photo: Beth Gilham
Some of these poems have previously appeared in the following
magazines:
Aesthetica,
Aireings
Orbis
Pennine Platform
John Gilham will be perfectly happy to make all the necessary assertions
that he is the author of the poems in this booklet (and on this website), should he ever be
asked to do so.
“Poetry is an art whose practitioners probably outnumber its audience.”
Sean O’Brian
Ever conscious of Sean O’Brian’s pithy truth, I have produced this booklet in modest numbers,
not only that you might sell it and its rarity value for vast sums when fame has knocked upon my coffin,
but because many of the poems are closer to the heart than in previous volumes.
Some, indeed, may mean little except to me and to my immediate family. Others may have a wider appeal.
I hope so.
Travelling
A Window on the World.
It’s dusk, when orange, red, and purple
pulse in the west,
the sky pitted by sodium,
and headlights, tail-lights, stack at junctions;
when the lights come on in houses
in back rooms seen from the train:
televisions, kitchens, an unmade bed,
already some Christmas trees.
Here a woman lays a table,
children do homework,
and there, a man in a vest,
a cat sleeping.
We pass in the night like Bede’s sparrow,
granted a glimpse of warmth and feasting,
though whether to celebrate a birth,
or mark a death, is not revealed.
And what do they make of us,
staring into darkness like astronomers,
seeking the meaning of life
from the fleeing galaxies, a purpose,
a pattern, a reason for it all.
Faster, we enter a dark country.
By the time we slow again,
those other worlds are gone,
shut off by nets and drapes
from the prying eyes of aliens.
Just as well; too long a clip of other people’s lives
encourages despair – the lights grown dim,
benighted, lost. We rocket on,
our own reflection all there is to contemplate.
Climbing to St Michaels
Here is a flight of steps:
from here the market is piled high
with white asparagus, kohl rabi, feldsalat;
and tonight from these same steps
we view a rock-band,
and a woman dancing from church door
to market square
elegantly, dangerously.
Another day:
and the sunlit Maibaum flutters
while below workers unite in fiery speeches.
Cheerful bands on strange instruments
soften the stridencies.
Another: and these curved steps
host the town’s children, garlanded,
and each one holds a balloon
that tugs and strains to be free
till all at once they fly
– into a harlequin sky.
Some snag on the Maibaum ,
some on the church,
some on the café’s swinging sign,
but most head up, beyond,
curious, adventurous,
like children, heading for life.
And tonight, the steps are closed
except to actors rehearsing
the play they will offer to us all.
Just now we by-pass them,
and make our way to the church
where there will be music all night long –
gift after gift of soaring sound
on organ, voices, strings and brass –
lifting us through to Ascension morning.
Underground music
You know how in London, sometimes,
in the middle of a rushed day,
the city chaotic, crowds at cross-purposes,
thwarting your timetable
softly, then louder, around some corner,
or at the bottom of some escalator,
comes the sound of a violin or saxophone
soaring high above the joyless masses
who press on regardless.
But for you it's like blossom in Spring:
your head lifts, your feet dance, you skip,
you search for 50p, a pound,
the price of redemption.
And it happens too in Paris, Berlin, Venice,
so when I heard a saxophone in Washington,
on the endless slow Metro escalator,
my hand went to my pocket for change.
And what a sound - free jazz, contemporary, now,
with such a range, bass, tenor, soprano
- and what courage not to play
"Summertime", "Those Foolish Things",
but new, wonderful, tunes.
What a city!
For buskers are not allowed in Washington.
The escalators play their own music
of chords and flourishes, of pure notes,
that echo in their concrete caverns,
the belts and rollers, the wheels and bearings,
making music for the underworld
and for climbing to the sun.
Announcement.
The senior conductor said, I'm sure,
"On leaving the train do not forget
to take all your longings with you."
All my longings !
Just let me find a case big enough,
a trolley, a porter, a taxi,
to bring them to your door.
Will you have space?
Will I be the unexpected guest
whose longings take over your spare room,
spill onto the landing,
surprise you, trip you up,
hurt you maybe?
I didn't want to hurt you.
I had done better to leave them
and come to you naked, without baggage,
leaving my longings to shuttle back and forth,
to London, Paris, Warsaw, Samarkand,
and all stations to Paradise, or Loss.
The Underground
There are tunnels beneath the hospital
where above, each building appears separate;
really, they are just the surface flowering of
routes for orderlies, the ways doctors use
to escape the needy, the place nurses go
to weep; the last journey of the dead
echoes through here among the whoops and skirls
of dinner ladies, pharmacists, anaesthetists,
racing their trolleys; releasing the world
from its burden of sick humanity
in sunlit wards above – all we visitors see.
The Old Gate at Wittenburg
The players were the first to go,
hung over, tattered, with their wagons and stuff,
pursued by urchins and unpaid innkeepers,
heading north to towns and palaces heard of
from student princes, late, after the show,
everyone drunk and maudlin, nostalgic,
promising the perfect audience back home.
And next him, heir apparent, in black already,
posting north in pride and fear,
launched by his father’s death from student prince to king
in the time it takes to break a seal.
And then his friend, puzzled,
borne on some dark rumour of foul play,
of wars and weddings, danger and death,
loyalty, curiosity, a kind of love.
And last, the two sent for, paid to go,
knowing who called the tune, the shots,
employed to build enquiry upon acquaintance,
hired men on hired mounts.
And of all these, only one returned.
Passed the gate and rode slowly
back to his lodgings. He was heard to say
that now Philosophy held no terrors –
he had been to the end of heaven and earth,
had seen there all that he would ever know.
Berlin 2006
At Spandau, we bought ice-cream,
at Potsdam, a guide-book,
and pretzels on Unter den Linden.
There, we watched a demonstration,
untidy, long-haired, shambling -
no salutes, no uniforms, no tanks nor missiles,
and not in the past.
Names mutate, their resonance fades:
the conference that lost the peace,
the trophy prison, the showpiece alley,
are now suburbs, destinations, S-bahn stops.
And others are re-harnessed to a different cause -
or perhaps the same one, in different clothes.
Here, in this city we step carefully –
for this was a frontier more than arbitrary,
it divided the world, trapped history
and fossilized the present.
Over our shoulder we see the wire,
the watchtower, the wall,
and beyond this line
the plaques, the crosses,
the grey transcendent blocks,
a broken yellow star,
that seek to re-unite the sundered peoples,
staunch the blood.
And commerce celebrates - its domes, its neon,
its golden arches.
Starlings cross the line,
the S-bahn snakes from West to East,
as it always did,
for the realities of infrastructure
outfaced mere politics, forced compromise,
stitching together despite itself,
the crack across the earth -
and not a shot fired, not in the newspapers
quotidian, subversive.
A city of trees, of neighbourhoods
of playgrounds,
of government ambition -
and of people talking in cafés,
taking bicycles on the train
buying postcards, selling pretzels,
ordering ice-cream in the dark, in Spandau,
children, parents, skipping into nothingness between the blocks of stone.
CONFESSIONS
Home
nobody comes
nobody comes
there is a shiny floor
a cracked ceiling
cot bars
and sunshine
in another world
but nobody comes
someone is crying
someone is washing dishes
people are talking
somewhere
someone is crying
I am crying
nobody comes
somebody comes
somebody smiles
somebody talks
too late
I am not crying now
the hurt heals itself
scabs over
those who come, may come
and go
I smile, I talk
the sun shines
in my world, and your world
but nobody shares
my world behind bars
Castaway
Imagining a treat,
my little-known father set me adrift -
a small boat on a large pond.
I was too young:
I couldn't reach the pedal with my foot
and when I did, down beneath the dashboard,
I couldn't see.
I felt a fool. I chugged around the pond,
uncomfortable, alone, and staring at the sky,
while he and Mother talked, ignoring
my attempts at coming closer.
"Watch me!" I cried, desperate,
while they, saying whatever lovers
long and still estranged, do say,
hurried, with one eye on the clock,
till I came in again;
their time was up
- I am still floundering.
The Pick Up.
I dropped the jam jar.
As the water spread out on the pavement
the sticklebacks twitched and gasped
amongst the glass. Helpless,
I cried quietly.
And then a woman
came out of a house
with a jar, and water,
and she picked up the desperate fish,
saving their lives.
She turned to me with such a kind smile
I wanted her
to be my mother.
So, when I picked up
a fallen woman from the pavement,
outside a bar, one night in Edinburgh,
realising too late in what her fall consisted,
I nonetheless transferred her gently
to embrace a lamp post
and smiled kindly
hoping that she wouldn't
want to become a relation,
sensing it was she
who had dropped me in it,
me, who was the fish out of water.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Needing foundations for our new kitchen, we excavate.
Tiles come up, pottery, small bones - chicken probably -
but not till we dig a metre or so do they appear, like sticks,
and then that strange twist, ulna and radius;
and wary scraping reveals a ball and socket.
Panicked, we call in archaeologists.
It seems, the past underpins us.
Once a courtyard where they threw scraps,
and swept out the breakages;
and before that, for centuries, a cemetery
stacked deep and close as though our kitchen
was an altar, some holy shrine to
gods of home and hearth.
Who they were we shan’t know
although we depend upon them.
As I depend upon my father, whom I never knew,
unearthed in a single photograph.
Not much foundation really for a family,
his very existence a skeleton
cupboarded so long;
but now no longer out of sight,
nor out of mind; roots, bones.
November
November, when the nets of my mother’s spare room,
white against the sky,
trap a black flake, ragged,
that proves a butterfly, wings folded,
caught, I guessed, last summer,
died, and left untouched –
a perfect silhouette –
that suddenly now moved,
spread its wings in colour,
climbed an inch or two, stopped,
folded, resumed its death mask –
and minutes later fluttered up, then down,
striving towards the light,
the little-did-it-know-it cold and raw, outside,
its desire frantic, its place, not in a room.
I let it out.
November.
Thus I released its soul.
Thus my mother flutters feebly,
long past her summer. Her place is a room, still,
not ready to move on.
Perhaps for us the metaphor turns round:
we pass from life to moments in the sun,
our souls seeking a world to spread their wings,
escape from the nets, the cold,
to be reborn more beautiful than we will ever know.
Offstage
At O level, we were led to Agincourt
like beasts to the slaughter.
Thoroughly, painfully,
poetry, drama, beauty
were severed from the text
and we were thrust into the breach –
the English dead.
But yet – it lives.
How many times a day
do the bard’s words ring true
from “fie, wrangling queen” (Antony & Cleopatra)
to “something rotten” (Hamlet)
or “great thing of us forgot” (Lear).
So, visiting my mother dying,
who talked inconsequentially,
and fumbled with her sheets,
Shakespeare had been there, seen that,
honed the metaphor:
for her “nose was as sharp as a pen” (Henry V),
and her subsequent passing, therefore, not unheralded.
Saying Goodbye
blackberry weather, fields and hedges
stretching out to the sunlit Wolds
and you, pregnant, on the tandem
waiting for our son
and then later with a child-seat,
on expeditions, walks, paddling,
or raspberry picking, tree-climbing
and it worked hard, many days, to school
and then, when the kids could pedal too,
to swimming, horse riding
- chatting on the way - sociable times
and lately, creaking, erratic, retired almost
an eccentric steed for daughter and boyfriend
cementing something in shared adversity
and now, our final journey, me,
stately and slow, passing it on, for free,
to be restored and blest
how come, I felt more sad
at my last ride on this family friend
than scattering my mother’s ashes
around the honeysuckle, brambles,
lush grass of that green lane,
nettles, hawthorn, sloes and crabs
the tandem missing from our gathered midst.
It shared twenty-six years of growth
as she did not, who rode alone, shared little,
preserved her privacy, paid for her mistakes -
at what high cost
unfilial to mourn the tandem more.
ON BEING A DAD
A Bright September
Too early for dew on spiders’ webs
and not time to put on the heating
except for an hour or two.
Too late to sit in the garden after dinner
but not too dark to walk by the river
in the evening light, slowly.
Leaves stay on the trees, all but a few,
that turn in the bright September breeze
- Autumn’s first metaphors.
And this quiet time, before that moment
which changed our lives forever,
is what we always call
“waiting-for-Kit weather.”
Auden’s Centenary.
“…when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.”
W.H. Auden. In Praise of Limestone
there's a plaque on a house we often pass
- to W. H. Auden, born there - an ordinary house
and round the corner is one John Woolman died in
and up the road, a pub where Guy Fawkes lived
and then, not far away, the upstairs room
my daughters were born in -
where someone else sleeps now and makes love -
in that sunny, morning place
do places matter so?
will my son, born in a hospital
now succeeded by a shopping mall
stroll reminiscent though the outlets
seeking some meaning from where his life began
(though really - it was in that same sister-bearing bed
one frosty night, nine months before)
and did Auden, I wonder, think of York, much?
the clay, the gravels, the alluvial moraine ?
limestone was more his thing,
varied, subtle, soluble
and Woolman’s life is not revalued by his death
though Fawkes may regret his move away.
birthplaces pass, are left behind
- deeds, words, those we love
need no blue plaque, or brass,
and yet I’m glad I know these origins
can trace the arc from birth to death,
from little room to little room,
a scaffold, or a limestone landscape.
School Concert
On Saturday, we have a lie-in
except that we don’t,
haven’t,
not for 26 years
not since our first-born
became an early-riser –
then our second, and our third.
The weekend is a chance to relax,
except that for nineteen years
one or other
has had riding lessons, music lessons
swimming lessons, drama
all at some ungodly hour
and at some distance which involves
me and the tandem
or at the least, giving them breakfast
and their bus fare.
The weekend’s cosy,
except that after biking out
in the rain, with some
equestrian son or daughter
to the riding school,
there’s nothing else to do
but get colder and colder
as they walk, trot, canter,
on their warm pony,
for a whole hour.
They bring you
so much, children,
- they bring you the chance
to spend Saturday night sitting
through two hours of beginners violins,
the string orchestra,
the pseudo-medieval consort,
while they murder the classics or, worse,
cat-gut the cheerful tunes penned by their tutors
for children of no ability whatsoever
(I except, of course, my own,
who at least can manage a tune -
and is therefore on last).
I’m looking forward
to when weekends are once again
free and cosy,
when I can please myself when to get up
and what to do
and be just as bored as I want to be
waiting for the chance
to become slave to the grandchildren
31.12.2003
New Year’s Eve sleet chills
the feet of revelling children,
our teenagers, who wear no hats,
and but for our parental fuss
would have bare midriffs,
no coats, only bravado and
a misplaced sense of fashion
against the north-east blizzard.
We stay at home, cosily sipping
a decorous glass of wine as Big Ben
heralds the New Year
(headlines all bad),
and lay newspaper over the hall carpet,
ready towels and blankets,
stoke the fire.
Our rôle is to offer hot chocolate,
bring in for them another year of hope
and conceal for now our own ambivalence:
our gloves of caution won’t be shed,
our coats of cynicism, scarves of doubt,
our chain-mail links to all the years gone by.
Having a Houseful
Time was, when going to someone else’s house
was a treat; them coming to mine
a disaster. Something in the air
killed the pleasure in it -
we didn’t do guests.
Time is, the house is full of children.
All I need, after locking the doors,
is to count how many overnight,
in case of fire -
who’s going to school, who needs breakfast.
Time to come, they will be gone, the first
floor empty, quiet and dull.
Send us your children, oh my children.
Something here will need them – to stir the dust.
Someone here will need them – to stir the soul.
RAGE
Editing
I need a smaller Bible,
one without the difficult bits:
like Hell, like retribution, an eye for eye,
like plagues, locusts, boils, the slaying
of the first born, salt, pillars of,
floods, and the destruction of cities
like Gomorrah, or Hiroshima, Fallujah.
I want to stick to loving my neighbour,
to blessings on the meek
and turning the other.
I need a smaller Bible, maybe the one
that Jesus might have wrote.
Upon Westminster Embankment – 15th February 2003
Going up was like the Coronation,
the train, ten stations out, near full,
and more of us at each – and free,
for the ticket staff were overwhelmed
by the pull of great events.
We lined the platforms
with flags then,
banners and placards now.
And the terminus crammed, the bridge solid
crowds streaming across to the Embankment,
in celebration of what it is to be angry, to be right,
to say: “Not in our name” two million times.
But we, who hoped to see our conscience not ignored -
well – bitterness, and bombs, and death, were our reward
Throwback
Lucerne, December – nineteen sixty-four;
and swans on the cold lake.
One, with slow wings
and paddles beating the surface of the water,
struggles to take off, lumbering,
slow to get airborne, till the bulk lifts and banks,
heavy, grey, slow in the grey, heavy sky.
Back then, in my mind’s eye, I saw the 707s
clamber up from Heathrow with slow grace –
now, from Fairford, the B52s throw me back again
to my age of innocence,
post Korea, pre Vietnam, before Iraq.
March 2003
Snowdrops done, crocuses finishing,
celandine still blooming, and all over
daffodils appear, as every year.
Spring has the usual signs, frogs
make the pond’s surface vibrate,
shimmer with desperate love-making,
and lambs are everywhere.
Across the woods there is the lime sheen
of this year’s leaves. We come home in the light.
Our hearts lift, but from Fairford the B52s
rise pregnant to the sky and turn east, choking,
turning the promise of new life
to the certainty of death,
their fertile rain of bombs growing
only terror, and more terror.
Soon, bluebells will carpet the ground;
the dead will carpet the desert, and revenge will
grow its blood-red crop in every corner of the earth.
Cyprus, Spring 2003.
Today we spread out the towels, the beach mats,
lie sheltered in the sun, and read –
a historical novel perhaps, a comical pastoral.
And already the crickets begin to buzz, already
a cold drinks seller sets up shop, children
paddle and throw sticks for a dog.
There are yachts on the sea, a grey smudge
hurries on the horizon, and across the blue bright sky
the silver darts spew contrails, flying west to east.
We have lunch: salad, olives, and something cool.
A lizard sprawls on a rock, ants rebuild their cities;
I put on a shirt to protect from burning.
Warm sand, a gentle sea. From this peace
I see more contrails, east to west. And later,
I learn they’ve been bombing Baghdad.
Of Course, It Goes On,
Even in bombed cities people need bread;
the peach crop, spared by the night’s bombardment
must still be sold, or rot –
and the butchers killed their meat yesterday –
life goes on.
The market buys and sells, though the soldiers
dart from cover to cover a block away.
and each morning, after the blitz,
we stepped over hosepipes,
to our offices.
Where the twin shadow fell but yesterday
the coffee shop re-opens.
For this is the affirmation:
this is how we say
that you who love war
cannot destroy us.
The bombed grocer who is “more open than usual”;
those who make love in the shelter;
the girl going to school past the burned out tank;
the mother who sings her child to sleep
through the stutter of gunfire, with songs
that are centuries old – of course, it goes on.
Out of the rubble we crawl with our violins,
our scraps of poetry, our cooking pots
and shopping bags; starting now
to rebuild what makes us human,
defying the teeth, the wolves of war.
Bicycling towards Ieper.
(i.m. Kathe Kollwitz)
bicycling towards Ieper
across the small, significant, ridges of Flanders
I found the quiet cemetery at Vladslo
here is a grove of trees which, in late November
carried still the memory of summer
as leaves fell on the incised names -
Johannes, Peter, Hans - yellow on the grey slabs
a grove where no birds sang
and Kollwitz’ silent parents,
wracked with grief, mourned for us all
to Tyne Cot and Passchendaele I carried them with me
years later, in Berlin, when even that last wall
was down, I realised her cruel fate,
whose imagination was tortured,
years even before that war, with images of mourning,
of mothers whose hearts were torn from their bodies
as their sons’ entrails, and her son’s, were torn from theirs
her soul, her hands knew
long before that last wave
at the corner of the street
that it would come to this unbearable quiet,
this bitter hush
how did she let him go ?
On the train from Eindhoven to Venlo…
…we passed through America
in twelve seconds.
That’s it, I’ve done America –
it’s a small town.
Just time to read the sign
and reflect…
What’s in a name ?
GAIA
Progress
cutting down the conifer in our garden
revealed dancing boughs, squirrels, magpies,
an explosion of leaves,
a world of light
wind-ruffled
like stumbling out of our Northern forests
into the Renaissance
Prayer for My Planet
What is that lifts my heart
as I step out from some crass
20th century concrete tunnel
onto the Thameside path
and say: “This is my city” ?
Or why, standing on the mole at Hoorn
watching the summer morning’s drift of stout Dutch sails
leaning into the diamond Ijsselmeer
does that seem home too?
The clouds that pile above the vales of Berkshire,
the North Downs, the narrow perfect valleys of Cumbria,
the inn at Fox-Amphoux, the castles on the Rhine,