WHERE THE BEE

June in this garden,
Where rose petals confetti a patchy lawn;
The evening breeze susurrates in branches
After the sun has sunk beyond rooftops.

I become aware of another, fainter sound
And find, flailing against the glass,
A huge bee, its gold faded, in our conservatory.

Despite open doors and windows,
It seems to be trapped;
Buzzing feebly, it flies time and again
Into the same pane.

I think he must be old
And losing his way through life;
The blooms of yesterday have dimmed
And now he battens blindly
On to the dried flowers in a vase on the sill
Where he seems to suck and then become still.

Moved by some vague fellow-feeling,
I gently and gingerly take up the bee
And release him into the trees
Where he falls and crawls
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

The breeze turns cold and plaintive,
And I turn back now
Into the house where we live.


(2000)


I don’t know why but, for some reason, bees seem to lose their navigation-system when they fly into our conservatory. Every summer, it happens so often that Lise bought a little fishing net on a stick, the sort kids have, and we use it to rescue and release the bees back out into the garden.

The title comes from ‘The Tempest’ by Shakespeare. It’s Ariel’s song of freedom:-

‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie:
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.’

MYTH AND LEGEND

Reflecting
On Camelot and Coleridge,
Kierkegaard and the Bible,
Abstraction coalesces
Into images of water,
As I stare into the sea
From a cliff-top in Anglesey.

I’m reminded of the story
Of a ghostly young man
Walking on the rheumy water
In an old sailor’s eyes.
Then, from a misty lake,
Another man in another story
Sees a silver sword rise;
But, sidewinding
Through rotting water,
A scaled and sinuous snake
Is all this mariner can see.

And this hand
Will not wither, Moses;
It only remains firm,
Gripping a rod
That refuses to squirm.
Your stick will not strike
Water from this rock,
Let alone cleave a path
Through any sea
For me.

Time
Rolls out on the tide
And the wind turns
Leaf after leaf.
I gazed out
To horizon’s sunset
And tried to believe
What I had read.

But why look for the dead
Among the living?
I see no young men
In dazzling robes.
I’m frozen
Out here on this ledge,
Clutching maybe faith
Or merely
Some kind of question;
Fearfully trembling now
Over grey waters
Seventy thousand fathoms deep
And not knowing
How I could ever leap.


(1979)


Studying literature and religion for a degree in my mid and late twenties meant my head was often up in the sky whilst my feet were adjusting to marriage and fatherhood down on the ground. I’m not sure that I ever experienced a crisis of faith as such -because there always were more questions than answers for me. I have, however, had several epiphanies – usually when gazing out to sea – and this kaleidoscopic poem began its gestation during a solitary couple of hours during a 1974 holiday in Wales.
It was a hot day and I was lying on a grassy cliff-top looking down at the bay where, I remember, these brown and white cows kept venturing into the shallows to cool down.

I have another recollection of Anglesey cows: each morning I would walk about a mile from where we were staying to the village shop for bread, milk and a paper. Mike Oldfield’s famous album ‘Tubular Bells’ hadn’t been out long at that time and I had a recording which I used to listen to on a portable cassette-player. There and back from the shop, the cows in the fields would follow me as I tinkled along on my way in the early morning sunshine. It’s a very vivid memory.

There’s a lovely, light, little Betjeman poem called ‘A Bay In Anglesey’, too.

I took the picture a few weeks ago on holiday in Portugal. It's the fabulous coastline of the southernmost tip of Europe, Cape St. Vincent - what the Portuguese call 'the end of the world' from which explorers like Columbus used to set sail.

AEGEAN SUNSET

The Zenith

Sunlight shimmers on swelling wavelets

Down through to the sand-bed below

Where it pulses like sparkling veins

Deep in the high life;

And we are in our element:

Swimming with glinting sardines and distant sails

Whilst bodies brown on rocks and beaches

Where cicadas whirr continuously in the green cliff

As they have since time began,

On this island

To which we have now returned.

The Blueness

Pure azure

By late afternoon,

The blueness has emerged

Infinitetisimally:

A slow water-colour evolving

In the faraway hills of the bay.

Greens, browns and yellows

Of trees, soil and beach

Coalesce in tones of blue,

Dissolving down from the sky,

Rising up from the sea.

The sun, still high, fringes the horizon

With a brilliance about to send bright scintillas

Sailing towards us.

The Shimmering

Now the sky, hills and sea merge

Into the blueness,

And a glittering spire of sunlight

Advances on the lambent water,

Flashing instants and breaking on the shore at our feet

Like seconds in the golden grains of ancient time.

The Dazzling

Down through the ages,

Romans, Turks and Venetians

Have watched this same shimmering

That we see now,

Turn to dazzle

On the sea between these shores,

And the point of this spire

That touches our toes

Now, in this lazy, hazy present

Touched others long past:

Always the same and always different,

Now and then,

Here and gone,

Always one.

The Afterglow

Molten gold,

The sun sinks to the crest of distant hills

And the moon rises silver behind us.

The last of the dazzling draws us in

To slip like snakes

Into the liquid silk of still sea.

We silhouette our way

Far out,

Into the twinkling heart of the dazzle

As the sun, its spire built,

Burns down behind the blue hills

Where a small, solitary cloud darkens and dispels.

In the afterglow burnishing the sea,

An aurora appears

From great unseen lanterns of gentle gods,

Briefly dawning the dusk,

And we glide back

To our deserted beach,

Naked and new

In the moonlit night.

(2005)

We’ve been to the Greek island of Skiathos a number of times and lain on our favourite beach, swimming, dozing and reading as the light changes through the day (that’s the actual view in the photo). I started this poem on the inside covers of a paperback edition of William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist’ which I was re-reading at the time. Perhaps the sun-drenched hedonism of the poem acted as an antidote to the dark horror of the story.

It took me another visit to the island and a couple more attempts to finish the poem. Although it doesn’t have a regular structure or a rhyme-scheme, ‘AS’ is the sort of poem that demands every word should be in the right place and every line be the right length. Coleridge said that if the definition of prose was the putting of words in the right order then poetry should be ‘the best words in the best order’.

That's the actual sunset on the actual beach with the actual Lisa in silhouette.

HERE SHE COMES

When walking,
Your beauty is a fresh May skyscape,
All cloudroll and blue yonder.

And I am a high flying kite.

When you smile,
Your beauty is a rising sunscape,
All birdsong and horizon,

And I am a spire full of praise.

In loving,
Your beauty is a noontide seascape,
All swelling and sundazzle,

And I am a galleon set sail.

In repose,
Your beauty is a new June landscape,
All blossom and moonshadow,

And I am the dew on your rose.

Here in church,
Your beauty is a Christmas snowscape,
Drifting down the August aisle,

And I am your right-hand man,
With a gold ring shining on your left;
Henceforward,
Into all our future, I shall escape,


(1998)


Many church buildings are beautiful; the Church as an historical institution and pillar of the establishment is not. Was it hypocritical to marry in church (I’ve done so twice)? Possibly – I saw it more as a compromise, I think. There would have been too many disappointed relations. The symbolism of the rings is meaningful though, and a sense of ritual is also important to me. Hatches, matches and dispatches etc.

Not that this is a poem about the church (incidentally, the organist at our wedding must have been the only one in the land who wasn’t note-perfect on ‘The Wedding March’…).

No, this poem is about Lisa and the metaphors are an attempt to convey what a beautiful person she is. I wrote this for her on the occasion of our wedding on the 1st August 1998.

Most people’s wedding pictures can seem rather dull in retrospect and ours are no exception so rather than a shot from the day I’m including one of my favourite pictures of Lise which I took a few Christmases ago.

GONDOLA

We swing out
From high, narrow shadows,
Smiling and serenaded
Through shimmering reflections
Of peeling paint and plaster,
Afloat on splashing backwaters,

Into sunburst panorama
Of sky and Grand Canal,
Whilst pealing bell-towers
Announce our presence
In an epiphany of time and space,
Bridging history and this hour.

Our grinning gondolier
Sings out, con brio,
‘Rialto! Ri-al-to!’
With sweeping gesture;
As, to others before, did his father
And his father before.


(2008)


On our first stay in Venice, we contented ourselves with a ride on a vaporetto up the Grand Canal – which was a quick, cheap and sensible thing to do. It was wonderful too, (as is everything in Venice). On our second time, though, we decided to indulge ourselves with a gondola – and it was every bit as magical as I try to convey above.
The gondoliers aren’t just ‘O Sole Mio’ merchants either – at least, ours wasn’t; he regaled us with a selection from Ennio Morricone!

We almost literally bumped into Neil Finn of Crowded House on a bridge near our hotel. I wanted to say hello and tell him how much we loved what was then his latest record (‘Everyone Is Here’ by The Finn Brothers) but we were lugging our bags at the start of our return journey and he was stood on the crest of the bridge, gazing around and taking it all in, so we just carried on our way.

WHATEVER

OK now, guys -
You don’t mind me, like, referring
To you all as ‘guys’, do you, guys -
Even though some of us are female
And none of us are sort of like American?
And when I ask if you’re alright and things like that
And you say you’re good and it’s so not a problem,
I’ll know that you’re basically just fine
And not actually declaring your, like, moral status
Or anything like that, know what I mean?
And yes, guys, I’ll know what you mean too.
And I’m like, cool with this now – we’re all cool, yeah?
This is so absolutely not a problem, is it, guys?

Right then, guys, hey, it’s all good, no worries,
Because, you know, at the end of the day,
We’re all sort of like - in this together?
And we’re on a journey and stuff like that?
Even though we’re going kind of like – nowhere?

Right, OK, listen, you have a nice day now, guys,
Because, hey, at the end of the day, it’s like
We so totally have nothing better to say.
Do you know what I mean?
Do I know what I mean?
OhMyGod!
End of.


(2010)

Lise and I both loathe conversational tics and threadbare clichés. These days, it seems like the spiralling babble above actually passes for cool chat. It reminds me of ‘duckspeak’ - the distilled form of ‘Newspeak’ in Orwell’s great satirical novel, ‘I984’. (You can, perhaps, hear the modern form of this corrosive prattle in TV’s ‘Big Brother’…).

Of course, we’re all susceptible to this kind of thing - no matter how hard we try to avoid it. Myself, I can’t seem to shake off ‘like, y’know’ at the end of too many sentences when I’m in the middle of a good natter. It might have come from my Mother because I think my brother and sisters all fall prey to it as well. Oh well, not to worry, or should that be - no worries?

The picture is a nod in the direction of that famous painting 'The Scream' by Edvard Munch. Lisa took it on the bridge at Abbey Park yesterday.

FROM ABOVE

As the G-force takes hold, lurches and lifts us from the land,
I know a critical point has passed and let go your hand.
You start to read but, as ever, I crane at the window,
Awed to see so much in so small a space so far below:
The miniature world before it dissolves into cloud-haze -
The churches, towns and hills and the woodland and waterways,
And I am humbled with wonder at such infrastructure
Wrought on the sprawl of land, the order of agriculture,
The charting of seas and skies, the power of invention,
Which, from above, seems entwined with nature’s evolution.

A crimson band of sunset girdles the horizon’s glow
Between high, blue heaven above and deep, black cloud below.
The feeling is of floating in limbo between it all,
As evening sifts into nightfall and then into landfall,
And our aeroplane descends through tonight’s rare clarity.
Coastlines twinkle now and the bejewelled urban circuitry
Defines itself in the eye, whilst the vacuum in our ears
Quickens the pulse and the mind is clenched by echoing fears
When the wheels hit the runway to rush, then slow to a stand,
And we kiss and smile at the intense, white grip of each hand.


(2010)


A few flights in the making, this one. Unusually, I’d developed a number of single words - rather than phrases – which eventually suggested the beginnings of a rhyme-scheme. The long lines distance the resulting couplets and hopefully make the structure of the poem an effective one.

Completed after a wonderfully clear return-flight from Dubrovnik. We’re not sufficiently ‘frequent fliers’ to be blasé about the experience, hence the ritual of holding hands.