Pitch
like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until
the town lie beaten flat
Chekhov was there,
In Mariupol,
Perhaps the now-shredded boulevard trees
Were there then too, new planted,
Now flail-cut with shrapnel
The Steppe-wind
Howling through…..
Chekhov’s level gaze
Under cruise bombardment
Missile fire,
No gay old Chinaman he
But a doctor
Who knew blast injury well enough
And would have written of it with the precision
And compassion of a healer.
March 2022
Note: Chekhov was raised about thirty miles from Mariupol
in Taganrog.
Homeric
Hymn to Aphrodite
Aphrodite refused Anchises’ wish for immortality because
he would first grow old, and only then immortal, like the mortal lover of Eos,
the Dawn.
“For soon miserable old age will enshroud you,
Merciless old age that eventually stands beside all men,
Deathly, wearying, loathed even by the gods.”
February 2002
Refusal
George
Seferis.
On the hidden shore
White as a dove
We thirsted at noon
But the water was brackish.
Upon the golden sand
We wrote her name
But a sweet breeze blew
And the writing vanished.
With what heart, with what spirit
What longing and passion
We lived our life. A mistake!
So we changed our life.
Translation,
February 2022
The
Road East
Black Sea harbour
A lock-up in the town wall above the sea
At a few pence only
Just an iron bed, horsehair mattress,
Strobing neon tube,
Paint the blue of nightmares.
Lights out….blind….the door bolted.
In the morning I walked out of town
Into the happiest hour of my life
(An old man’s judgement)….
The road east along the coast,
Unmetalled, sandy…. walking quietly
Through a pine forest that reached to the shore,
Fragrant, cool and silent
In the perfect balance of the self.
January 2022
South
East of Albi
South East of Albi
There is a narrow road
That climbs up to the watershed
Of High Languedoc.
You drive up through pine forest
With big blue flowers like Michaelmas Daisies
In the lush grass of the steep road banks….
It gets cooler towards the top.
There you could draw a line in the road.
On one side you are in Northern Europe,
With its dark forest and blue flowers.
On the other a warm landscape
Is open down to the sea beyond Beziers,
With sun-bleached grass and yellow flowers,
A few wild olives among the rocks.
It’s like the world’s on a knife edge there….
And with one step
You are in the Mediterranean.
January 2022
The
Equal of the Gods
Sappho
He seems to me the equal of the gods
That man who sits opposite you
And listens close to your sweet voice
And the love in your laughter.
It sets my heart beating in my breast,
For when I glance at you I can’t speak
My tongue won’t move,
A fine fire runs under my skin,
I see nothing, my ears roar,
Sweat pours off me, I tremble all over,
And I am paler than grass,
So close I seem to death.
December 2021
Cathedrals
No history then
The buildings were of the present
The past a circle
Eternal
The future
A flash.
We, who are all process,
Cannot imagine Now,
That great, elaborated, ramifying
Celebration of This, as it is,
As we can raise it up.
December 2021
Sun
Horizontal sun
Slides through the grass,
Snake-sun
Shaking the bents,
Leaving a slick of wet light
Cold as ice.
November 2021
Cypris,
Sappho.
My
translation.
Come to me,
Down from the mountains of Crete
To this sacred temple
Where your delightful grove of apples stands,
Alters smoking with incense.
Cold water sounds through the branches,
Deep sleep descends from trembling leaves,
There a horse meadow blooms
With Spring flowers, and honey breezes blow.
Cypris, pour gracefully into golden bowls
Nectar that blends with our festivities.
November 2021
Net
Zero
Net zero
Net the wind
Net the ebb-tide
Net the flow
Net the tsunami
Net zero.
November 2021
Untouched
This quick moment
Leaf-fall wind!
Streaming through on the bike
The leaves spinning like shrapnel…
Untouched!
October 2021
Voyager
We who have no future
Have no past:
The tyranny of progress
Reduced to a point;
Teleos, purpose,
Shrunk to absence;
Voyager,
Billions of miles into nowhere.
October 2021
Jazz
Odyssey
Bird’s impetuous rhapsodic voice
Detonates a Homeric immediacy
Unleashes the Muse
Beginning where she will
Falling pell-mell into now
Into the spinning out of a soul
An epic history, a heart
Driven far and wide
Through sea sorrow, lotus lands.
September 2021
September
A day among the immortal seasons
In September fifty years ago…..
The corn has been cut,
And over the stubble field
Weaves a shoal of swallows and martins,
The field glistens
The hot air shimmering and vibrating,
Colour is drained from the south
There is a diffuse glare of sunlight,
The hedgerow elms are silver-grey
The backs of the swallows shine like gunmetal.
To the north the line of oak, ash and birch
Is rich in colour.
A party of tits filters through the leaves,
Among them are two willow warblers
A fierce migratory restlessness is in their movements
They flicker like yellow lights in the green spaces.
September fifty years ago
A day among the eternal seasons….
We thought the world would last forever
We were wrong.
September 2021
The House
of the Waning Moon
Autumn Equinox,
Full moon,
In the dark house
She turns in profile,
Chiaroscuro,
A cheekline
crescent at the north door
Where the winter stars fly in.
Equinox of Spring
She moves in the dark
A brilliant outline
Moves beyond the lamplight
To the south door
Where the swifts
fly in.
August 2021
Note: The waning moon of the Autumn Equinox rises progressively
further to the north of east, and the opposite is the case in Spring.
They
Told Me, Heraclites. For CT, after Callimachus.
They told me, Heraclites, you were dying
And it stopped me in my tracks
When I remembered the nights we spent talking,
Drinking wine, smoking pipes, reading our poems,
And how a long time ago,
Up on the mountain near your place,
I walked slap into reality, by accident,
Just a simple twist of fate,
And it made me laugh,
Because it made no difference to anything,
And so I know
That your poems will live on
And that there’s nothing in the nature of mind
That is capable of dying….
Nothing at all.
August 2021
Scent
of Limes
Scent of limes,
That time of year,
The time of yarrow
The herb Achilles took to Troy to heal wounds,
The plant the Taoist Masters
Divined the Book of Change with,
That time….
Returned like a strain in music that assembles
St John’s wort, betony,
Flowers of the bramble,
Flowers of the lime
Streaming down the wind,
A dying fall….
“Flower
o’ the broom
Take
away love and our earth is a tomb!” 1
July 2021
1 Robert Browning, Fra Lippo
Lippi.
The
Year After
The year after Vasily Arkhipov saved the world,
Summer among the Isles of Greece,
The gift of being nineteen
Writing in a shuttered peasant’s room
In a house under the mountain, on Ikaria,
The island where no foreigners came,
A runaway from post-war England,
Scratching with a pen by day,
Working on the mackerel boats after sunset
“These
balmy placid island days.”
Kennedy dead.
A dark day in November nineteen sixty three
Hitching down from Scandinavia in the snow
Ending up in the small hours in a dim café on the Belgian
border,
The border closed till morning,
A kip on the tailboard above the slush,
Coffee and dark tobacco at dawn,
Like a benediction.
It was the coldest winter since ‘47
Snow in the streets till March,
Mandy Rice-Davies swigging champagne from the bottle
In the back of a limo. The Beatles
Industrial, insistent, clanging like an advertising
jingle….
Back on the road there was silence, space,
The edge of loneliness, fear.
Peyote on the beach in Crete
I tuned Bird in from the static…..“Out of Nowhere,”
A miracle of rare device
Cut adrift while Memphis burned.
July 2021
Ashes
to Ashes
Sitting in a dead man’s dust
Head of the Gully, high summer,
Fragments of bone among the scabious.
These days I walk the world
Like I wasn’t there anymore
A space open and generous
Like a childhood vision.
I pick up a grain
And roll it between my fingers…..
It’s the time of St John’s Wort, Marjoram,
After the Solstice.
June 2021
A
Bestiary of Flowers
Hawkweed, hawk-bit, mouse-ear, yellow goat’s-beard,
A bestiary of the Solstice. Flowers… earth-gold as a
hawk’s eye,
The fierce, dense yellow of high summer;
Egg-yolk bird’s-foot trefoil,
Dragon’s-teeth, viper’s-grass,
Beasts at the heels of Aphrodite of the Flowers,
Dove’s-foot crane’s-bill, dog-rose,
Wolf’s-bane, toad-flax, sow-thistle….
Conjured by the violet-haired Muses
Their steps visible in the quaking-grass,
Their scent crushed in the thyme,
Eternity in the touch of your fingers.
June 2021
Falling
The falling shafts which never fall
Flash across my windows
From bows drawn in Africa….this house,
A memory in the souls of swifts.
Black sparks struck from entropy
The air no element for endurance
But for these warping shapes of gravity
Curves in space and time
Falling across the wind
Falling through all dimensions
Falling.
May 2021
Look
Back
Remember when your waking breath
Was like the air of paradise? When your body
Embraced you like a lover?
Look back…coloured shadows…..
But these violets, this may blossom,
Ash and oak
Are now as then
The same as in Sappho’s time, or in Shakespeare’s
Or in your own eternal season….
Look back with them one last time.
For now the seasons are dying with the summer ice
The spring, always as fresh as youth,
The physical touch of youth,
The spring is dying.
The spring, the eternal season among seasons
Is being wasted away by the trillion dollar plague;
Wasted away by those philosophers of human nature
With their bow ties and dead souls;
Wasted away in corporate boardrooms
By old men with silver hair and perfect teeth
For shareholder value;
Wasted away by Capitalist Modernity,
And the inheritors of the European Enlightenment
That genocide project, a scorched-earth war
Waged against all other cultures.
Look back now
For the past is dying with the future
Look back
Summon the Cretan gaze
Converse with the shades again
Look back
Look death in the face
All you who have been worthy of this world.
April 2021
Hesiod
on the Farm
The plough-maker he called “Athene’s servant”
Carpenter to the goddess of technology
Who pegged the plough-tree to the stock
Fixed the shear
Polished the grip;
Or he walked the mountain for a holm limb
Formed in one piece
Stock and tree unbreakable.
He thought himself wealthy to have both
Curing in the smoke of the chimney
Throughout the winter
While he wrote the history of the gods
Sung to him by the Hippocrene Muses
In the roaring of the wind up above.
April 2021
Blinded
by the Light
April afterglow
Cold as an oracle
The Pleiades, Orion, the Dogs,
Fall headlong into the sun
Blinded by the light
Oedipus consumed.
This is the road at Colonus
This the gesture of Theseus
This is the void beyond the Labyrinth
The journey through the night
From the end
To the beginning.
April 2021
Dog
Days
Agni
shines against the dawn
Sirius returns
Fire engulfed in light at sunrise.
When Electra drew water for the farmer
River Inachus in darkness
ὦ νὺξ
μέλαινα χρυσέων ἄστρων τροφέ! 1
In the dog days,
In July in the heat,
Sirius, Dog Star, rose at dawn,
Rose earlier each night
Nearing midnight in Autumn
The season farmers cut wood
Cut plough-trees and wagon-timbers
Announced by the seasonal stars.
Since then the stars have drifted,
A long precession of the axes through the centuries,
Drifted deeper into Winter….
A month in two thousand years,
The seasonal star-clock running fast
The dog days in September now
In the cool.
What poets will write
When Sirius returns to the heat again? 2
What farmers?
What world?
1 “O black night. You who
nurse the golden stars!”
Euripides, Electra.
2 The precession of the
equinoxes is around a 25,000 year cycle.
March 2021
Hare
on the Hill
The smale foules then
In Gramarye, in the violet moon,
Puck and the muses
Tangled in the roundshaws.
Hare on the hill
Roe in the high wood
Swans in October starlight,
The river… heron above
Otter below....blue-fin tench, pike,
Raven rolling at break of day,
Badger town, fox hollow,
In the greenwood….
Festivals of owls.
March 2021
Eternity
Overwhelmed
And when there are no longer seasons
When cyclical time is overwhelmed, as
Tide by tsunami…
When a road has been driven through eternity.
When there is no longer climate
Only weather; unpredictable, chaotic, violent;
When the great forests are cut down
Made monoculture: palm oil, burger-ranch, soy plantation,
Capitalist Modernity…. an ideology made palpable.
When species become so rare
Their evolution is brought to halt
Abundance-driven natural selection
Overwhelmed by selection for profit,
The shape of death: palpable, obscure…
When there are no longer seasons,
Time overwhelmed,
Eternity overwhelmed,
Summer, no more,
Spring, no more.
February 2021
Fugitive
The fear was the best of it
Those fugitive years
Along a glittering world
Under a different sun, another moon,
Somewhere between the days,
Without contact, the void
A second skin.
Lost in orbit
Come back to another time
An alien planet.
Here the birds are not the same
The stoat on the track
The willow herb blowing
The scent of lime blossom…..
They are unreachable
The shouts beyond the horizon.
February 2021
The
Same Stink
The world smells of death.
Where once there was that high rolled hair
(Called Victory Rolls when it was all over)
The heavy military skirts of the camp guards,
The cigarettes, the laughter, the camaraderie outside the
barracks,
We’ve all seen the pictures….
Now, it’s blond hair, falling in regulation spirals,
A style as formal as a salute,
Pink lipstick, the lashes, the slim
Baby-blue dress,
“The Christian girl-next-door”
Almost a porn-star,
The PR Nazi…..
It’s the same stink….
The world smells of death.
January 2021
Moon
Old midwinter moon
Walking the old path
With the old gesture
Remote, aloof, way up there.
Summer moon, twice the size
Crouched over the horizon
Rolling a tun of buttermilk
The same old story
Old as the wind.
January 2021
