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…

CLOUDS AND TREES

Consider the wild transcendence of clouds:
Painting the sky as long as light allows,
Blown above us on the wind’s holy breath,
Sublime as the stars ranged above the earth;
Each one as abstract, fluid and mixed
As every star appears eternal and fixed.
From high cirrus, through rolling cumulus
To horizon’s far-following stratus,
Clouds change every day, blazing in the dawn,
Glowing in the dusk, always weatherworn,
Carrying rain that feeds the crops and trees;
Making with sea and sunlight that which frees
The energy of life to fire and surge and whirl
Through everything waking in the wuthering world.

Ponder now the perfectly evolved tree
In all its casual, ancient beauty:
In avenues, gardens, fields and mountains,
Its bare bark flowing into green fountains.
From rainforest to municipal park,
Exhaling oxygen through day and dark,
Each one its own world, there to resurrect
An Eden for blossom, bird and insect.
Processing life and leaf through birth and time,
Passing through childhood and youth into prime,
Down old age and death to rise in rebirth,
Blown above us in the wind’s holy breath;
And when the certain time arrives that we must cease,
Then lay us under the clouds and amongst the trees.

(2012)

I’d been wanting to write a poem about trees for a long time, but I didn’t know that when it came, it would have to share the bill with clouds.

One of those that ‘wrote itself’ quite quickly, though I laboured long over a handful of words and phrases here and there. The picture is another one taken in our back garden.

DREAMREADING

I wish I knew what that book was -
The one I sometimes find to read
Between the covers of my sleep,
When words appear on clean white sheets,
Rising up from the strange, dark deep
In the faraway, moonlit bay of dreams.

I wish I knew what that book was
Which I read in the starry dark -
Is it a diary of the day,
Recurring in the depth of night,
Floating up, up and then away
In the moonlit bay of castaway dreams?

I wish I knew what that book was -
Is it a never-never book,
Just by the third star on the right,
Always out of reach when I wake,
Sinking suddenly out of sight
In the faraway, moonlit bay of dreams?

I wish I knew what that book was,
Though I suppose I never will,
But deep in the sea of the night,
I know the words will wake again -
They will swim up into the light
In the moonlit bay of castaway dreams.

I wish I knew what that book was,
But I don’t really care at all:
The white sheet reappears and gleams,
And words will race along in lines -
Like these words coming now in streams
In the faraway, moonlit bay of dreams.

(2012)

Occasionally, words running along a shining screen too fast to read appear in my dreams – and that’s where this poem comes from. Quite how it came out as a sort of nursery rhyme, I don’t know, although the image of the Peter Pan island from the Disney film was er, hooked into my mind during the writing. Hence the picture.

THE BLUE TATTOO (1942)

The rhythm of her breathing
Shapes a vision
Of trains leaving cities,
On time and out of time,
Trailing steam
Above hypnotic rails,
Over sleepers
And through tunnels
Of reveries and memories,
Old and new,
Steam-grey, smoke-blue.

‘Move along, move along,’
The guards sneer sing-a-song,
‘It is not your number,
No, not your number,
But vice versa, yes, vice versa.’

History is merely new versions
Of shaven skulls and striped overalls;
Of the showers and the shovels,
And events occurring on another level,
Ash-grey, smoke-blue.

She sleeps shapely
While I lie sick and still,
Awake and at mercy, until
A cry escapes the nursery
Where the infant lies curled
From that other world,
In which dreams never come true,
But nightmares always do,
And the blue tattoo
Runs us all through
And through.


(1980)

Having a baby interfered with my sleep in more than the obvious way.

The sheer scale of the Second World War has always fascinated me. It feels like an age away now and to younger people it probably seems about as meaningful as The War Of The Roses, but when I was a teenager, for instance, it was only a couple of decades past. I count myself very fortunate to have missed that war, but I often wonder what it must have been like to have lived through such times. There have been other holocausts before and after, but the Nazi’s industrial slaughter of the Jews was particularly horrific. As I suggest elsewhere, the fear of a future nuclear Armageddon cast a shadow over parenthood for me, but so did recurrent sleeping and waking dreams of being a family caught up in The Final Solution.

This poem has long been waiting for a picture and last week in Liverpool it finally arrived - more by luck than judgement. We were waiting for a train at the James Street station and I was fascinated by the ‘Dream Passage’ wall sculptures over the track. It was only after taking the picture that I realised it would go perfectly with this poem.