Poetry

 

         

Thomas Bewick  –  1753-1828  

 

Slowly a tired man crossing snow with a dog
to a farm in a copse, no chimney smoking.
Or a barque moored in the lea of a rock,
its grain like a feather in water reflecting.
Birds in trees, in flight, afloat
a river where a fisherman is loading his creel.
Rain falling on cattle, signposts
rotting, dogs and hunters stalking.
Bits of conversation between strangers
pausing on journeys in opposite directions. 

Through the wrong end of the telescope
he celebrates creatures of the universe
who are not the Duke and do not care to be,
but draw breath in the small moments
historians aren’t interested in – so small
we need a magnifying glass to see them.
Between sea-foam and mackerel skies,
the gait of the midwife’s mare ridden for dear life
and the Devil smoking the hanged man’s pipe,
a brindled cow twitches its tail. 

Animals, people, the weather, carve a path
from one era into another – how we came to be we,
while History rides the horizon in a painted carriage,
ignorant of whose soul is on the gibbet.
War and Diplomacy take place somewhere else.
Here it’s always a particular time of day.
Night falls, cocks crow, horses toil
and Englishmen go about their business.
Here are the things that are always happening
and do not matter and never change anything.

Poetry Review

     

Other Poems to Read

Where are the men whose mouths
clamoured for this war, the narrow
dark-suited clerks, their bowler hats
held high above trimmed moustaches ?

Where are the university students,
bow-tied, in their straw boaters,
the artisans, gentlemen’s valets, waiters
and semi-skilled factory workers,

who thronged the steps of the square
singing the national song, strangers
embracing strangers ?  Like ink dots
in a newspaper photograph enlarged,

they swarm across this page of history,
shades of grey and black and white
whose meaning, on closer inspection,
is hard to decipher.  Where are they

now that the square is deserted,
the shelves in the shops empty
and the coalition government has fallen,
the congregation of civilians

in public spaces strictly forbidden
and the singing of the national song,
laughter between one stranger and another
are something that has gone for ever ?

The Rialto

makes an inner and an outer.
Where the chalk wall stalls
and the ragged slope of the valley
levels towards the horizontal,

execute your imperial design
across the path of ancient tribes
of ant, wingless crickets, firebugs,
the lizard’s flashy signature

and the stately procession of one,
the caterpillar that will soon sleep
faster than light.  On the rim
where a pair of adders subtract

themselves at your approach,
proclaim – O Xerxes of your hectare! -
to your dead neighbour’s ghost
like sheep: KEEP OUT, STRANGERS!

Plant your iron picket here
against the insubordinate nature
of there.  Fence your meadow,
Mister, in the hawk’s shadow.

The SHOp

 

After she died she lived
in every insect – in the fly on the wall
and in the ointment -
and in every occasion the telephone rang
through his silent apartment,
as if he hadn’t always known she was someone
who would eventually die,
something she had known all along.

Once, joking, they arranged a signal
for the Other Place,
a private sign of recognition.
Now that the joke is over,
he is almost ready to believe
that a call would be put through
to a dead ghost
from one still living.

But he had never been so wholehearted a believer
in the telephone
even between living people
as she had.  Is the house fly’s hum
in this silent room
the call tone of his much missed one
who for the length of eternity is dying
to hear from him?

Warwick Review

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