Poems

Yes, I hear you. I hear

something else too.

Being from a young nation you find that dawn beguiles you

onto the exhausted saltmarsh,

miles of morose vacuity clad

in couch grass, cottonweed, random puddles, wire

and the odd, triumphant

                     flourish of pampas grass

featherily trying to tell dead factories,

                               Look here,

something fans, even at the far edge of Europe

where large gulls crowd and abruptly dip, although

the fish have all gone home to bed.

Well, it’s been waiting all these years, like a poem

            asleep in the word-hoard, its prince to come,

kiss at the ready, and bloom it forth to the world:

            or like a kouros, hauled with pain

from the gnarling waters, smiling gaze intact,

            its maker long put out to sea:

or like that ‘orient and immortal wheat’ that waved

            before Traherne, a child bereft,

and set him claiming Paradise again:

            yes, it’s here for the restless heart –

The American Express Gold Card Dress – and all

                        may now be well at last.

Come – no grazed knee, no tears, no –

no fear of darkness in the singing wood.

Hear the threnody written on the wind:

a lament not for lostness, no, but for the slow

path homewards, the pebbles which guide us:

The time’s come round again, blind pomegranates shine

In their dark bins like tawny Tuscan wine.

In the street

of my childhood

nothing is reliable.

There is no God, I was made in this man’s image:

those slate-dark eyes of his are mine,

the dented bridge of our his-my nose.

I laugh with his rasping cackle in me.

I walk with his stooping, trudging gait,

swearing his ‘Jesus bloody Christ’

in a sudden fist-curl of temper.

My right ear points like a flesh-antenna as his does,

and being my father I bear his name.

Haphazardries of kin passed on from birth

that to see him wizened on his cancer bed,

his insides turned to water,

for Craig Sherborne

‘Grief wrongs us so.’

                                                  Douglas Dunn

To the sea we bear our fathers in state –

or what they’ve done to them: the square conversions.

Surf mild as receding tides,

we slump in dunes with our burdens,

This must be a page from The Manual

For the Instructing of Humanity,

Showing the improvement of the Social Order

By the avoidance of personal identification

With Suffering, a turning-away to private Sanity.