Collected Poems, page 29
a devout man –
then the lout in the speeding car
who purposefully mounted the kerb . . .
I think we all should kneel
on that English street,
where he widowed your pregnant wife, Shazad,
tossed your soul to the air, Abdul,
and brought your father, Haroon, to his knees,
his face masked in your blood
on the rolling news
where nobody’s children riot and burn.
White Cliffs
Worth their salt, England’s white cliffs;
a glittering breastplate
Caesar saw from his ship;
the sea’s gift to the land,
where samphire-pickers hung from their long ropes,
gathering, under a gull-glad sky,
in Shakespeare’s mind’s eye; astonishing
in Arnold’s glimmering verse;
marvellous geology, geography;
to time, deference; war, defence;
first view or last of here, home,
in painting, poem, play, in song;
something fair and strong implied in chalk,
what we might wish ourselves.
Philharmonic
Wounds in wood, where the wind grieves
in slow breves,
or a breeze
hovers and heals; brass,
bold as itself,
alchemical, blowing breath to blared gold;
all strings attached to silver sound.
This the composer found
in his deaf joy, despair,
and the brilliant boy; a where for time and space;
a place in endless air for perfect art –
a songbird’s flight
through a great medieval hall
over the dancing dead.
The Beauty of the Church
Look, you are beautiful, beloved;
your eyes, framed by your hair,
are birds in the leaves of a tree,
doves in the Cedar of Lebanon;
your hair shines, a stream in sunlight
tumbling from the mountain; you are fair,
loved; your mouth, entrance; your kiss, key;
your lips, soft scarlet, opening;
your tongue, wine-sweet; your teeth, new lambs
in the pastures; your voice is for psalm, song.
I see your face; I say your face
is the garden where I sought love;
my head filled with dew; my hands
sweet with myrrh; my naked feet
in wet grasses; my mouth honey-smeared.
Your voice called at the door of my heart.
I am sick with love.
Turn away your eyes from mine,
they have overcome me.
You have ravished my heart with your eyes.
You have kissed me with the kisses of your mouth
in our green bed, under the beams of cedar,
the rafters of fir.
You are altogether lovely.
Your cheeks, spices and sweet flowers;
your breath, camphire and spikenard;
saffron; calamus and cinnamon;
frankincense and aloes;
your throat is for pearls;
your two breasts are honey and milk;
your left hand should be under my head,
your right hand embracing me.
Just to look at your hand,
I am sick with love.
You are the apple tree among the trees of the forest.
I lie under your shadow
and your fruit is sweet to my taste.
You are a cluster of camphire in the vineyards;
an orchard of ripe figs, pomegranates.
I am yours and you are mine,
until the day breaks and shadows fade.
No river to quench love, no sea to drown it.
I was in your eyes and I found favour.
I was all you desired and I gave you my loves.
I say the roof of your mouth is the best wine;
you are rose, lily, a cluster of grapes.
I looked for you at night on my bed.
I rose and walked the city streets,
searching for you.
I found you. I held you
and would not let you go,
until I had brought you to the field,
where we lay,
circled by the roes and hinds of the meadows.
I rose up to open to you
and your hands smelled of myrrh.
Your navel, a goblet which needed no wine.
How beautiful your feet.
The joints of your thighs were jewels.
Your knees were apples.
I sleep, but my heart wakes to your whisper.
You have brought me to this bed
and your banner over me is love.
Set me as a seal, beloved,
for love is strong as death,
set me as a seal upon your heart.
Shakespeare
Small Latin and less Greek, all English yours,
dear lad, local, word-blessed, language loved best;
the living human music on our tongues,
young, old, who we were or will be, history’s shadow,
love’s will, our heart’s iambic beat, brother
through time; full-rhyme to us.
Two rivers quote your name;
your journey from the vanished forest’s edge
to endless fame – a thousand written souls,
pilgrims, redeemed in poetry – ends here, begins again.
And so, you knew this well, you do not die –
courtier, countryman, noter of flowers and bees,
war’s laureate, magician, Janus-faced –
but make a great Cathedral, genius, of this place.
Pathway
I saw my father walking in my garden
and where he walked,
the garden lengthened
to a changing mile
which held all seasons of the year.
He did not see me, staring from my window,
a child’s star face, hurt light from stricken time,
and he had treaded spring and summer grasses
before I thought to stir, follow him.
Autumn’s cathedral, open to the weather, rose
high above, flawed amber, gorgeous ruin; his shadow
stretched before me, cappa magna,
my own, obedient, trailed like a nun.
He did not turn. I heard the rosaries of birds.
The trees, huge doors, swung open and I knelt.
He stepped into a silver room of cold;
a narrow bed of ice stood glittering,
and though my father wept, he could not leave,
but had to strip, then shiver in his shroud,
till winter palmed his eyes for frozen bulbs,
or sliced his tongue, a silencing of worms.
The moon a simple headstone without words.
An Unseen
I watched love leave, turn, wave, want not to go,
depart, return;
late spring, a warm slow blue of air, old-new.
Love was here; not; missing, love was there;
each look, first, last.
Down the quiet road, away, away, towards
the dying time,
love went, brave soldier, the song dwindling;
walked to the edge of absence; all moments going,
gone; bells through rain
to fall on the carved names of the lost. I saw
love’s child uttered,
unborn, only by rain, then and now, all future
past, an unseen. Has forever been then? Yes,
forever has been.
Silver Lining
Five miles up, the hush and shoosh of ash,
yet the sky is as clean as a wiped slate –
I could write my childhood there. Selfish
to sit in this garden, listening to the past –
a Tudor bee wooing its flower, a lawnmower –
when grounded planes mean ruined plans, holidays
on hold, sore absences from weddings, funerals,
wingless commerce.
But Britain’s birds
sing in this spring, from Inverness to Liverpool,
from Crieff, Caernarfon, Cambridge, Wenlock Edge,
Land’s End to John O’Groats; the music silence summons,
George Herbert heard, Burns, Edward Thomas; briefly, us.
The Crown
The crown translates a woman to a Queen –
endless gold, circling itself, an O like a well,
fathomless, for the years to drown in – history’s bride,
anointed, blessed, for a crowning. One head alone
can know its weight, on throne, in pageantry,
and feel it still, in private space, when it’s lifted:
not a hollow thing, but a measuring; no halo,
treasure, but a valuing; decades and duty. Time-gifted,
the crown is old light, journeying from skulls of kings
to living Queen.
Its jewels glow, virtues; loyalty’s ruby,
blood-deep; sapphire’s ice resilience; emerald evergreen;
the shy pearl, humility. My whole life, whether it be long
or short, devoted to your service. Not lightly worn.
Lessons in the Orchard
An apple’s soft thump on the grass, somewhen
in this place. What was it? Beauty of Bath.
What was it? Yellow, vermillion, round, big, splendid;
already escaping the edge of itself,
like the mantra of bees,
like the notes of rosemary, tarragon, thyme.
Poppies scumble their colour onto the air,
now and there, here, then and again.
Alive-alive-oh,
the heart’s impulse to cherish; thus,
a woman petalling paint onto a plate –
cornflower blue –
as the years pressed out her own violet ghost;
that slow brush of vanishing cloud on the sky.
And the dragonfly’s talent for turquoise.
And the goldfish art of the pond.
And the open windows calling the garden in.
This bowl, life, that we fill and fill.
Christmas Eve
for Ella
Time was slow snow sieved by the night,
a kind of love from the blurred moon;
your small town swooning, unabashed,
was Winter’s own.
Snow was the mind of Time, sifting
itself, drafting the old year’s end.
You wrote your name on the window-pane
with your young hand.
And your wishes went up in smoke,
beyond where a streetlamp studied
the thoughtful snow on Christmas Eve,
beyond belief,
as Time, snow, darkness, child, kindled.
Downstairs, the ritual lighting of the candles.
Mrs Scrooge
Scrooge doornail-dead, his widow, Mrs Scrooge, lived by herself
in London Town. It was that time of year, the clocks long back,
when shops were window-dressed with unsold tinsel, trinkets, toys,
trivial pursuits, with sequinned dresses and designer suits,
with chocolates, glacé fruits and marzipan, with Barbie,
Action Man, with bubblebath and aftershave and showergel;
the words Noel and Season’s Greetings brightly mute
in neon lights. The city bells had only just chimed three,
but it was dusk already. It had not been light all day.
Mrs Scrooge sat googling at her desk,
Catchit the cat
curled at her feet; snowflakes tumbling to the ground
below the window, where a robin perched,
pecking at seeds. Most turkeys,
bred for their meat, are kept in windowless barns,
with some containing over 20,000 birds. Turkeys
are removed from their crates and hung from shackles
by their legs in moving lines. A small fire crackled
in the grate. Their heads are dragged under
a water bath – electrically charged – before their necks
are cut. Mrs Scrooge pressed Print.
She planned
to visit Marley’s Supermarket (Biggest Bargain Birds!) at four.
Outside, snowier yet, and cold! Piercing, searching, biting cold.
The cold gnawed noses just as dogs gnaw bones. It iced
the mobile phones pressed tight to ears.
The coldest Christmas Eve
in years saw Mrs Scrooge at Marley’s, handing leaflets out.
The shoppers staggered past, weighed down with bags
or pushing trolleys crammed with breasts, legs, crowns, eggs,
sausages, giant stalks of brussels sprouts, carrots,
spuds, bouquets of broccoli, mange tout, courgettes, petits
pois, foie gras; with salmon, Stilton, pork pies, mince pies,
Christmas Pudding, custard,
port, gin, sherry, whisky,
fizz and plonk,
all done on credit cards.
Most shook their head at Mrs Scrooge,
irked by her cry ‘Find out how turkeys really die!’
or shoved her leaflet in the pockets of their coats, unread,
or laughed and called back, ‘Spoilsport! Ho! Ho! Ho!’
Three hours went by like this.
The snow
began to ease
as she walked home.
She hated waste, consumerism, Mrs Scrooge, foraged
in the London parks for chestnuts, mushrooms, blackberries,
ate leftovers, recycled, mended, passed on, purchased secondhand,
turned the heating down and put on layers, walked everywhere,
drank tap-water, used public libraries, possessed a wind-up radio,
switched off lights, lit candles (darkness is cheap and Mrs Scrooge
liked it) and would not spend one penny on a plastic bag.
She passed off-licences with 6 for 5, bookshops with 3 for 2,
food stores with Buy 1 get 1 free.
Above her head,
the Christmas lights
danced like a river toward a sea of dark.
The National Power Grid moaned, endangered, like a whale.
The Thames flowed on as Mrs Scrooge proceeded on her way
towards her rooms.
Nobody lived in the building now
but her, and all the other flats were boarded up.
Whatever the developers had offered Mrs Scrooge to move
could never be enough. She liked it where it was,
lurking in the corner of a yard, as though the house
had run there young, playing hide-and-seek,
and had forgotten the way out. She remembered
her first Christmas there with Scrooge,
the single stripey sweet
he’d given her that year, and every year.
But Scrooge was dead, no doubt of that, so why,
her key turning the lock, did she see in the knocker
Scrooge’s face? His face to the life, staring back at her
with living grey-green eyes and opening metal lips!
As Mrs Scrooge looked fixedly at this,
it turned into a knocker once again.
Up the echoing stairs
to slippers, simple supper, candles, cocoa, cat,
went Mrs Scrooge; not scared, but oddly comforted
at glimpsing Scrooge’s knockered face.
But still, she double-locked the door, put on her dressing gown
and sat down by the fire to sip her soup.
The fire
was very low indeed, not much on such a bitter night,
so soon enough she went to bed – night-cap, bed-socks,
Scrooge’s old pyjamas, hot water-bottle, Catchit’s purr . . .
and then her own soft snore.
She dreamed of Scrooge,
of Christmas past,
of Christmas present, Christmas yet to come; dreams
that seemed to trap her in a snowstorm bowl –
newly-married, ice-skating with Scrooge,
two necks in one long, bright red, woolly scarf;
or hanging baubles on the tree;
or being surprised by mistletoe, his kiss, the taste of him –
but then her world was shaken violently
and she was kneeling by a grave, hearing a funeral bell . . .
Midnight rang out from St Paul’s. She gasped awake.
The twice-locked door was open wide
and all the room was filled with light
and smelled of tangerines and cinnamon and wine.
A cheerful Ghost was perched and grinning on her bed,
now like a child, now like a wise old man,
with silver hair and berried holly for a crown
(and yet its shimmering dress was trimmed with flowers).
‘Good grief!’ said Mrs Scrooge. ‘Who the hell are you?’
The Ghost squealed with delight and clapped its hands
(a hard thing for a ghost to do, thought Mrs Scrooge).
‘I am the Ghost of Christmas Past,’ it trilled.
‘Now, rise! And walk with me.’
It took her by the hand
then flew her through the bedroom wall. They stood at once
upon an open country road, with fields on either side.
The city had entirely gone, the darkness too;
it was a sparkling winter’s day, all blinged with frost.
‘I know this place!’ cried Mrs Scrooge. ‘I grew up here!
We’re near the village of Heath Row!
My family kept an orchard close to here.’
They walked along the road, Mrs Scrooge recalling
every gate, and post, and tree.
‘That way’s Harmondsworth,’
she told the Ghost excitedly. ‘Famous for Richard Cox,
you know, who cultivated Cox’s Orange Pippin.’
The merry Ghost conjured an apple from the air.
She crunched delightedly. ‘That way’s Longford village;
that way’s the farm at Perry Oaks; and that way’s Sipson Green!’
They’d reached the village now, a green, a row of houses and an Inn;
two fields away a farm, beyond that farm another farm;
