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All poems © John Gilham 2004, 2005, 2006
a house full of children
a yard full of children -
grown-ups talk books
one late bird; island
and lake black and silver, sky
like smoke, blue and gold
taking in the nets,
rowing home; the sound
of one trout flapping
an evening full of
laughter; the sound of footballs
thudding on the barn
The shortage of larks is not here,
nor is it of hedges, cowslips, primroses,
kingfishers, voles.
Here be butterflies abundant,
elms, deer, lichen, moss,
all the threatened species the city press
would have us think are rare.
Here we pick brambles, on many a sill
elderflower foments to wine, sloes steep
in dark cupboards, knitters knit, hedges are laid.
This is not another country;
but why uproot hedges, why fill in the pond
where the deer drink, where a blue dragonfly
passes the summer day, and frogs croak
who may someday turn into princes
if we love them enough.
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 what we have.
The bombed grocer 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.
COMMON
FORM
If
any question why we died
Tell
them because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling
We have been lied to again.
Our fathers, it seems, cannot prevent
their lips from curling round the comfort
of a lie. Why trust old men?
This man lies in the dust
this, in a prison cage, and
on this woman lies the care
of her starved children
The flash lights glare;
there’s the clack of a hundred shutters
as the old men face down the wrath
of those they have lied to
with more lies.
Words crumble in the dust
and not only in the desert.
“If this is freedom , this democracy
these the words we die for,
let us have no more.
Let them lie in the dust too
coughing out their dreams in the dirt.
Leave us with our empty bellies;
we have nothing to fill them but terror,
revolution, hate”
Old men, your children reap what you sow.
Sow truth, sow justice,
for already we guess
what lies in wait.
Funny, how we missed it – that night
cycling home from the pub, so late
that on the quiet roads a barn owl flew with us,
and the night soft like silk, tossed lightly
over woods and fields till the next long day.
And warm, the summer lightning flittering noiselessly
on all the hills around, miles distant,
and never a thunderbolt, never the heavens split
by the surgical strike we did not see,
could not remember, waking to the gutted transept,
firemen, the press, the finger of god.
Is the trumpeter a chimney sweep
or the sweep a trumpeter?
and does the poet sell insurance
or is the salesman a poet?
Which is the day job?
And yet think of the art
of sucking out the soot
in house after house,
with never a speck on chair or carpet,
and then blowing one’s own trumpet
in the jazz band at night, craft skills,
two sides of a single breath.
Without the insurance we might never
have had the words, the music;
just words turned in on themselves alone
like a policy of despair, fraudulent claims to a life
which is only the hermit’s emptiness:
the same thoughts bounced endlessly across the cell,
brushing the chimney that’s already bare.
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 too.
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, incidentally).
We 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.
it was frozen
in the morning, stiff
in the ice at
the top of the bucket
dead, of course
this was no
experiment -
I wasn't going
to leave it a hundred years
then microwave
it back to life
no, it had paid
the price for being
in the wrong
place, and caught
it wasn't easy
killing a
half-dead rat
the cat had
maimed
this is
suburbia
this is the
century
when we like
our rats out of sight
and death to be
someone else's
package
I had drowned
it
and then I had
to bury it myself
Yes, we remember those movie moments:
but not Bogart for me, nor the usual suspects:-
the Odessa steps, nor the red balloon,
close though that is.
It’s the barbed wire, the butterfly,
and the hero’s hand, outstretched, dying.
(Symbols surround us; much metaphor mere cliché.)
November, when the nets of my mother’s spare bedroom,
white against the yellow sky,
trap a black flake, ragged, fixed,
that proves a butterfly, wings folded,
four legs, antennae; caught, I guessed,
last summer, died, and left untouched –
a perfect silhouette –
that 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 around:
we pass from life to moments in the sun,
our souls seeking out the way to spread their wings,
escaped from the nets, the wire,
reborn more beautiful than we will ever know.
high wind, four tugs
nuzzle the ferry like piglets
at a sow, steering
your plane lifts, banks
and is lost in cloud
from the viewing platform
I return to the concourse
I am lost in the crowd
until the news breaks
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 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.
Crossed the bridge 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.
Yes, I remember Doncaster. The train
stopped there, one evening in November;
and as we waited for further announcements,
or the whistle down the empty platform
"I wanted to be in York by ten," you said.
It seemed unlikely. It seemed you had to catch
the last bus to Easingwold, or things
would never be the same again.
Then, over the time it takes to find a driver, or a guard,
our lives unravelled, until you knew
how much I cried when our dog died,
and I, how you dropped an ice-cream, on the pier, at Ryde.
Oh I remember Doncaster, for there
was where we switched our mobiles off,
the train got under way again
and the next morning, long after
the first bus, we gazed at the winter sky
from my window; and at just that moment
they rang all the Minster bells,
and all the birds of Yorkshire sang.
[with due acknowledgement to Edward Thomas]
nobody comes
nobody comes
there is a floor, shiny
a cracked ceiling
bars of my cot
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 yours
but nobody shares
my world behind bars
they're unhinging one of my metaphors.
they say the Gulf Stream’s changing,
subverting my affections,
diverting my poet’s love,
constant, warm, life-giving,
bringing Spring to the cold,
a fertile air, an agreeable climate,
a longer growing season
something you could rely on.
now, if the Gulf Stream falters,
snow enters the vocabulary.
I need a new language,
be constant like permafrost,
offer love soft as the first snowflake
rash as snowboarding,
glacier steady,
warm words in a house made of ice.
strung up in Bransdale
two dozen dead black moles,
unwelcome insiders.
restoring the falls
would put the heavy water
back in its place
but we can never
unharness the atom, never
make the known, unknown.
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
and 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
Lucerne, December – nineteen sixty-four;
and swans on the cold lake.
One, with slow beating wings
and paddles running the surface of the water,
struggles to take off, lumbering down the long cold runway,
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 at Heathrow with slow grace –
now, from Fairford, the B52s throw me back again
to my age of innocence,
post Korea, pre Vietnam, before Iraq.
Three Haiku for an Autumn Kimono
wood rots on the forest
floor; the mushroom picker
shows his full basket
windy sunshine, spiralling leaves;
children run to catch them,
arms outstretched
on the castle terrace
a small tornado; children run
to catch the swirling leaves