Hungary calling

The evening sun heels over behind the hills,

projects a shadow that smoothes them to sandiness.

The beckoning arms of timber have disappeared

from the slopes above the road where refugees tramp.

In Hungary’s bloodlands Eichmann found willing help;

The arc of the moral universe bent away.

Now refugees face razor wire and stark rifles.

Why do evil to these persecuted people?
The weakest ask Job’s question and limp like Jacob.

Sanctuary light

In the leaf-blurred light the glint of stream gurgled rocks.

The green grass glowed in a fire-gold circle of sun.

Your hair glossed black as jet as you struck a match.

Smoke from the flamed twigs drifted like a desert cloud.

Your breath passed mine in our yearning to borrow words

to relive those knotted moments time can't measure,

for a miracle of finding air, water, fire, 

earth to regenerate the elemental real.

Our desire to consecrate pulled the Mayday taut

before it slipped as if it might never have been;

It distilled these lines, remains within them crystal.
The crushed coke can winked like a sanctuary light.

Friesian

Cups clacked on saucers, logs snapped and gulped fiercely fizzing flames,

and the cat settled on an upended hat on the couch.

Slumping in his great coat, he hunched into the grainy snow;

The chill stung his nose red and the snow crusted his hat white.
Skulking into the black of the hay-floored slated lean-to,

the old tan collie implied she had better eggs to suck.

He looked like a horse hanging his head out of the hard wind.

He did not waste words or talk when he’d rather be silent.
He would buck even blasting blizzards to check his cattle.
There was the soft sound of rubber boot-heels scuffing the snow.

His steps potholed the piled-up drifts duning the sunken lane.
The shawl of whiteness in clear air put him on a fine edge;

then his beard-stubbled cheeks paled and his squinting eyes clouded:

A branch of the felled tree had pierced the cowshed’s iron skin.

Now a meat slab the cow had a gape where her face had been.

The herd stood easy in their stalls, side-jawing, chewing cud.

He cuffed his hat back on his head, staring at the Friesian.
Summer after summer she had been his best milk yielder.

The snow had the yellow of melting when he buried her.

.

Thought for Today

Pink custard clouds hang from a high brilliant-blue plate.

The angel of devastation eases stock-still.

The sun retracts its question; dawn doesn’t answer.

The west is an abyss that might swallow us whole.

We function in sentences like Swiss-army knives.

But time will clip the wings of the goddess of storms.
The truth is: We are safe in a rock-solid house.

We’ll heat pasta and prawns and pour a glass of wine.
We have not been condemned to death by apathy.  
We claim a life worth living, a worth life-giving.

The truth is: Children huddle in blistering boats

That might burst to bits on the Mediterranean.

"You don’t put children on the sea unless it is

safer than the land." We must save the children now!
Assure them worth life-giving and life worth living.

Mackerel day

The morning lay like a grey cloth

discarded by dirty hands;

The grey-blue mass of the ocean

broke into surf on our toes;

The whelk-reek of glistening rocks

closed the sides of the world in.

The dogs sulked in the heaviness;

Waves salmon-leaped up the cliff;

A boat cut through the crested swells

pulsing, beating, to the shore;

The fisherman’s shouts brought baskers

bare-footed to the tideline.

Spoiling in the oppressive heat,

swimming seagulls' frenzied air,

silver bellies, black stripes, grooved fins,

deep-forked tails, green-blue dapple,

gleamed mackerel iridescence.

They school now through memory’s tide.

Erased

The hill does not look civilised;

It has gone back to wilderness.

Red-clawed hunting beasts must rest here;

A bubbling spring lets them water.

The vegetable garden lies

trampled by hoofs, flattened by time,

blurred under a dense mat of weeds.

Birds flit-flash among the willows.

A knocked stone wall, fringed with bindweed,

once shelved a terrace to the front.

Tense solitude haunts the fired house

with something aged past memory.

Suspicious eyes stare out at you,

surprised that after all the years

you would stand peacefully still here.

At the top of the hill the wind

robs your breath and deafens your ears.

There, a pall hangs over time’s head.

Memory slips into time

Time clouted hard through the marshy valleys,
the sun’s risings and settings,

the moon’s waxings and wanings.

Once she wished the moon pause beside the hill.

In the snow she’d fired the Fordson’s crankcase.

Then the crank-pulled tractor broke

her right shoulder out of shape.

She cursed its poor traction in the deep snow.

In times of leavened hope she built the farm,

churned butter and pressed cider,

grew crops, pastured cows and sheep;

Her disappointments were crosses shouldered.

She helped the hardcases who robbed the bank,

fed them food in the hill field;

A lit jailhouse with locked cells,

her mind had depths they did not look into.

The shower tinkled in the stone horse trough.

Life’s page yellowed brittlely.

Memory slipped into time,

like a swallow flying by her window.

Her death was an ice sliver in their hearts.

They remained in the graveyard,

neither talked nor cried nor stamped

their boots frozen into flat white paws.

Fall of grace

Fighting the winter fall of grace,

Spring had greened the sheep-grazed hedges,

blued the cold lake in the mountain

battered into a shapeless hat;

The grasslands fell flat to the west.

The twisting stream-rush beat their ears.

The river slid to the lakes.

They filed up small as grubbing ants.

The pull stronger than gravity,

They lugged themselves to innocence.

But somewhere a serpent glided:

Gunshots growled out in the valley.

A body dumped in vengeance

stained the wood below with blood.

Gang honour is the coin of thieves,

Homeric hard on human hearts.

Shucked clean, they’ll learn about life now.
The paradise of Cain can’t stand.

Minds the canal

The sun fells the trees into long shadows.

He stands staring with unreadable eyes.

Everything in the land speaks to him.

He remembers barges like floating jewels

braceleted in flow under a blue ease,

broad horses lumping along the towpaths,

the locks filling in a tremor of light.

He remembers the bridges stone by stone,

Granite and limestone sparkling slap by slap.

Now the bridges hump over chokes of slime.

Water hens question with their shocking cries.

Lanes rush dryly over the slugged canal.

No bargepole can fend off the melt of time.

But his barging past stays present to him.

He reveres the waterway though it cannot trump
the wrack of time. For it is not all gone.

Eel man in Enchalon

Feet on the drawbar of his Ferguson 20,

aching left hand holding the pale grey mudguard wing,

I listen to him describe a hen harrier

holding the dimming sky up over Eshbrack bog,

how the light plays on wet weathered shale, on deer sedge,

cowberry, ling heather, hare’s-tail tussocks, and moss.

Drumlins of clouds slidder across the skim-iced sky.

Breakneck winds pierce and prune hedges, hawthorn and gorse.

Tricky sunlight splinters on white silk cotton-grass

Gleaming like one-night snow. We skirt sheep-ford river.

His mind’s a water-hen in the lakes of Bragan:

Bradáin where he ate the salmon of knowledge;

Na Bléine Báine where plights of love turned to gold;

Loch an Aoire where his leap-dive splash stained the moon.

He'd caught ice-age lamprey and smooth white-claw crayfish,

and griped at glibbery eels in Blackwater mud.

Poaching pike on Emy with a cut hazel rod,

with a brave-sized hide strip of rabbit’s tail as bait,

he'd hooked an olive lump, an eel’s head in its gut.

He remembers the breeze pawing the dimmed waters.

And oar-rippled waves sucking the planks of the boat.

He knew the beds in Emy lough where once pike lurked to pounce.

The plashy lough lap-lies in a fen-fringed hollow

between whaleback drumlins, where a sudden stern curve

of wood backs from the shore; there in the fearful fen

of willow hides an unseen dragon none talks of.

Willow, which helped to cure Assyrian fevers,

holds the bank against swollen wash-away waters.

He wants me to see the silver eels climbing falls,

gleaning the moon’s last light with their gleaming fins.

A curlew flies over a peaty scraw-fringed lough.

His eye catches the down-curve of its slender bill

in its act of becoming a long-legged wader.

This gyres his soul to speak of Greenland White-fronted

Geese on Glaslough lake, of blue-grey hook-billed Merlins,

and trilling Red Grouse. Now the tractor soodles on.

The moon's dance in the mirror defies diffusion.

He lived among the green silence of moorland grass,

and the rising glass-sheen of mirroring loughs in rain.

In his eel-mud mind Emyvale was Enchalon.

Dawn time

The day holds its breath: the dawn’s tide fronts the night’s ebb.

Spilling light like golden Viking helmets,

Bright roused rays muster beyond the sea’s horizon;

Piercing night’s defences, they charge the swells and troughs.

Lulled away by light, night has loitered long enough.

Shadows shrink sneeze-fast in the tang of salty air.

The lichen on the duirling boulders blushes sun.

A mist as cool as ice-dust lingers in the trees.

A stubby-beaked blue tit lisps among the furred leaves,

upside-down, twittering grey, blue, white and yellow.

A sleek brown stoat with a black tuft at his tail tip

sears after a rabbit who swirls to the sand dunes.

The peaty lake holds an apparition of sky.

Blending with the green, gold and rufous blots of time,

Lost in the primeval womb-flow of breaking dawn,

A fisherman stands still in the ephemeral.

June day

Unusually for June the day had

a single shadowless skim-milk pallor

under a hazy beam of shifty cloud.

The huffle-whiffle of sudden ground gusts

lifted the sweet-and-sour swathes of tossed hay.

Geese tootle-blabbed by the slubbery pond.

With faintly a friggle a heron

gullocked down a fat frog.

In the hollow farsed-fat grizzle-grey sheep

grazed puckles of pool-slush green grass.

Luke sat on his gray Ferguson 20.

His face was set like the tip of an iceberg

He shouldered the weight of a solid thought

He had to share with me.

In China a small farmer who sold

his vegetables in the local market,

always carried home in his hand

a big heavy bucket full of dung.

He divined that humanity feeds on itself;

Its dunghill is its daily sustenance.

The hook of a hawk slashed into a spiral

down to wing-clapping green-necked woodpigeons.

The monotony of milk waiting in creamery cans

Glazed the look of the day into a smooth surface.

‘Bad News’ Sam stopped to say Farley’s youngest

had been kicked in the head by a horse.

His fleer-lipped flew-cheeked gargoyle face pursed.

No nature shone from his miser-purse eyes.

His stretched leg eased the creases in his pants.

He had delivered the bad news first.

He asked ‘How many beasts went down in the test?’

He cycled off holding a swede by the greens -

Robespierre displaying a guillotined head.

I was conscious of a gnaw in my belly.

And the hum-bizz of a bike of bumble bees.

A mallard lands in Rossmore Park

Black, like a spacecraft after a fiery entry,

the duck, neck outstretched, wings short-span, landing-gear up,

daggers through the air, crossing the tusky redwoods.

His fast wings beat defiance against gravity.

Then like Iris riding the rainbow-circle tube,

He curves his wings forward cupping the drag of air.

Now his image self-develops as he arcs down:

His legs reach red forward, his head lustres round green,

His speculum blue-purples, his chest blunts chestnut

His yellow bill pierces the steep line of the arc,

The feathers tipping his wings spread and separate,

and his bomeswish body sways falling fast to ground.

He slows with the water of the lake just below him;

He lands in a blink-spray of bright watery lights;

The flung-up flash falls into out-rippling circles;

In the concentric he floats as though always there.

We meet for a walk after twenty bereft years.

Will we land and talk as though always there, or go

round and round, awkwardly, in concentric circles?

Threshing

Evening shines waning green and reddening gold.

Singing its light-spraying stone-song, the flat-stone stream

trembles its clarity as we work on nearby.

My ear defenders block the jewelled flow of sounds.

The heavens take the haze from the thresher’s engine.

And as the tank takes grain from the auger’s helix,

the noise takes the sounds of the birds picking the fields.

I thirst - deaf Odysseus on his tortured raft.

From the old rickyard I see the big buck rabbit.

Hard-edged sunlight through the gape of doors clarifies.

The barn’s threshing floor is like the stream’s clear stone bed.

He huddles gathered listless into utter gloom.

Yellow-white viscous slime pusses his swollen eyes.

I lift him. He has lumps. His drowning lungs gurgle.

He trembles in mortal fear and then wets himself.

I live with the non-sense of unfeeling nature -

our bee-loved lime tree left a gale-storm’s broken bones.

But no lullaby words can soothe this away: Man

hid cruel horror in this buck’s gorsey wilderness.

Down, he burs behind the helve of a bezzled axe.

On his pain the gods of science look down unmoved.

Traces

Spiral snake-shaped ammonites with coiled-shelled chambers,

Sutured shell-caves in grey-blue mouldered muddiness,

Each bedded chamber keeps time for a being in life.

The polished marble of medieval cathedrals

is the klastos of coiled shells and fine-grained limestone;

Water snails scribble life on its masoned surface.

In Selskar Abbey the gabled buttresses rise

into pinnacles that catch the dawn’s herring-bone glow,

the sandstone stained red by the sun on desert dunes.

The straying stars are peepholes to infinity,

From where to judge the traces we leave behind us,

Evidence, telling as clay-fired pots in the earth.

We who are spits of clay from the potter’s wheel

hold shaped in our molten minds traces that heroise

doom-driven Homer’s sword-swishing blood-gorged ghost.

Yes: we have our vocabularies weaving art,

like the spume from the white waterwall plume bearing

a rainbow that gleams colours above the darkness.

On the soiled window of a deserted cottage

sits a cup of time’s dust layered with fine dry ash,

a trace from the chimneys of the red-flamed Shoah.   

Disappeared

In the cyan-blue ebb-lane of shore-shimmering light

Kids splash-kick the safe shallows into glass shivers.

Three tanned archaeologists caress sea-washed stones;

One thinks the pile might be ballast shingle lost from

a lone storm-dashed doomsday-driven Armada ship.

In the rolling fields they ploughed the potatoes out;

Pickers with buckets went up the rows filling sacks.

They threw away the ungirt sag-bags of squashed rot.

The moist pulp disappeared into the muddiness.

In the low damp dip the clay-clung potatoes had

to be scraped pink-skin clean from their cloggy cocoons.

In the marsh between the potato field and the river,

they found a ‘disappeared’ - his humanity burst

like a last-breath bubble on still bog-pool water;

In the hotel a country-and-western band plays;

The sun gashes red the wisps of white clouds curling

across the tug-boat moon that hauls the drifting tide.

The river eddies eat its bed and sides, rotate

pebbles in a vortex, and pukes them on the beach.

Spiders’ webs thread a white sheet on the grassy drills.

Gull strike

The boat kisses the lip of the damp dock;

Tide-washed tongues of thick rope bind them;

The fish-and-salt smell makes the wind’s mouth water;

Gulls fly white circles, pecking and screeching;

Here and there they hang in the wind solving

The riddle of flying while fiercely still;

One begins his strike through the air’s hollows;

He seems an aimless missile from the moon;

But his slow-motion whiteness has eyes-on;

A man dandles a burger in his hands;

The gull turns his head like a tank's turret;

He leaves shreds of bap and tomato sauce;

Shock wake and swoop see the man jaw-fallen;

Bereft, befuddled, he bawls out his bans;

Screeching gulls and tinkling masts drown him out.

Pebble and dash

Like the angel sounds of Sho pipes on the Silk Road,

Rays of light shone from the heavens - excursion day.

With gold-rush zeal we stamped headlong to the beach

on a quest for precious stones shaped from silica.

Sis wanted a pink rose quartz for her cabinet;

I looked in vain for waxy-grape chalcedony.

White chert is winter ice on gritty burning ground.

We raked through laminated schist and smooth-worn chert.

Dad said quartz crystal is a frosty-skinned beauty.

Mam asked, ‘What is beauty?’ Dad called her Socrates.

Mam wrenned out ‘We are all the stuff of common clay.’

‘We might all stop a hole to keep the wind away.’

Rolling two round pebbles, Dad crowed: ‘Hamlet’s balls!’

Waves banded like polished pebbles of sliced agate.

Suddenly a swallow skied in from the ocean,

Swooped blue-black gloss over the beach-gleam of pebbles

And flitted - a painter’s dark dash into primrose.

We sang our human souls like Hichiriki flutes.

We found our own raptures on stone-scraped tidal shores.

Quaquaversal

The east wind, pitiless as a falcon’s beak, scours

the bare tor-top clitter of cank-hard rubble rock.

She lies between the rucked earth and the faithful moon,

Her feeling bones on granite flesh-red with feldspar.

Skin membranes the mineral mind

that sees spiky-tailed stegosaurs

slub-slab-slup by limpid lagoons.

She journeys from the white fire-core, the plutonic,

sedimentary, clay, humus, grass, moss, plants, trees,

insects, birds, rain, snow, peaks, roads, water, villages,

roofs, satellite dishes, railways,

runways, space station - and she sees:

Hungry hell-harrowed huddled souls boat the abyss,

sniff Mediterranean air from Europe’s rocks

for the life-tang of liberty.

United by the sea bed

We morally connect

To refugees wheresoever.

Quaquaversal.