening of heavenly food, drink and company in some tavern or castle, generally ending upstairs in a bedroom with the partner of his or her dreams, who then awakes to find himself on a cold hillside in the morning. And no trace of the castle or tavern. He has stumbled into fairyland. He then spends the rest of his days wretchedly trying to find the way back. This isn't so mythical. We came out of the Glastonbury Festival one year and spent a perfect night in a pub in a hollow - called The Green Man - it was the world cup and England were winning for once. Everyone was happy, the beer and banquet was divine. The next day we decided to go back there for lunch and wasted the entire afternoon lost and grumpy in fruitless lanes, with no hollow in sight. On a psychological level, it also happens: the eternal search for that grail-winning World Cup triumph of 1966 that never comes again and George Best winning the grail of the European Cup in 1968 with a divine talent he himself could only dream of by 1971. All this comes into 'The Green Man.' I performed it at 7 pm on May 3rd as part of my contribution to the Elsing Mayday Free The Green Man Festival, at which I have the honour to bring in the May at 2 pm.
April
Nut Job in a Nutshell. Ye Page 3 interviews Julian of Norwich.
Well, Julie. Where do you see yourself in five years?
Julian. Now-here.
‘Julian’. Why the bloke’s name? You after a bishopric?
Anchoresses don’t need names. It’s the name of my local church. St Julian’s.
So you get in here a lot, yeah?
I’m in here all the time. We’ve kind of grown together.
Nice. Like flint and mortar?
Like ship and anchor.
So are you going to see it through with Norwich or are you looking for a move?
I’m not going anywhere.
Do you have a life? - I mean outside of church?
I never leave this cell. And no-one’s allowed in.
Except a doctor of course?
No-one. I am beyond the grave already.
So how did you get into all this? And how old were you?
Thirty and a half. I saw Christ’s blood trickling down from my deathbedside crucifix under the crown of thorns hot and fresh and right plenteously... like the drops of water that fall off the house’s eaves after a great shower of rain-
Where and when was this?
Death’s door. May 8 1373.
Can we nail it down to an exact time?
3 pm.
How many visions exactly!?
Sixteen.
In one day? Will you be having any others?
God knows.
The same God who wanted you walled you up against the church with the burial service read over you?! Dead to the world!
But attached to it. My visions weren’t just for me but for everyone.
So what do you do with yourself in there all day?
Give counsel to visitors through this aperture. Meditate on the meaning of my visions. Write my book Revelations of Divine Love.
So what does Divine Love feel like? Nice?
(patiently) Like a thorn in God’s side.
Which side?
(pats left side) His female side.
Nice. And has God’s female side got a message for Page 3?
God said not, Thou shalt not be travailed, dis-eased
Tempested, just not be overcome. I saw Him
Shew into my mind a nut. And perceived
This is the reason we are not at ease
Of heart and soul, that we seek in this thing
That is so little, where no rest is in,
Its Maker, Who is very rest….Yet we
May run to Him (and all shall be well)
As a frightened child to its mother and he will lead us
By his open side to his blessed breast,
Bearing us on the Cross, giving birth to us,
The Father truly our Mother in Christ Jesus,
And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
Can we get a picture of the breast?
Like Homage to Fanny, this is part of my spring tour with the Familiars, Spoken Word, Spooky Folk and Wild (Norfolk) Women. If you don't know anything about Mother Julian or her cell in St Julian's Alley off King St, it's well worth finding out. Her cell is still there and you can visit. It's very peaceful. I have a feature in The EDP's weekend pull out on April 5 comparing Margery Kempe of Lynn and Mother Julian of Norwich, which gives a fair amount of basic information.
March
Homage To Fanny
Shelley fainted when he heard Coleridge read his poem Christabel, which describes a femme fatale with eyes in her breasts. He summed up the Romantic agony as ‘I fall upon the thorns of life. I bleed!’ In September 1811 Fanny Burney endured, and described with classical precision, a mastectomy without anaesthetic.
From the toads in the halls of your riverside Lynn’s
Harpies amid the harpsichords, to High Society and sin
In the Robes of Queen Charlotte, Blue Stocking works
Joshing with Johnstons, Garricks, Montagus and Burkes
Of bad manners and bad hearts, of a King completely mad,
Your tongue like a whip between the ingénue and cad.
Your arms, so much gentler than Madame Guillotine,
Napoleoned by a General of the ancien regime;
Your eye and ear sharper, your stories so well fit
Of the innocent Eve blessed with beauty and wit
In a fallen world, graduating, through long adversity
(Like your devourer, Jane Austen) from that University.
And when ‘dreadful’ French steel plunged into your breast
Undeadened through ‘veins, arteries, nerves, flesh’
They told you – needlessly - ‘not to restrain
The cries’, the twenty minute scream, the ‘pain
Undiminished as the knife withdrew’
‘The resisting grain of the flesh when applied anew,
Describing a curve’, the wound’s edge ‘sharply teared’
‘Dividing the dreadful gland from where it adhered,
Scraping the remnant, racking the breastbone
For atom after atom’, for ‘some further requisition…’
You Britishly fainted twice, twice addressed your doctors
‘Que je vous plains’ (I pity you) and ‘Give me warning Sirs!’
Napoleon’s surgeon, famously battle-brave,
Streaked with your iron blood, bore a face like the grave.
Your eye’s steely balls (General Ether uninvented)
Hermetically sealed, lids into their cheeks indented
Showed you the rose of real life without the opiate weed-y
‘I fall upon the thorns of life. I bleed-y’
Of romantic death. You survived as long again
-No slur on our angel of the Peterloo pen -
As Shelley’s whole lifetime beating his chest
In Romantic agony, when, by Coleridge addressed,
He fainted at a phantom with eyes in her breasts.
For the sharp-seeing heart, Fanny, yours are the best.
Gareth Calway 2014
Notes: I almost gave myself a mastectomy reading her description of hers, endured without anaesthetic in Paris in 1811. The Shelley references are to a public reading of Coleridge's Christabel in which hearing of Geraldine's eye-nippled breasts, the young Romantic fainted. His famous statement of the Romantic agony - 'I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed' - bears comparison with Burney's more surgical - classical and female - experience of bleeding here. This poem forms part of my forthcoming (April) tour with the fabulously talented Familiars - Spoken Word, Spooky Folk and Wild (Norfolk) Women.
February
Oliver's Army
(for Thomas Patrick )
I met Noll Cromwell’s hacked-off head
And he didn’t look very well
Says I to Cromwell, why the long face?
Says he, I’ve come from hell.
Though my name is blood in Ireland until
The last ever trumpet sounds,
Though shed and shedder’s have long since run
Together in Catholic grounds,
Though I stained the Pale from green to red,
In Sixteen Forty Nine,
Still the grave robbers chop and spike my head
For an English capital crime.
Yet I chopped off the head of a tyrannous king
And a traitor to his land
Forged an English Republican Army
With Bible and sword in hand.
O, they dig up my body, chop off my head,
And spike it on Westminster Hall
Not for my high over-righteous zeal
But for my Republican gall.’
‘Cut off his head with the crown upon it,
God damn this King!’ I cried,
‘Only tyrants will tremble, recalling this day,
Good men recall it with pride.’
One king on the scaffold, one head on the block,
One royal rascal dead,
The only ten years of all English history
With the English at its head.
I gave every sinner a chance and a choice,
Even bishops and knights and kings,
And the England we cut to a Common wealth
Was a high, revolutionary thing.
That King signed a war pact with papists,
The old foe, his fingers crossed:
‘Better the Irish you know how to cheat
Than the Roundhead who can’t be bossed.’
O, they dig up my body, chop off my head,
And spike it on Westminster Hall
Not for my high over-righteous zeal
But for my Republican gall.’
And that dim old King’s son would have Scotched us
With an unforgiving kirk
Though they hated him like the devil he was
And he spat on their holy work.
I Scotched their alliance of haggled souls
With a miracle at Dunbar
And the Britain I ruled with a sword of steel
Was gentler-bridled far.
But I stained the Drogheda green to red
Where green was the wasted colour,
Of Catholic wiping out Catholic in arms
And brother reducing brother
And I drowned your father’s town in blood,
And gave your home to my soldiers
And sent native Irish to Connacht or hell,
Twixt death and a barren boulder.
O, they dig up my body, chop off my head,
And spike it on Westminster Hall
Not for my high over-righteous zeal
But for my Republican gall.’
The greatest England for four hundred years
And its meanest act in Drogheda
And though they might send me to Connacht for one
They send me to hell for the other.
O, they dig up my body, chop off my head,
And spike it on Westminster Hall
Not for my high over-righteous zeal
But for my Republican gall.’
© Gareth Calway 2012
Notes: This poem is a dialogue with the ghost of my Drogheda grandfather. Oliver Cromwell’s embalmed body was exhumed from its royal tomb two years after death on the orders of the restored Stuart King, Charles II. His corpse was disgraced, beheaded at Tyburn, the head spiked on a traitor’s pole and the body thrown into a pit. But not for the Irish campaign. He was a Puritan rebel with a ‘good old cause’ who led the successful and progressive opposition to Charles I’s tyranny. He inspired Milton (Paradise Lost) and Marvell. His brutal Irish policy was no different from English kings before and since, merely more efficient and less compromised ( as was Charles I's) by the devious hoodwinking of the Irish that in return for support there might be a restored Catholic monarchy in London. All this has obscured Cromwell's advanced superiority as a political thinker and practical Head of State and army to many in England at the time and in marked contrast to all the Stuarts. (Charles I managed to declare war on both sides of the Thirty Years War, without the means to do so, and ended up paying reparations to both.) There is a context as bloody as the Thirty Years War and as deep as the Reformation to Cromwell's behaviour at Drogheda and that he wasn't there to play football but to secure England against Catholic French or Spanish invasion from Ireland by winning a campaign at least cost to his fever-ravaged men. But it was a dreadful blot on his usually enlightened record. And I believe it’s stopped him becoming a rousing hero of the folk tradition. Alas, that Drogheda 1649 was where he effectively became the leader of our only Republic.
The Worm That Turned
i’m a creep
a real crawler
no backbone
at all, a
low, humble
grinder, base
mouth full
of soil, a
wet, writhing
hyper-
sensed slave
to all, a
chill, faceless
horror, tight-lipped
toothless
scrawl, a
dim, brainless
shrinker from
harm, a cringing
coil, but a-
live!
and i can turn
To a snake in the grass, or in your bosom,
(Or under a garland of bright apple blossom),
Moving you deep in your bowels:
Subtly developed, sophisticated,
Staring through hooded, lidless eyes
At a dense underworld, dimmed, deaf as Dis,
Feeling my sniff-flicking way with my tongue,
With a wriggle of ribs, swift-scaling the dust,
Dumb, unless rattled, when, breath caught, I hiss.
I’m
Puffed up with sluggish irritation,
Stitched in a dead skin, a splintered vision,
Excreted through rocks like fear, or birth,
Charmed by your writhing arms, scared of sticks,
The dinosaur undead, too potent to handle,
Daemonic, divine, river written in the stars,
Smooth poison keeping Creation sweet,
The dragon. Get off of my back or I’ll strike you.
You’ve wanted me always, under your heel.
I performed this a couple of times during my winter tour of Cromwell's Talking Head, not that there is anything worm-like about Crom. I was aiming more at the Norwich Dragon Festival, which, in the 17C Puritan stronghold of Norwich, would have doubtless gone down well... First performance was on Folkspot radio at Great Massingham on Feb 2 - lots of yonge folke in - and then even more memorably at Jurnet's Bar Undercroft storytelling event (run by Dave Tonge The yarnsmith of Norwich) on Feb 5. Storytelling as an art form is probably more concerned with casting a spell by ritual repetitions of narrative elements and a kind of freewheeling engagement with the audience and less with actual word music and the theatre of a speech by heart delivered 'in role' than I am with this monologue but in that amazing place and before that audience of connoisseurs I put myself under a spell by the end, let alone anyone else.
January
An Elsing Wassail (for Tim)
rocking up a few miles from Nowhere Lane
past a church rubbing shoulders with an Eternal Then
across low fields
of mud-chastened pasture
and shoots of corn the green
‘green’ used to be
when the world was young,
where winter girls with summer eyes
meet cider apple-cheeked boys
in the bleak midwinter
and kisses hang in the air
like wind-fallen apples kept young and fresh
in january’s natural fridge
outside the crinkly crone’s kitchen door
breaking the norfolk village winter silence
for though summer is lost as eden
and frozen as fallen rain
with a waes heal and a freeman’s shout
we call it back again
passing the frozen summer ghost
of a packed village hall millennium-airily Now
walking across the shingle in tudor shoes
speaking with sonnet tongues
coming out together
to a breath-taking full may moon over the church
windows glinting
like texts of mediaeval latin
seeing silver mermaids
pale-green cornfields
paradise in a norfolk acre,
an island of apple trees,
west of the dragon sunset
bark haven of the may king,
the winter king, under its boughs
until his blossoming return in our hour of need,
for though summer is lost as eden
and frozen as fallen rain
with a waes heal and a freeman’s shout
we call it back again
the norfolk green man, bush-bearded, twig-hatted, grinning
his healthy disdain for health & safety,
triple-torches the timid evening
and leads the norse-unabatement society
whistling, rattling, stamping, drumming, cymballing, yelling, laughing
round the country bend and up the common or garden path
to the sleeping orchard of past, present and future,
where wrinkled boughs and twigs of talon wisdom
naked-eyed under the naked stars
host a bonfire of all the inanities
launching interplanetary fireflies on the wild wind
and a village shares its sweetmeats and toasts
its apple king and queen
tempting the robin to the boughs of its wassailing barque
as it floats on a tide of good company
back to the jigging mermaid
a bird in the cider bush with a whole summer in her hand
for though summer is lost as eden
and frozen as fallen rain
with a waes heal and a freeman’s shout
we call it back again.
(January 3 2014 - the first two verses as performed in the Mermaid on the night; the third verse added since)
© Gareth Calway 2014
poem of the month for December
A SIDE The Only Gift
‘A crown of thorns to freeze your breath
The berried holly brings;
Through snow-white sunlight chaste as death
The silent barn-owl wings
But now the ghostly holy dove
That bellows in your ear
Is tuned to robin-song by love
And cheerfully made clear.’
So the angels sang to Margery
The Visionary of Lynn
And from the fifteenth century
You can hear that robin sing.
Chorus.
The only gift left on the shelf
That nothing else can rise above,
Includes all treasures, lasts forever,
And grows when shared with others: love.
From teeth-bared heath and icy track,
To town the river glides
With Christmas sparkling on his back,
The diamond geyser rides,
Where starry angels on the tree
Grow larger in the dusk
To heaven-blue and Eden-green
And rose and reindeer-musk
And the checkouts ring for Tilly Hoe,
The Iceland girl from Lynn
And through the devil’s Ouse and row
She can hear that robin sing.
Chorus.
The only gift left on the shelf,
That nothing else can rise above,
Includes all treasures, lasts forever,
And grows when shared with others: love.
Note: The mediaeval visionary Margery Kempe of Bishop's Lynn heard messages from The Holy Spirit but they were so loud - like a bellows in her right ear - she asked God that it be changed to a robin's song. The prayer was granted as described. Tilly Hoe the Iceland girl from modern Lynn hears the same robin in another way.
A SIDE: (this is a double A side)
Real Wife (for Melanie)
(34th Wedding Anniversary Dec 1st; 35th Pagan Anniversary Dec 15)
We're not the teen-dream lovers of the songs
And films n’ soaps n’ mills n' boons n’ ads,
The 'hunters' living with their mums and dads,
The twenty-something dramas, dinging-dongs,
The sizzling catalogues of straps and thongs,
The Darcys, Juliets and golden lads
In modern strip from tales in which the cads
Are fifty-odd like us and cause all wrongs.
Our story didn't end like these above
In frozen celebrations, wedding-deaths;
We've raised a daughter into Now and Next,
We're grownups grown together, more or less,
Our romance is a realistic text:
A dangerous, married, grail-quest of true love.
Note: 'True love is no game for the faint hearted.' Meher Baba.
A Merry Christmas to all my readers. Especially all the people who attended my/our gigs this year.
POEM OF THE MONTH FOR NOVEMBER
(a tenth anniversary)
England Win The World Cup (1966/2003)
November rain and bales of mildewed hay,
The soil a cemetery of summer's yields,
A brief grey day of mud on lanes and fields
And everywhere the fragrance of decay
And on some field ten thousand miles away
The other side of Earth, a gritty heaven builds
That's made of sweat and English dreams, and gilds
An hour to last as long as England may.
And thirty seven years is laid to rest
As I remember an unbroken heart
That Beatled to a drum that couldn’t fail
Believing then that Britain was the best
At everything, believing now we’re part
Of something greater, striving for the grail.
Notes:
Two of the best moments of my life.
NATIONAL POETRY DAY./ POEM OF THE MONTH FOR OCTOBER
National Poetry Day - I wrote this at UEA in 1975 for a collection called Love Songs From A Dressing Room. I've recently extended it for inclusion in my UEA Murder Mystery (A Who Donne It and yes John Donne is involved) so it's both my most recent poem and my oldest. It is spoken by a character called Lancelot Knightley, a superficial character with hidden depths. I might even sing on it on the Britain's Got Talent if I can find the right girly backing band. All half-dressed in the worst possible mid-70s taste of course.
Disappearing Act
Watch me dance, baby,
Watch me kick off these shoes,
These are the steps
I pretended to use.
Watch this hat, baby,
Over both eyes
Watch how it tips
A wink to the wise.
Watch this shirt, baby,
Torn to the heart,
This is how love
Strips us of art.
I've worn the pants, babe,
But love's split the crutch,
I really have nothing
But what you can touch.
Now you see, baby,
How do you react?
Now you see what's behind
My disappearing act?
A monastery built
Out of concrete abstractions
For courtly lovers,
This college of Young Ones,
With nights tolling in
Along vertigo walkways
To freshers' balls
And red-bedded m’aidez. (maydays)
On his knight’s velvet sleeve
The lady-killer’s
Savaged heart unseen is
As crude as the miller’s.
I've worn the armour,
L’amour’s pierced the heart,
Unhorsed and outlanced
In a sensitive part.
Now you see, baby,
How do you react?
Now you see what's behind
My disappearing act?
POEM OF THE MONTH ANNOUNCES A NEW FEATURE. A B SIDE AND AN A SIDE (FOR THOSE WHO REMEMBER VINYL) B SIDES WERE WHERE BANDS COULD EXPERIMENT AND TAKE RISKS AWAY FROM THE COMMERCIAL GLARE OF THE A SIDE AND IN THE 60S IN PARTICULAR THERE WERE SOME MASTERPIECES OF EXPERIMENTATION. LIKE RAIN,
July 2013
A SIDE:
Writing For The New Humanity
If, instead of cowing and naying a sheepish congregation,
You beef so divinely it makes them feel human;
If you can tongue and bell with golden flesh a word
That tolls heaven back to earth, like the Eden in every bird;
If you can string the bow of learning to the arrow of intuition
And keep a faith that’s unafraid of critical reason
And score your heart in blood and swear it aloud
To a backwards-saddled, blinkered, farting holy-cattle crowd;
If you can shake the hand of the Am-Dram-thank-you-ham
Who lifts your tragic laurels with his prat Fall of Man;
If you’re wise to the one-book-brain of Simple Simon
Yet lost in the heart of a rose, not the tongue of a shaman;
If you can whittle your stake to an instrument that plays
A song beyond itself, not a reed that measures praise;
If you can give your art for some hard-earned recognition
That gets monk-eyed in the dark by a mirror-shaded demon;
And forget yourself, and the long quest to get it,
In one divine delicious self-annihilating lyric;
If you can follow Hafiz, not twisting as others have
The mouth of God to a trap of lies, yet be roasted as if you had;
The hart of love will lead you tripping lamb-like to the Psalter
And, what is more, you’ll be a writer, my daughter.
Notes: It's taken me years to get the 'If you can give your art...' couplet right and it reminds me much time and blood I used to spill rewriting the minutiae of poems. It had better be worth it because the fascination of what's difficult, or rather the torturous art of making it look easy, exacts a shocking price and doesn't have any immediate impact on the world it strives to serve. Nowadays, I am writing in so many other genres and also rehearsing and performing (just as hard in their own way but with swifter returns) that I'd almost forgotten what a beastly and miserable toil it is getting a poetic line right. But then it's a joy forever.
B SIDE
For to love her
For to love her for her looks lovely,
My heart was set in thought right firmly,
Trusting in truth to have had redress.
But she hath given me leave full honestly.
Yet do I not rejoice it greatly
For on my faith I loved too surely
And reason will that I do cease
For to love her.
Sithens that in love the pains been deadly,
Methinks that I will verily
Return me to my first address
For at this time too great is the press
And perils appear too abundantly
For to love her.
A cover. I'm performing this again - at an archaeological gig - on July 24, on ground made holy by ancient bones. It's from Tom and Harry, a play in which I have all the best lines (I think) because they have been written by Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Tudor flower of the English renaissance, bringing Italian and French forms alive in a broken-heart English . It is a joy to say these lines onstage. The ambiguity of 'looks' is just one of its many exquisite features.And - not being my own - I didn't even have to labour to make it beautiful.
May 2013
A SIDE (dedicated to David Beckham from The Beautiful Game
from 4. Something for The Weekend
Football is sex. When Beckham rammed that YEEEEEES
Down the crowd’s throat (with Campbell about to mount
Him behind) having opened his account
With England, and swivelled his hips like a lech
Because he’d scored with a country, no less,
The earth was moving for us all (our doubts
Stripped off, the World’s Cups in our grasp like founts
Of milk and honey) and joined our nakedness.
Sex at its very best, for what is sex
But love, or God, without the permanence,
A crude attempt at ending loneliness?
And what is football but a lonely crowd
Trying to score, a fallen Man, united,
Icarus over the moon and standing proud.
Thanks, David.
I read this recently on a very lively Folkspot - lucky it was radio as we were all naked ;-) - and also at Gin Trap folk. I publicly stated my man love for Beckham, if only because during his heyday not only did my wife and daughter allow me with their usual generosity to watch televised football during the evening schedules, lovingly sacrificing their soaps, but if David was playing they DEMANDED that we watch it, so I could do so while also feeling like a proper family man.
B SIDE
Morgan Le Fay introduced by a 12C Welsh monk
God sends a bolt from the heavens, fire and brimstone from under the earth. In 536, a summer without sunshine all over the world. In 539, Arthur and his dark son Mordred, the evil one, murder each other at the icy battle of Camlaan. Morrigan Macha Bodbh, Celtic triple goddess of birth, marriage and death – Mordred’s mother, Arthur’s sister – ships him beyond the sunset to the mystical isle of Avalon. She sings at his funeral:
I love males, yet live makeless:
The long night and false dawn still lingers lonely
As day breaks my dike-brook’s bed
Diluting with grey light my Du(w)-distilled soul.
I give birth, yet grave brothers.
My mothering bosom of womb-mouthing earth
Is death-witch and dearth’s country;
Both vessel you’re born on and vestige’s barque.
I bride men and breed Mordreds:
The world’s consummation weds its confounding;
The lightning of love’s moon-lore
Will strike dead the armed man sick-nursed in these arms.
I brave blood, a bereaved bride,
God’s mother and man’s Eve, a death-moth and Mary:
O, Arthur, ardent brother,
The love-sword you bury here seeds the whole world…
Notes: This is the weird and wonderful B side to May Poem of the Month. I improvised a new version of this with more frequent Celtic drum live on Folkspot recently when temporarily deprived of the power of recall. God only knows what I said. But the above is the authentic version as performed for one night only on May 3 as track 2 of the B side of Tom and Harry and since replaced by a jollier piece of monkery called Ethelred The Unready For Anything. Morgan le Fay deploys two of the main four cynganed (mediaeval Welsh harmony patterns) in alternating lines which creates a beat and dark music - heralded before each stanza on the bodhran - exciting to perform and hear and to my ear well suited to its subject. Duw is God, Du the mythical black horse of the Celtic unconscious, the only means of pursuing the mystical boar through the treacherous shifting woods. Norman monks satanised the goddess Morrigan Macha Bodbh as Morgan Le Fay. There really was a cataclysmic event in 536, a volcano-earthquake and/or asteroid hitting Earth of such magnitude that there was no sunshine and a darkening of the sky for the whole of that summer: by unconscious instinct, we date the beginning of our Dark Ages from about then.
April 2013
In Memoriam.
This is from 'I Got On At Hallelujah Lamppost' written in the early '80s and published in Anglo Welsh Review in 1987.
3. Fire & Brimstone
This valley had iron
In its guts,
Steeled itself to change
Moving with the trains,
Dug into its coal
For a port for the ores of Spain.
It had shod the Great Bear
Of the Steppes with skates
Made In Blaenafon
Had united the States
Across the wild west
With Monmouthshire iron.
And when King Coal called
For a Copper Grail
For his stainless steel Table,
Tongues of fire could purge
The iron in the soul
At Pontypool inferno.
4.
Conductor
The conductor stubs out
Nostalgia and fag
For the rush down valley,
While through his worn bag
Go all the colours of the river,
The green and the silver and the discoloured copper,
Changing
Forever.
5.
Afon Garde
Afon raging with the rain.
The cut steelworks sinks in the sodden clay.
Steel-faced pickets slam a portcullis
And draw up the bridge of their riverbank scrapyard:
The workers
United
Will never be defeated.
Red-soiled, livid, steaming, green,
Fed with liquid fire and gases,
Afon, desperate, blindly burrows
Like a dragon for the sea.
And all the Sunday School kids
Are Monday-morning singing....
The Word
Is on the dole
He'd rather give us the past tense of coalfield.
Emmanuel
Is on the dole
He's gone down the drain with all the rotten leaves.
Panteg steelworks at twelve o'clock,
Busmen chasing overtime, pickets - jobs,
Eyes calm as anthracite,
Clouds lined with lead
The workers
United
Will never be defeated.
6.
New Towns For Old
In Tal-y-waun
The girls are like leather, the beauty ingrained,
In 15, at 50, it remains, on the wane
Like the ghost of Coal always in the unworked vein
And what is already has, and what has will again
In Tal-y-waun.
In the the New Town
In the the New Town
In the the New Town
In the the New Town
The old canal is polished up, the gardens laid down,
And pushchair trolley women bus aroundaroundaround
And brakes and valves and services - autopias - abound.
Parked in his mother's arms high above the ground,
The brand new Son of Cymru gives a multistorey frown ,
MORE of lots of MORE to lose, mortuary-bound,
And after six, just trodden chips-
Not a soul to be found.
End.
March 2013
Stone
Almighty, endless metamorphosis!
Birth of the deadliest thing on then planet,
The Verb into noun, the process into stasis.
Damn all these currents of feeling that kiss
And wear me, so much, with their wetness, or grit,
Almighty, endless metamorphosis!
Sunshine, tears, won’t melt my heart like Ice’s,
I’m dead hard. Whatever moves, I’ll kill it,
The Verb into noun, the process into stasis.
Silence, a stare, are my anaesthetists.
I freeze out pressure, heat. I won’t admit
Almighty, endless metamorphosis!
I went to pieces once; perhaps round this
More grainy core, less brittle, I can fit
The Verb into noun, the process into stasis.
Made of dead reactions, buried stresses,
Grist to milling Earth, I’ll never quit
Almighty, endless metapmorphosis!
The Verb into noun, the process into stasis.
I'm dedicating this to the wonderful Year 11 and 12 students of Droitwich Spa High, whom I met on Monday during a 'poetry masterclass' on form and meaning in poetry. As they will be able to tell you, this poem above is a villanelle (cf 'Do not go gentle into that good night' by Dylan Thomas) a highly formalised, perhaps even artificial, renaissance development of the Italian villannella from the pastoral (and oral) tradition of the middle ages, undertaken by those inveterately rhyme-mad French poets during the 16th century. The villanelle has rules and set rhythms/rhymes/repetitions coming out of its ears but it sounds tres bien and works well in any poem where a relentless refrain (it has two) fits the emotion. I have another called 'On being Locked Inside A Tiny Room By An Inept Caretaker' where the claustrophobia of the form comes into its own but here it's about the implacable lack of change, emphasised by the music of the sound patterns. We also had some fun thinking of all the st- sounds in English which have a stony or static meaning, including four in this poem. Try it. You'll still be stuttering stilled sounds and never getting stumped or getting in a state about it until Easter - it never stops. English is an arbitrary language - the sound has an abstract link to meaning but there are exceptions and these - which my very bright students knew were called onomatopoeias - are played for all their worth by poets, word-musicians always looking for sound that conveys meaning. The idea of healthy action being stilled into a sub-human stasis - of verbs solidifying lava-like into granite noun/states - is a key one in Literature since the Gorgon: the trolls in The Hobbit are one example and Miss Havisham is a Dickensian example (among many of his reified characters) in terms of being paralysed at a psychological crisis which Dickens shows by her still being in her wedding dress as a decaying old woman. The suggestion is always that the genuine living energy and spirit of human life has been reified - paralysed - into a habit as old and dead as stone. (The Stepford wives are a variant: men reducing women to the state of dolls out of fear of their living energy and challenge.) We all need stability and age certainly has a stiffening effect on the body if not the spirit (but sadly often both) and of course the skull and the skeleton are an essential foundation for our blood flow, nerves, electric pulses, brain waves and tides of spirit and emotion. But youth tends to the opposite of stasis and an excess of stoniness suits corpses better than the living.
February 2013
My Valentine
My Valentine is a picture, her painted eye like a rose,
Her body held in a soft flame of stillness, freed in a pose.
My Valentine is a dancer, unfastened hair like a tide,
Her fingers fly out of time's rut: and pluck my heart as it blows.
My Valentine is a priestess, who trails her heaven scent
To hell and back round a navel the musk-deer* endlessly roves.
My Valentine is a goddess, her neck is softer than sky:
She turns to me like a planet, and everything else explodes.
O heart, this quest is your own end, you're lost and that's why you win,
You’re stripped of even your held breath and kiss what God alone knows.
*The Kasturi-mriga, a deer of the Himalayas whose navel yields musk.
This is the text on the card you can buy from my bookstall or via the purchase page.
January 2013
Cromwell's Talking Head
Chapter 1 Heading off a burglar
Good evening, young Master. Welcome to my Grave. You’re a burglar, I see. And you’ve been digging up a National treasure.
And now you’re in a deep hole. Face to face with a hacked off Head of Security. So deep, you’re never getting out again.
What’s that you’re screaming? ‘I meant no disrespect to the Crown, Mr Head, but I got mouths to feed!’?
The Crown? Who said anything about the Crown? This treasure belongs to the Nation.
I’ve got a face like a sow’s what? What do you expect? I’m dead.
The name’s Oliver, by the way. Oliver Cromwell. Pleased to meat you. They put an axe through my neck 350 years ago. Eight swings of the butcher’s blade before they got my bloodless head off. I was never so hacked off in my life!
Why did they do it? I chopped off the King’s head. So his son chopped off mine.
No. I am not having a laugh. I can’t. And you’ll be laughing on the other side of my face if I get any more of your cheek. Me and fifty eight soldiers chopped off the head of King Charles I. In 1649. The only time the people of England ever topped a King and became the Head of their own Nation.
Am I famous? Oh yes. I’m in all the history books. And I was on the heads side of the coins until they brought the kings back. Have I been on I’m A Celebrity? Son, I’d rather eat my own face. Can you have an autograph? Not something I can really put my hand to...
May you shake my hand instead?
If you can find it. My hand is 200 miles away, in a tomb in Yorkshire, along with what’s left of my body.
How about a nose rub? There you go. Now we’re talking!
Now you’re famous. Only the special ones go head to head with me. Or pick what used to be my brains. Or find out where my headless body is.
But, over the thirty minutes, you’ll hear it all. And then you’ll be a celebrity. Until you die.
Oh stop yowling like a scared cat. What? You’re ‘too young to die’. You ‘didn’t mean nuffin?’ You was just on the Cambridge college tour, honest guvnor, and you got lorst?’
At midnight? Six feet underground? Pull the other one, mate. If you can find it.
Not your lucky day? No, son, but it is mine. September 3. The day God and I won my great battles in 1649, 1650 and 1651. The day my soul went to heaven in 1658. The day this spike through my head was hit by a thunderbolt and started the Great Fire Of London in 1666. That’ll teach Londoners to chop my head off and put it up on a roof!
My lucky day. But you make your own luck, son.
Notes: I'll be performing this and the other nine chapters of the story at Oliver Cromwell's House in Ely on January 30, anniversary of Charles I's execution in 1649 and also eleven years later of Oliver's own beheading (posthumously) at the Restoration. Tickets are £7.50 for the show, a tour of the house by a costumed guide and a glass of Cromwell cider. Starts 2 pm. There is a second performance at the Gin Trap Inn, Ringstead on Friday 1 February at 8.30 pm.
December 2012
The Only Gift
‘A crown of thorns to freeze your breath
The berried holly brings;
Through snow-white sunlight chaste as death
The silent barn-owl wings
But now the ghostly holy dove
That bellow blasts your ear
Is tuned to robin-song by love
Pitched cheerfully and clear
So the angels sang to Margery
The Visionary of Lynn
And from the fifteenth century
You can hear that robin sing.
Chorus.
The only gift left on the shelf
That nothing else can rise above,
Includes all treasures, lasts forever,
And grows when shared with others: love.
From teeth-bared heath and icy track,
To town the river glides
With Christmas sparkling on his back,
The diamond geyser rides,
Where starry angels on the tree
Grow larger in the dusk
To heaven-blue and Eden-green
And rose and reindeer-musk
And the checkouts ring for Tilly Hoe,
The Iceland girl from Lynn
And through the devil’s Ouse and row
She can hear that robin sing.
Chorus.
The only gift left on the shelf,
That nothing else can rise above,
Includes all treasures, lasts forever,
And grows when shared with others: love.
Note: Margery Kempe was a burgess's wife turned visionary in the reign of Henry IV Part I. She wept continually during church services in anguish at her (to her) direct experience of the crucifixion and love of Christ and when the holy ghost spoke to her like a bellows, she asked that it change its manifestation to a robin, which God duly arranged. She 'wrote' the first autobiography in English - the Book of Margery Kempe - and went on pilgrimages dressed in the white of a holy woman despite being married and the mother of 14 children, much against the tenor of the times. Her local parish priest was the first Lollard ever burned in England and though Margery seems much more orthodox in her theology than Mother Julian of Norwich, she (unlike Julian) spent her life being suspected and tried for heresy. In this carol, I imagine her modern secular counterpart - a girl working on the till in Iceland - also hearing the bedlam of Christmas transformed into robin-song by love. The chorus is surely the essence of all religions and if the tenor of our times ever sings it from the heart, all manner of thing shall be well. Until then, we'll have to make do with poetry.
November 2012
Writing For The New Humanity
If, instead of cowing and naying a sheepish congregation,
You beef so divinely it makes them feel human;
If you can tongue and bell with golden flesh a word
That tolls heaven back to earth, like the Eden in every bird;
If you can string the bow of learning to the arrow of intuition
And keep a faith that’s unafraid of critical reason
And score your heart in blood and swear it aloud
To a backwards-saddled, blinkered, farting holy-cattle crowd;
If you can shake the hand of the Am-Dram-thank-you-ham
Who lifts your tragic laurels with his prat Fall of Man;
If you’re wise to the one-book-brain of Simple Simon
Yet lost in the heart of a rose, not the tongue of a shaman;
If you can whittle your stake to an instrument that plays
A song beyond itself, not a reed that measures praise;
If you can hurl your heart at the Keep Off, Keep Out knives
That kill the deserved applause your un-listener craves;
And forget yourself, and the long quest to get it,
In one divine delicious self-annihilating lyric;
If you can follow Hafiz, not twisting as others have
The mouth of God to a trap of lies, yet be roasted as if you had;
The hart of love will lead you tripping lamb-like to the Psalter
And, what is more, you’ll be a writer, my daughter
Notes: This ghazal is instead of the punch in the mouth I nearly gave someone who parked himself in front of my bookstall after a well-received show (so that no-one could buy anything) in order to perform me an extended homily about the spiritual folly of seeking recognition.
It is inspired by quotations below from “Selfishness,” “The New Humanity,” “Faith,” “The Life of the Spririt” and “God Speaks” (a Bible for the Einstein age, marked GS) by the Indian mystic Meher Baba (1894-1969)
“Divinity is not devoid of humanity. Spirituality must make man more human...releasing all that is good, noble and beautiful in man.”
“True art expresses spirituality”
“The spirit needs to be clothed in matter if it is to come into full possession of its own possibilities”
“Works of art can ennoble and raise the consciousness of people”
“Spiritual truth can often be stated and expressed through the intellect and the intellect is surely of some help for the communication of spiritual experience”
“Many forms of naive credulity cannot be broken through except by the fearless and free working of critical reason...When critical reason is implemented by a deep and living faith, based on pure intuition, its functioning becomes creative, fruitful and significant....True faith is a form of sight and not of blindness. It need not be afraid of the free functioning of critical reason.”
“The rider needs a horse if he is to fight a battle...if the body yields to the claims of the spirit as it should, it is instrumental in bringing down the kingdom of heaven on earth.”
“The freedom of the spirit which is sought by avoiding contact with the world and by going to the caves or mountains is a negative freedom”
“Mysticism is often regarded as something anti-intellectual, obscure and confused, or impractical and unconnected with experience. In fact, true mysticism is none of these.”
“Some people, as a result of efforts towards forgetfulness in past lives, get spontaneous and temporary flashes of it in a later life and it is such people who give the world the best in poetry, art and philosophy and make the greatest discoveries in science.” (GS)
“In such moments of true forgetfulness there is a mental detachment from all material surroundings in which the poet allows his imagination to soar. An artist, when he gives form to an ideal in which he completely forgets himself and all irrelevant surroundings, creates a masterpiece...” (GS)
“poets, artists are born not made (but) these fleeting phases of true forgetfulness are the results of efforts made in past lives.” (GS)
Other references
Kipling’s If ... Hafiz’s ghazal: “Back to the Heart”
Psalm 64 “Hear my voice, O God, in my prayer...”
April 2012
The Rise of An April Leaf
Puckered,
Naked,
Grizzled,
Clenched
Ugly as a newborn face;
Scared to let myself go:
And where do I go
Except towards death?
And what if I grow
In the wrong directions,
Abnormal or twisted,
And how do you do it anyway?
Thoughts crumpled,
Feelings crushed.
Perhaps I’m not even a leaf?
Just scared to stand out
From the crowded branches?
So what am I? – yellow?
Or just painfully shy
Soft virgin green
Closed against the urging sun?
Do I have to do anything?
Will I just become – me?
Or do I have to force myself out?
Safer to sit tight;
But then I get scared
The rest of the branch
Which had seemed
So wooden
Is unfolding faster;
Best to to let go then;
But what if my flower
Hardly out of bud
Gets pollinated?
The May blossom light
Of the still warm evening;
The birdsong high
Above distant traffic:
God become mild
And expansive, beaming:
The breathless wind:
All give their answer:
He who saves his dances
Will never be a dancer.
Note: This poem is having a bit of a resurgence in folk clubs at the moment. Tough bearded folkies are crying into their real ales as I once again sound the song of innocence versus experience…
February 2012
For A City Fan of Seventy Years
You’ve seen some ups and downs here in your time
And I could wish more ups than downs right now
And kids of six or ten supporting us today
Are dreaming of that play off season now
As good times gone, maybe. You’ve seen the top
(That twenty minutes was it?) and the bottom
(That Eighties free-fall into near-extinction)
And you could tell them what goes up comes down
But (thanks to eight Bristolian heroes then)
What fell so fast’s still coming up again.
Born the year we won that Cup and fathering
Me the last year we were Champs (’34 and ’55)
Your seat one season the cement mixer in which
One of these terraces was constructed from
And faithful as Atyeo through thin and thick and thin,
I wish you joy today. A famous season-rousing win
Against this Premier-nudging Hawthorn-in-our-side
We haven’t had for years or, failing that,
A goal to cheer. Or six. And seventy six trombones
And a big parade. You know this blip will pass
But your support and mine will never shift
However much the heart may sink at times,
However low the lows or high the highs,
We’re City till we die: a faith that cannot lose
You gave me as a boy and, as a man, would choose.
Happy 76th Birthday!
Notes: They say that if you have twelve perfect moments in your life, it’s a happy one. This was definitely one. So much could have prevented it. Co-ordinating Dad’s attendance with mine, negotiating the delayed five hour train journey from Norfolk, getting him into the East End (season ticket holders only); getting a programme just as the game started and leaving him to find the surprise; the Bristol City Media department not mixing up the submission and taking the trouble to go back into the page and insert the late dedication (thank you Jim Healey); then – even more out of control and unlikely - low table City managing to outplay a top place team who usually beat us 4-1 in their free-scoring yoyo between Championship and Premiership. To put it metaphorically, I ran down the wing and crossed it. Not too deep or too hard. Not too short. I didn’t slice it. No-one got in the way. Dad was in position and not looking somewhere else. He rose above the defence with a perfectly timed brylcreemed header that sent the love-turning leather globe crashing into the net like a classic Johnny Atyeo strike from the early Sixties. YES! YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSS! A glimpse of God and then a walk back across Ashton Park bathed in divine light, joking and being praised by West Brom fans. I would have liked a lifetime of such Saturdays: who wouldn’t? Like the ‘celebrity penalty’ I once smashed into the top left hand corner of the net past a pantomime cat in front of the East End, it’s unlikely to happen twice. But we got that one.
January 2012
From The Road To Walsingham
a holy half mile from (a) Bank Holiday Sabbath
past a pilgrim or two on foot, is the “Slipper Chapel”
-”the last wayside church for pilgrims
before they came barefoot down into Walsingham.
built in 1325, it is now the Roman Catholic National Shrine
to Our Lady”: the chalky green valley slopes
off into heaven. I trace the gentle contours,
the lit, ascetic ash of winter Norfolk,
then light on the flooded stream, water of life
running over in an instant of absolute freedom;
the landscape turns to vision, lightning-flash clear,
fully Earthed, sheep bleating like the bellows of heaven,
the pleasant purl of water on water....
Notes: Happy New year to all my readers. I’ve chosen something with a feeling of renewal about it, a hint of spring ahead. This is from a poem published in my Norfolk-earthed Britain’s Dreaming collection (House on the River being Norwich more than Norfolk). As I will be charging across such earth in January in my upcoming screen role of Connall (hiss and boo, he’s a baddie), this poem about the ‘lit acetic ash of winter Norfolk’ came to mind. Also, I usually find numinousness and serenity more readily among such scenery than, say, entering Norwich Cathedral where a whole gang of reeves now ambush you with tourist guides, donation programmes and conveyor-belt wilcommenspiel when all you want to do is have a quietist moment. Give me those wide open Norfolk spaces or just trust me to know that I’ve been in a cathedral before and know what to do without supervision!
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