NOCTURNE

    Here in the foreground,
    Black, silver and blue,
    Slates glint with the frost.
    Further back, churches
    Spire up in starlight.
    See the chimneys curl
    And the rooftops slant
    So sensually
    On those hard angles
    Of smokestacks and walls
    With dark curtains drawn,
    In the street below.
    Observe now, midground,
    The vague huddled figure
    In a dark trench-coat,
    Hurrying along
    The moonlit cobbles,
    Just past that street lamp.
    See it hesitate
    At some sharp corner.
    Does it move toward
    A familiar hearth,
    Out of the cold night;
    Or will it proceed,
    Further on outward
    Into the background
    Of a destiny
    Yet to crystallize,
    Black, silver and blue,
    In the icy dawn?

   (2012)

Another one that came very quickly after I’d been looking at a photograph of a Prague roofscape by the Czech photographer, Josef Sudek who I discovwered recently. The poem is by no means a literal description of the picture – it might just as easily recall scenes from the film noir, ‘ The Third Man’ – but it was the original point of departure.

The picture is one of a set of four that we bought from a photographer (not Sudek) who had a stall on the Charles Bridge in Prague several years ago. Interesting how all these elements come together...

1st JULY, 1916, THE SOMME

1st

JULY,

1916,

THE SOMME

After all the dramas
And documentaries,
After all the poetry
And the histories,
That summer morning
Never fails to appal:
The dull intelligence,
The wasted week
Of bombardment;
The Germans safe
In their rolling slopes
Despite the million shells;
Their wire uncut,
Their trenches intact;
The orders still standing
And sixty thousand fallen.
Men sent walking - walking –
Into a hell of fire and metal
And hundreds of thousands more men wasted
In the wasted months before the battle’s end,
When snow drew a shroud over the sludge,
In the dead of the wasted, wilderness winter.


(2012)

This was written in just a few minutes after we had watched BBC TV’s tremendously moving adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ WWI novel, ‘Birdsong’, the centerpiece of which is his setting of the Battle of the Somme.

In a negative and tragic sense, the history of mankind is the history of war – we just can’t seem to do without it. There is, however, something particularly compelling about the so called ‘Great War’. The Somme represents the top of the arc of the fighting halfway through the conflict. As far as I’m aware, there have never been so many military casualties on a single day of a battle in all history. When it was finally called off in November, 1916, well over a million British, French and German soldiers were dead. The allies had advanced barely five miles in those four and a half months…

The photograph shows the WWI memorial at Bradgate Park, Leics. This poem is my personal cenotaph.

THE ARROW OF TIME

It has given us a sporting start
But Time will run us down,
Like man-hunters honing their spears,
Measuring our breath in the rain-risen dawn
As we race past the arrow in the wilderness
And the certainty of death, towards life itself.

And all life ever here on populous planet Earth
Has lived in the twelve and a half miles girdle
Between Mount Everest and the Mariana Trench,
Riding the glorious freak of chance that made us
Light up the solar system’s dark, vast loneliness,
But as we circle the Sun and rush ever faster away,
The universe expands and we contract and end:
And no matter how we may bid Time to stay,
The lark will still ascend,
Ever higher, ever farther away.

And from white dwarf to red giant,
From the organism to the machine:
All will run down in Time
And be run down by Time,
And nothing can or has or will go
Beyond the endless flight of Time’s arrow.

(2012)

American Indians would sometimes sport with their captives, firing an arrow high and far on to the plain; where it fell would mark the point at which their prisoners were allowed to flee before the hunt would begin.

'The arrow of time' is a complex scientific concept which can be crudely summed up as ‘no turning back’. After the ‘Big Bang’ and the first sparks of creation everything eventually outlives its growth, declines into entropy and dies, even as the universe surges outwards towards infinity – and perhaps, as Buzz Lightyear adds, beyond…