SUMMER SONNET

After the brief bluebells and daffodils
And the simmering blossom-swell of spring,
Summer comes galloping over the hills,
The sun beating through a billion wings,
Bringing it on, singing it in with long
Days, hot spells, short showers and old folksong
Grown new in the swaying fields of barley,
Gathering in the harvest finale.
But, before the fall of the merry scythe,
We will roll in the grass by the bandstand,
Carelessly young again, laughing and tanned,
To sing the song of leaf and fruit so blithe:
Summer is a-coming in, year on year -
And see – the trees, the trees, the trees are here!


(2010)


So much poetry grows out of doubt and melancholia, and I’ve heard songwriters say that it’s somehow easier to write sad rather than happy songs – and I wonder why that is. Perhaps when we’re happy we’re too busy being happy to reflect too much about why we are. And then many positive poems tend to be tinged with sadness when the experience is being recalled in nostalgia.

I often want to write something really bright and upbeat but, being of a rather pessimistic disposition, I don’t usually find that easy to do. Let me tell you, I must be ‘in a good place’, as they say, to have come up with this!

‘Summer Is A-Cumen In’ is one of the very oldest of English folk songs. It features on one of my favourite soundtrack albums, ‘The Wicker Man’, which I was playing whilst writing this poem.

I never seem to tire of photographing Abbey Park just a couple of minutes away from where we live in Leicester and the picture included here is of one of my favourite views.

IN CONCERT

(I)

A seated study

Blurred still

String-hardened fingertips

Taloned

Slide like live china

Along the frets

Skill

Intent and long

Refined in the bones

*

Astride

And stomping

To beat of skins

Plectrum

In nicotine grip

Skids primal

As loins grind

Soul

Improvises from the heart

And through the boot-heel

(II)

Wing-collared

And funereal

Grand Master

Undertakes classics

Patient eyes

Follow pale hands

Which instruct

Patent feet

Embalming old symmetries

Note for note

*

Open-necked

And pounding

Holy Roller

Rocks his pulpit

Accusing fingers

Vamp and stab

Brimstone chords

Smoke and roar

Pushing the crescendo

Further every time

(III)

Eyes on dots

White-gloved

Sniper

In the distance

Surveys his tools

Waits for his moment

Measures his beat

Selects and strikes

Steadies the vibrations

Replaces and reloads

*

Eyes wild

As sticks are twirled

Tossed and snatched

Above volleys of sound

Power

Locked with bass

Blizzard of cymbal

And crash of pedal

Rolling with thunder

The avalanche of beats

(IV)

Muscular larynx

Flexes

Perfect diction

From banal libretto

Takes up positions

On polished stages

From rich boxes

The elite rise

In measured ovation

*

Leathery throat

Convulses

Slangy melismas

From juvenile lyric

Hips jerk

Almost sacrificial

On sweaty boards

At brandished mike

Surging crowd

Whoop tribal

(1989)


I hope this poem doesn’t give the impression that I don’t like classical music – because I do (a fair bit of it, at least). In a live context though, it can seem rather clinical and stilted compared to rock music. I’m not certain I had particular musicians in mind when I wrote this, but the classical guitarist is probably Julian Bream who I remember seeing quite often on TV. The rock singer looks like it might be Mick Jagger. The rock piano, however, is definitely being played by Jerry Lee Lewis and the rock drummer simply has to be Keith Moon. I doubt whether he was always ‘Locked with bass’ because he may not have been the best technical drummer ever, but he was surely the most exciting.

The photograph is of one Frano Gryc, an extraordinary musician we saw several times on the isle of Lokrum near Dubrovnik. He plays acoustic guitar with an electric pick-up every afternoon at an outdoor bar-café there. Beautiful rippling classical and jazzy renditions of all sorts of song emanate from him. No singing though and very little talking. The shades and cigs are permanent features of the unsmiling Frano-fizzog. Supercool.

SEASIDE

Midnight

On the slow-wind beach

And the hungry sea

Licks black sand.

Moonlight

And me,

Throwing stones,

The way people do

On lonely beaches,

A stone’s throw

Away from the town;

Lonely people,

Making sinking splashes

As the long tongue of sea

Licks grey sand.

A bloody ribbon of sky,

Distant

In tattered blackness;

And me

On the cold-wind beach

At first light.

(1975)

Writers need to ‘find their own voice’ and this is one of the first poems in which I felt I’d shaken off, if only temporarily, the powerful influences that had inspired me to write in the first place.

The beach in question was somewhere in Wales; possibly Rhyl.

The photograph is a recent one and was taken overlooking the beach at New Brighton, a few miles north of Liverpool. We’d hopped on a train to go and see the sunset there and spotted the lone figure you see in the picture.

THE FLIGHT OF THE MONARCHS

It is September in a corner
Of Lake Eyrie in Canada
And, until now, this place
Has been the whole world
To billions of their kind.
They have never ventured
More than a few hundred yards
But now, as the cold inches in,
Some genetic memory urges them
Beyond this cooling microcosm
To turn their wings southward;
And now they are soaring
Like Autumn in reverse
And filling the sky with a golden sunset.

Gorged on nectar and guided by the sun,
They will fly two thousand miles
To a patch of shrinking forest,
High in the mountains of Mexico,
Where they will hang in dense clusters
Through the long night of winter.
Some will drop and perish in the frost below
Whilst some fall prey to the few birds
Immune to their protective poison.
Most, though, will survive to wake
And drink at the renewed river;
Drifting down to ground
Like Spring in reverse,
Before filling the sky with a golden sunrise.


(2009)


Over the years, I’ve watched all of David Attenborough’s TV series about the natural world. This poem was inspired by one of the stories about migration in the last one.

I read a newspaper article recently in which DA was warning about the widespread decline in the world’s butterfly population. And then there’s the alarming fall in bee-colonies – not to mention the thousands of other species at risk. Many of us are, I think, complacent about environmental issues and whilst we may feel sorry that there are only a few pandas and tigers left, we assume that most of the natural world is simply too profuse to be at real risk. Well, drastic reductions in species like bees and butterflies should give us pause for thought.

It’s worth remembering that, back in the last Ice Age, human beings had almost certainly dwindled to very small numbers indeed. Our own species was probably perpetuated by a mere few thousand, or even hundreds, of its kind. We’re lucky to still be here at all and should take more care of what is left

The picture was taken in our kitchen the other day. That’s a real butterfly perched on the clock. A case of time flying. A pity the time wasn’t more dramatic than ten past six – say, five to midnight...

FOSSE PARK

Still the same.
And yet different.
Better perhaps. Greener.
More trees than when I first played here
Half a century ago.

The children’s playground
More varied and safer
Than when Georgie Smith
Fell from the high swings.
His blood still there a week later.

Those swings long gone -
And the hut where Harold,
The straight-backed park-keeper,
Forbidding in his uniform,
Dubious with his glass eye
And the other on the little girls,
Drank tea with his epileptic gardener.

The toilets – ‘Gents’ at one end,
‘Ladies’ at the other - and the shelter
Half-way (romantically known
As ‘The Arbour’) - all gone too,
Due to graffiti, vandalism and various
Misbehaviour, I suppose, but look:

The brook and circle of elms in the middle
Are still there and the wrought iron railings
Where Paul Botterell impaled his leg:
They still fence the terraced perimeter,
And ring with the echoes of the stick
That I’d clatter along on my way home.

My childhood came alive here,
A stone’s throw away from the unhappy house;
It was my first route of escape
And for ten years this park was my second home.

How many balls did I chase towards the jacketed goal
And how many bat away from the bicycle wicket?
How much water did I drink from the tap
Behind one of the great oaks
With George and Chris and Geoff?

I can taste that water now,
Feel it cooling my hot boy’s face.
I can see the old men playing chess
Under the trees at the top of the hill,
(Like in that song about another park),
And the kids queuing at the tinkling ice-cream van.
I can smell the new-mown grass making me sneeze
Where we loll with our portable pirate radios
As the psychedelic pop songs of the mid-sixties
Stream like butterflies on the rippling evening breeze.

I used to lose track of time there -
Or maybe time lost track of me.
When I left home and school,
Time would quickly find me,
The park soon left behind me.
Since then, life has been
Both cruel and kind to me,
But the park remains to remind me
Of the roots here that will always bind me.


(2009)


Nostalgia set in very early for me and I tried to write this poem several times without success over the years, so I was pleased when it was finally finished. The song alluded to in the eighth stanza is Jimmy Webb’s ‘MacArthur Park’ (‘the old men playing checkers by the trees’). It was a worldwide hit for the Irish actor, Richard Harris during the Summer of 1968, by which time my tenure at the park was just about over.

SHOWER AND STORM INTERLUDE

May,
And a pink, trodden snow of blossomfall in the road black with rain;
Me in this avenue,
Rambling back from the old college, trying to induce a dim brain
To think of something new.

Evening in this avenue,
Where the trees drip and glisten in the close vacuum of a deep day
Beneath an ocean on high.

Down deep in the avenue
Becalmed with glinting cars and glowing curtains, the starless darkness
Drifts down a boundless heaven.

Now,
In a silence less soundless than profound, these my homeward feet pause,
This my pageward hand stirs;
And then suddenly in the electric sky a dark dragon roars,
Awesome and mountainous.


(1977)


About the drama of the creative process. Conceived on the way back through Spring showers from Scraptoft College to my first matrimonial home, a flat on Sykefield Avenue, Leicester.

I took the landscape photograph on that very avenue the other day. It hasn’t changed much – just more parked cars. The portrait picture was taken a few streets away on Kirby Road. The church is now up for sale.

CHANT OF THE APOCALYPSE

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

The apple is bitten and the rainforest dies;
Cadillac overtakes and the ozone layer fries:
Can’t take the truth so double-think it into lies.

Species cannibalized, poisoned, clubbed and shot;
Another one bites the dust, then another, so what?
Get out of the kitchen if you can’t stand it so hot.

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

We all just want another hit, another thrill,
So foul the seas as gulls dive over that landfill.
Meanwhile, Mother Nature moves in for the kill.

Waste and weapons of mass destruction pile up steep;
Can’t disarm – too far an imaginative leap;
It’s much too late to laugh now, get ready to weep.

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

In heat one last time, the rabid hellhound breaks jail
And with its bitch of money, chases its own tail.
Now shares plunge as the price of profit bleeds us pale.

Life is short, love is sweet but hatred is bitter:
Only the strong survive, you better get fitter.
All you own turns to trash, your cash into litter.

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

Like always, imperialist forces invade
And, for sure, the rich will exploit the poor with trade.
Now suicide-bombers explode out of the shade.

Don’t want no eye for an eye or no tooth for a tooth;
Thousands of years later, still waiting for the truth:
Billions of believers and not a single shred of proof.

Simply won’t read the writing wailing on the wall;
Just go forth and multiply and come one, come all:
We’ll all be refugees soon, here comes that final fall.

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

Here’s capitalism’s reason and rhyme:
The greatest amount of profit
For the least amount of people
In the shortest possible time.

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

Here’s capitalism’s reason and rhyme:
The greatest amount of profit
For the least amount of people
In the shortest possible time.


(2008)


Sometimes you just despair of the world – or should that be, despair for the world.
This seems timely, given the continuing global financial crisis and impending General Election in the UK.

It’s not so much a poem, more a Rant & Roll song – a lyric, at any rate. If anybody out there would like to give it a tune, well, you know how to reach me. I always thought Bob Dylan’s 1965 song, ‘It’s Alright, Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’ was a tremendous piece of polemic – and it may be a distant inspiration for the above.

Hence the picture. For the Dylanologists out there, I can tell you that, in the upper image. the bikini-clad figure in the background is Sally Grossman, the wife of Dylan’s manager at the time. In the lower image, Dylan is watching Dean Martin on TV (more a swayer than a rocker – what a thought: Dylan & Dino!).