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View from the Hills
All poems © John Gilham 2005, 2006
To the reader:
This collection is about landscape, the ground we have our feet on when our heads are in the clouds, and how it got to be the way it is, which is also about how we got to be the way we are.
As a species, we have over millennia made superficial changes to the surface layer of our planet. Most of this has been unconscious. However our dream time has recently come to an end; we can no longer pretend that the consequences of our actions are unknown, or insignificant. If we are the dominant life-form on the Earth, then we have a responsibility to care for the planet and for other life forms which share it with us. But we are fouling our nest, without having anywhere else to go.
This is not a polemical booklet, but in a very small way, I wish to join my voice to those who are crying out against the folly of governments, the arrogance of big business, the blindness of all those who are accelerating their 4 x 4s and their cheap flights towards the breakdown of those natural systems which keep the world in equilibrium. Hence the sections which follow:
The question mark is significant.
Some of these poems have appeared in various magazines over the years
John Gilham
July 2005
For Kit and Jo
19th August 2005
“whose fields are not ours to till
whose weather is not ours to rule”
The Provençal Mas
The first time, there was no loo,
but lavender, and lizards,
and a pomegranate tree.
I recall splitting the fruit,
the hard bulb, the juice,
and walking to the baker’s after dark,
a river of stars in the August sky.
And then the valley in May with our children:
cherry blossom, fresh asparagus
and strawberries,
olive trees in ancient, unkempt fields,
and rivers of ants, busy
constructing their future.
A Farm in Telemark
Now the farm grows children, who play
where once a wheat crop filled the space
between lake and mountain.
Skis in the barn, a studio now, and still a tractor,
though no cows spend the winter,
and no hay in the hayloft.
We picnic on the islands, we swim in the lake,
we leave nets out for a fish to tangle in;
we climb the mountain to pick blueberries
and cloudberries and chanterelles;
we note the evidence of elk.
A Town House in Baden-Württemburg
From the station it’s a short walk
down past the art gallery, an inn or two,
over the covered bridge and up
through the busy streets, the market square
to this small haven, tucked behind the church,
beneath the hill, packed round with other houses
and other families, with history, riches, war and famine,
a house rooted here,
before, through, and beyond this time
Places
Dear to me for friends that live there,
different from this place, where, city though it be
In each street I know someone,
recognise a face, a function, a walk;
a place where I see my neighbours grow old.
We bustle within our white walls;
we drink beer, tea;
we know where and when.
When to go in, and when to bar the gates.
Our cathedral bells, tumbling through changes
accompany living.
Yes, I’m tempted by the scent of thyme,
by wind on the lake, coffee in a cobbled square
Or even the wide skies, the polders,
the poplars, the snug farms, earth, air and water,
the crackle of reflected light,
the flat land, the odd permanence,
of dyke and ditch: something maybe in the blood…
Each one an itch, a longing, a memory.
We all have our Paradise - or I hope we do.
There's a high road above Dentdale
where curlews fly winter and summer
and spread below me the small fields enclose the light;
where sheep pattern the varying green
and roads and streams lead their winding, rock-determined way
towards quiet places.
Peace; though here too
I have shouted with exhilaration when a blizzard's
whipped down the the valley from the east
feathering visibility to a few yards
for a few five-minutes; and then sunshine,
and the Howgills, ten miles away,
clear as a summer dawn.
Memory encompasses
dry seasons, when we walk and jump
the plates of rock in the river bed
and harebells line the way to Blea Moor,
when there are orchids, and dippers,
and the rustling of wrens.
Autumn comes, overwhelmed with brilliance;
and then Christmas, when the thin ice splinters
on the tractor ruts, and I strap holly to my pack
to return to the train in the sun's last horizontal rays.
Gather ye holly while ye may.
The dale goes on, and these paths,
made by generations of farmers, shepherds and churchgoers
will endure beyond my feet.
Paradise endures,
and what healing lies in these few miles:
the resilience of landscape,
the diagnosis of light,
the cut of wind and sun
and the homeopathic glimpse of wrens.
That little bit of God in me;
that little bit of God in them.
The map says there is a path here:
a dashed green line links this road
with another, evidence of old desires,
perhaps now cooled, but nonetheless
this signpost marks the start, and that gate is new, only,
someone has ploughed where we need to walk,
another gate is locked, no stile,
the next field impassable with rape,
tough stalks preventing, our clothes stained with pollen.
Are we right – and in the right ?
For this is not a wildness, this is a patchwork
where every stitch has some intent:
footpaths, bridleways, boundaries, quilt the map,
where the past is not easily ploughed out or planted over
- the record stays.
We persevere, the path resumes,
navigation vindicated
by a fingerpost just where we need it.
Now we join the story of these fields,
now the clods bear our mark, the bent stalks’
violation a droit de seigneur.
We climb through his fields,
through lush grass from a wet summer;
thistle, clover, a few dock, sheep droppings,
and here a ring that will grow fairies later,
and there a dip, nettled, stone quarried.
Hedges no longer laid, but tidy;
the walls rebuilt, made strong –
his sons did that.
But the soil is what matters:
clover, dung, grass ploughed in
for wheat in another year.
If he notices the two hares that start
under our feet and leap, run, gracefully
ignored by the dogs, he does not say so.
Nor, as we reach the top, does he comment
on the half of Yorkshire spread out
beneath the roiling clouds, stabbed with sun shafts
on the purple moor, the tidy villages,
the myriad fields each with its own warden,
resolutely keeping his eyes on the earth,
though his head be next to heaven.
And was this the border of Elmet,
a ridge, defensible, stretching up
from the washlands
with their stocks of winter geese,
ducks, a hunter’s harvest;
and did it protect too, the river’s ford
where the Romans later set their stamp
and left their name?
I walk this path and with one step
straddle two counties, can follow by eye the line
that links the highest points, that picks up features
no-one would know (or care) how old they are,
indifferent as the kestrel that glides
from the field into the wood, targetting
some small rustling in the next kingdom.
Our world is ordered from remote offices
but once was carved by men with ploughs and axes,
smoothed by women planting, harvesting,
teased from one where kestrel, goose and duck
took their territories from God,
who also placed the hills, the rivers, and the ice.
We slow, join a queue of cars
ahead,
an ‘A’ road turned to
country lane
by a tractor with its load of
beet.
From the bus, high between
towns,
time to look out
- the Wolds,
slanting from us in chalk
fields
thorn hedges, barrows, clumps
of trees,
until the eye leaps to the
South,
the flash of Humber, plumes
from Drax and Ferrybridge,
spreading,
joining the wide cloudscapes
of eastern England.
In the distance, a shower over
York,
nearer, a sun-shaft on a
village church,
a pheasant in a field by the
road.
Without this tractor, would I
have seen
these layers of time, of place,
of weather?
Reading reports to save time
– for what?
More reports, more racing to
the future,
more targets, more outcomes.
Next time,
I dream the farmer will have
harnessed
his slow shires, feather
footing their waggon
across the ridge, beneath the
majesty of clouds,
I and the bus, in their humble
train.
One by one they cross the stepping stones,
with increasing confidence.
This year, the oldest helps the middlest,
next, the youngest needs help –
soon, they will be falling in,
relishing the familiar surprise.
Dams can be built, siblings splashed,
sticks floated down to be caught
as they hurtle through the gaps,
hand and eye together, like a heron fishing.
Now they come back, with lovers, children;
soon they will be bringing us, helping us,
smiling to remember their own hesitant beginnings,
patient as we were.
Perhaps they will one day scatter
our ashes in the pool, watch
as they quicken between the stones,
grant us our little part in Paradise.
one evening, stage-lit
we climb the brackened hill against the sun,
pause on the ridge,
and find, looking back
that we are shadows on the trees
the trees a shadow on the wood
the wood, a shadow on a further hill
The Lord commands it - and the land obeys:
the country settles, huddling against a long winter -
the trees bend for an evil time.
Our world is ending, yet the curve of hills
and breadth of plain and valley will endure:
they will remain when our time is done.
But who knows where our earthworks,
our hillforts, our fields and forests
will be in the new world ?
For the bramble grows fast, the badger digs,
and leaf-mould, unswept, buries deep the encircling ditch.
All may be forgotten
Arthur reigns as if his peace will last for ever;
He rules by fear and sword.
And how shall I tell him?
For tonight he shall see the Grail and then no more
nor no man more in this land
until all are gathered in.
Away with summer goes the cuckoo's song;
the small birds die and do not sing;
the buzz of bees is not a lasting thing.
Deep in the deepest silence
deep in the country's core
Arthur remains, knotted in the land and years,
strained against chaos with an ancient strength.
On
this bleak hill, the sun focusing the cold,
out
walking on Boxing Day, flakes of ice in the wind,
we
sheltered in the ditch of an earthwork,
huge
and ancient, silted beneath the drift of centuries.
I
wondered what it was for;
not
just to eat one's sandwiches in
but
to contain things, or keep things out,
dreams
and enemies, Picts and Danes.
The
landscape moves on, cows graze and forests grow
the
plough erodes, lives change
and
under it all the curve of the earth
its
surface a palimpsest, a maze.
Today
there is the silence of the season,
the
world, celebrant, on pause
but
through and beyond that, from the hills ahead
an
axe, shaving at the wilderness
shading
to a pick, a plough, a harrow
and
a sweeping of scythes.
Order
in the high fields
where
a warrior from the past and before that
heir
of the Romans yet, in his thickest blood
heir
of the land before the Romans came
Arthur,
twice lord, reigns on his sheep-grazed hill
last
hammer of the English, forged by
the hand of God
and
thrust in the fire against them
he
waits with his war-band the hour of need.
Amiable,
we amble where he strode
his
legacy our present,
his
vision ours if we care to see;
sun,
friendship, our feet on the ground
the
mist veiled fields and woods of England ours
these
clods the seal on the charter,
and
though the purpose of this Ring eludes us, the map no help
our
function is to walk cheerfully,
accepting
that the gift of God is the land and the people
and
the voices whispering through the last leaves.
Like
the old druid, wed to his new religion
as
an oak wed to the wind, his roots in the earth
and
feeling through his bones the lift of the land
and
how God is omnipotent and lost in the wondrous Grail.
Or
Arthur, who holds by the grace of the King and his will
this
land together, clamped to his careful course
like
roots to rock.
Who
fights for the feel of the land, since he must;
ordained
by the gift of the Grail,
and
by acclamation of the rocks and trees.
Who
knows what Arthur takes to the Grail,
who
knows what faith he gives, blood he offers
and
what strength given to that holy bowl
by
the curve of the hill, his land and ours
as
we wind down the bright fieldside
snow
beneath the hedges, in sun and cloud and wind
the
ancient forest turned to hedged fields
our
future built on his, our eyes, our hearts
lifted
to the silver slant of the winter sun
till,
back in the village, we kick
the
drifts of white from our boots
and
find in the warmth of friends and jokes
and
drinks by a fire, another bedrock
balance
to the past,
a
human counter to the world of myth.
We
lift the glass not the Grail cup,
our
vision in each other's hearts
not
in some cold chapel by a winter sea,
and
though we are heirs of Arthur, visions of Merlin
neither
will come again;
we
must cut our own ditches, turn our own sod
and
sow our own seed;
parents
of those "whose fields are not ours to till,
whose weather is not ours to rule."
We visit the post office,
check out the pub for dinner,
and stroll past the harbour.
By the ramparts we stop,
watch a boat putter in from crabbing,
and gaze South to Bamburgh.
The castle delights us, a fantasy left
from the enmity of English and Scots –
we linger, imagining the past.
And then we take the grass track
to the North, birds and butterflies, rabbits
and wildflowers, the sound of the sea.
Our daughters, we hope, await us
there on the beach, fourteen and seven, trusted
in themselves and on this island.
Holy Island, protect our daughters
from our own fear – let them live untroubled,
safe before the Vikings’ coming.
…where we are the tourist hordes,
three of us for an hour or so, obvious strangers,
greeted by all,
yet none can recognise our picture of a house,
the family’s but seventy years ago, and now unknown.
Here are still chickens, here is still chopped wood,
stacked like bones in the bone cellar,
and cats which, no doubt, stem from a line
our people left behind with those who stayed.
In the church, the rich stay dead.
Four hundred years on we still
can read their monuments, count their children,
note their piety, their hopes of heaven.
Not so, the rest.
Why, even in death they rent a plot of land
not even for half a span: for thirty years,
perhaps fifteen, and then are gone;
the genealogist’s clues removed;
gravestones returned I know not where;
their existence remembered only by those still here,
and in some filing cabinet, some list.
Here lie Schairers, buried in ’96, the last in this village.
The smithy is closed, the church empty,
only the chimney sweep left plodding the streets
once the school bus has shed its children
to walk the old paths back to their farms, their new estates.
Our links are long sundered, our fathers and grandfathers
pitched against theirs in trenches, or in Normandy,
and our uncles, cousins, billeted here, an occupying force,
suspicious of these unknown relations
who till the fields, shoe horses,
speak incomprehensibly.
We move on, but first we have trod the lanes they trod,
stood on the church step where they stood
at funerals, christenings, and proud marriages.
These cats, these chickens, these middens,
the church, these farms, these fields
they knew, these people their neighbours - and ours,
now the seas are not so sundering,
now the world shrinks again and our enemies
are known to be our brothers.
1337 this house,
this year’s children 8 and 5,
but most of its progeny long dead,
their bones neatly stacked behind the altar
in St. Michael’s bone-cellar,
their high church, where short,
or long lives are memorialized
as kneeling parents, swaddled infants.
From the church steps the town fans out:
the market, stalled with farmers, bakers, fishmongers,
three score cheeses, a hundred sausages,
kohl-rabi, crab-apples, spitzkohl
– gemuse, wurst.
This house sends its children
for rolls, pretzels, eggs, and spice;
to the post with its impenetrable tongue;
to the little house of glass full of books
in this town of wooden houses,
and wooden shops. This town
where the potter keeps a toy museum,
where up the steps of the council
councillors heave their constituents,
cows and donkeys.
This is a town
where in two glass boxes, the art gallery
clashes the renaissance and twenty 04;
where the museum omits nothing,
and while celebrating much,
notes the 3rd Reich,
reconstructs the synagogue.
This is a town
where the bookshop seems organised
on no recognisable principle, and sells wine;
this is a town where the street lights
light only the way, and not the stars,
where the doctors have an art gallery
in their waiting room.
And this is a town where my daughter lives
in a house six centuries old,
and shares her room with turtles;
where the tourist guides
point out the painted ceiling,
and blow a horn for today’s children
to switch on the lights;
where sometimes the listeners in the street
can hear a cello, sometimes a violin,
sometimes, I hope, they hear my daughter singing.
This is a house where a poorly child,
in his white pyjamas,
reminds me of those bundled burials,
and yet by teatime is once more playing games,
smiling, while his brother throws a line
again, again into the tree
until it loops over, forms a swing,
for how many children, past and future.
This is a town where the school
puts on the shepherds’ play;
and once again the good innkeeper
remembers her stable, just in time;
gives hope to the kneeling families,
their lost, trussed infants,
ensures their bones are just bones,
and that all their souls will sing in the stars.
January fifth, two thousand and four,
and back to Larkin’s toad.
Once, one’s joyous efforts flowed
in this direction, but more and more
the clouds beckon, the wide
skies over moorland roads,
the land, the palimpsest, that encodes
our history: hedges, ditches, that divide
two kingdoms; the swell of a hill fort,
the stone trod, the burial mound;
basic, but not found
each Monday to Friday, when I ought
not to think outside the box,
but follow the rules, shuffle a load
of controlling paper, calculate what’s owed,
and all while the spirit inside me mocks
my diligence. Time, prescription, boredom,
erode the sense of duty. Sunlit uplands sowed
wild flowers of discontent, where the wind’s kiss might goad
the frog prince to inherit his kingdom.
East Yorkshire 26th November 1997
could it be anywhere?
one field is like another,
one shell-shocked stream impassable
as any other to men weighed down
with rifles, gas-masks, sandbags, shovels;
and this mud not less than Flanders mud;
blood here not less bloody;
where to be dead is just as dead.
imagination furnishes the battlefield.
is there a holiness of place?
what sanctifies this tump, that bridge,
this Mount of Olives, that Passchendaele?
and what invests these lines of beet, or wheat,
these stunted vines, that oak, with meaning,
if not memorials we build there?
there are no crosses in these fields,
no church or temple, roadside plaque,
no weight of tears.
but for that, it could be anywhere,
but for that.
No doubt the richness of this earth:
fields greening with new wheat,
fields red with cabbages, piles of beet, bone coloured,
and marrows left to rot like severed limbs.
A wet, fertile soil; and where the sun
catches water standing in ruts and rows,
(deep enough to hide a body in),
they flash explosion-silver;
wet grass between the graves,
peppered with points of light:
"Soldiers of the Great War - Known Unto God."
Stand now where the towers of Ypres, the spire of
Passchendaele,
are the horizon's span
and know the space it takes to fire a shell,
draw lines on a map
and throw a million lives away.
Poplars grow, farms and houses rise again,
wheat turns toward summer.
The dead stay dead.
From this rich land, "little Belgium",
the lorries spread across Europe,
to England, Germany, Sarajevo,
to markets where some still mourn
the father whom they never knew,
but "Known unto God".
your memory was
not where I expected it to be
not on the
approach to Passchendaele
not where McRae
wrote of poppies
nor, marching
through with the November ghosts
in the market
square at Ypres
no, but here at
Bridge House,
looking back
across the years
across the
waste, where, six to a stretcher
you carried
each wounded, mutilated shade
of what was
once a man, borne from hell,
back to where
the roads began, and healing,
restored,
perhaps, to death in life.
you were here.
in front, a
little stream it cost five hundred men to cross;
behind, the
dead city, and here, dead in these graves
your men, your
mates, blokes you knew
the ghosts you
kept in silence to your grave -
an
unacknowledged loss from round the heart
After Köln, where the smell of cabbage drifted across the station,
we sped south, threading the tidy streets of Bonn
like an intrusion on a maiden aunt, until suddenly
vineyards appeared, knitted up the hillsides,
ribbed experiments in colour choice,
folded to let a castle (ruin, museum, smart hotel) adorn a rock,
while on the Rhine, dashed with white like a mountain stream,
Europe’s barges battered the waves.
Later, from a high apartment, we watch as darkness falls:
lights move and sway as if we are still voyaging -
an inland sea, a Brio set, crossing and recrossing the fields
with bright skeins of earnest travellers,
patterns in light, a country on the move.
And we move too, on clockwork trains,
past peaceful woods, fields of dry corn, and bare orchards.
We visit quiet towns, cafés with cakes you might die for,
or from; sausages and sauerkraut, paving, baroque altars,
and litter pre-sorted, purposeful, neat.
We drive, we visit friends, we see the sights;
but in one place, on a farm wagon a tarpaulin
and a name – Mengele – angel of death,
strikes like a shard of ice impaling the heart.
I think “farm machinery firm” – in vain.
Here lies the poison of history:
it chills these golden hills;
it lurks behind the smiles.
We cannot avoid what we inherit -
but we must know it
for what it is and how it shapes us.
The town to which we return, have dinner
with friends who live there,