A NICE WAY TO END THE YEAR

I'm delighted that my poem, 'Spurn', was a finalist in the Aesthetica Poetry Awards and is published with the others in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual. This poem was written before the immense storm surge of December 2013, which washed away large sections of the road down to Spurn Point and made it inaccessible except on foot, and now seems somewhat apocryphal.

A DEAD DRAGONFLY

A Dead Dragonfly

My heart was moved to see you lying there,

your wings a silken tapestry

spread gracefully

in contrast to the roughness of the concrete path.

At first I thought that you were only resting

from the blissful rigours of a warm late-summer day,

but as I looked, and you remained as still as death,

I saw that, like the first leaf of the autumn fall,

you’d drifted gently down to earth

before the fierce battering of winter

had caught you in its morbid grip.

It seemed as if, perhaps,

you’d chosen your own time and place to die,

not hidden in the gloomy shadows,

but where the sympathetic sun

could still sparkle on your wings

and catch the living fire,

as when your agile body had first danced above the water

or flitted with the joyfulness of life

across the skyscape of a careless summer day.

So, death had not robbed you of your beauty

but just released you early to escape

a harder, crueller end.

DOWN THE SOLEMN DAYS

Down the solemn days

Down the solemn days of all my wanderings,

through basking, golden afternoons

or echoing across the vaulted stillness

and in the vast, black rages of the night,

I have come home,

to look once more upon the dreams I left

and see that they are good.

And to look once more upon old faces,

now etched with painful lines of mouldering memories,

and see that they are good.

By this brave fire I am bidden to sit down

and given autumn’s jam on new-baked bread,

and never asked about the things that I have done

or about the strangeness of the worlds that I have seen.

Here in this once-familiarity,

I can, at last, discover who I am

and am content with what I know.

THE CURLEW

I couldn't get a photo of the curlew as I didn't have my camera with me, so I 'borrowed' this one.

The curlew.

Carefree the curlew, to my thinking

looking upwards from beneath

into a cloudwashed sky

replete with rain not falling.

And the circling and the diving

with curving beak

down-pointing,

wings spread gliding

or beating up against the windless air,

eyes scanning needle-sharp

to pin-point whatever food is there

inland from the richness,

eagre*-fed,

of the salt-marsh estuary bed,

if only for an earthy feast

of worms

from rain-washed ground released. 

And the strident crying

with unique, persistent,

triple-calling notes fast-dying,

addressed to nothing,

or perhaps a distant mate far-flying,

loud-carrying

above the silver sweetness

of the blackbird’s jealous vying

and the mocking cuckoo newly fledged

and the cheeseless** yellowhammer,

silly on the hedge. 

Carefree the curlew, to my unthinking

not driven by instinct’s insistence

unknown to my own fey existence,

not realising that this morning’s early breaking

of the night-starved fast

to daily feed the famished wide-mouthed gaping

is a task not lightly asked.

*An 'eagre' is a tidal river bore found especially on the Humber.

** Refers to the yellowhammer's call of "just-a-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese".

THE OAKS' GRAVEYARD

The Oaks’ Graveyard.

The oaks are dead.

Straying from the road,

I stumbled on their secret graveyard,

enclosed within a stand of living trees

where their remains now rest –

eighteen in all and once of mighty size,

but now just severed and uprooted stumps,

hidden from the common sight within a roadside copse.

This stand of trees was once a greater wood,

where, no doubt, oaks grew strong and tall.

(Not far away, the last of these still lives –

its massive, hollow shell

now standing like a spectre

beside the old lane’s edge.)

I’ve passed here many times before

but never guessed that in this shady place

these precious relics,

each like a wooden Ozymandias, lay:

cut down, uprooted, left to rot,

and overshadowed by tall-growing ash and birch.

Some upright, others on their sides,

each forms its own memorial

but all without a name or date recording their demise.

And overhead, the reverend rooks

in well-worn Sunday black

preach from sky-roofed pulpits,

chanting never-ending funeral rites

or delivering grim sermons

on death’s inevitable grip,

while a woodpecker

is hammering in coffin nails.

Across the sky, a red kite haunts the fields,

uttering its strident, plaintive cries,

not mithering for the oaks  

but in mocking tones bemoaning

the death inflicted

by its own beak and claws.

 

 

THE MAN WHO KNEW TREES

The man who knew trees.

 

He moved like a man who knew trees -

not as objects, or even equals -

but, certain in his mind

that here were the greatest of all living creatures,

he stepped comfortably and quietly through the wood

and, without presumption or design,

acknowledged every one as if it were a friend.

 

               “Trees,”

he said, speaking as a believer would when entering a church,

“are the oldest living beings on the earth,

and make our span seem like a second’s passing.

If, out of necessity, we have to cut one down,

we should first beg its forgiveness,

as do hunters, living off the land,

when they must kill an animal for food,

out of respect

because they know the prey control the hunt;

or like a reluctant executioner

whose duty is to make a martyr of a saint.

For whenever an old tree dies or is destroyed,

we lose a library

where birds and animals have always come

to gain the knowledge of all of nature’s ways

and even we can, if we have a mind,

study how the world is made.”

FROM WHINNY HILL

From Whinny Hill

A potent pathway runs along the rim,

trodden since unlettered times

beyond the consciousness of man

by feet that understood the power of paths.

But now the roads on lower land prevail

and these high places no longer stimulate

the stagnant soul and stultified imagination. 

Still, we whose heads have always been in clouds

can gaze on sights unknown to those

whose tiny minds are there below,

amongst the tiny works of men:

the houses, villages and fields,

where their inconsequential voices

could never pierce the wildness of the wind. 

Only in high places do we truly know

the sacredness of space.

Only here, above the daily clamour,

can we stand and listen

to the turning of the earth,

hear the wisdom that the birds impart

and feel the pull of ageless intimacies

from beneath the barrow’s mound

that speak in voices sorrowful but proud: 

“When we had life, the world was quieter.

We had the time and space to stop

and stand here on this winsome ridge

to view a world that we had not created.

Here the wolf could roam

and find a peaceful sanctuary

amongst the shadows of the trees.

Then we shared with wolves,

and all the creatures of the woods,

the bounty that renewed with every year.

In those days giants walked the earth

and though we did not know them,

we felt their presence

and could see their works,

for our eyes were open then,

instead of filled with dirt,

or closed, as yours are now,

to all the wonders of the world.”

The path is little-trodden now,

except by those who need to seek

the solace of an open mind,

clear of all the affectations

that crowd our every waking hour

and chase us even

into the haunted depths of sleep.

Perhaps I’ll meet you on the pathway,

coming either from the rising sun

or from the shadow regions of the moon,

and we will stop and gaze at one another,

as if the two of us

each had met a ghost.