Sunday 25 August 2013

"Where the River Meets the Sea" (1997) by John Mackie


1. Garmach

S/he who hunts for forebears
Through the archive at Elgin
Knows that the past is never sepia
Except as the result of technical naïveté
In the mechanism of memory or the chemistry of light.
In my father's mind there was but black and white.

Look
That woman who with her empty creel
Waits in weeds on the Buckie fish quay
For a spume broken glimpse through a heaving sea
Of a garnering ship that long since sits
Flanks and planks agape, asunder
On the tumbled rocks of Elgol
Below the headless crofts
That died alone
When the people, driven, went
From the land agent's fire
And the landlord's rent.

Not yet spent
Is the taste of the flesh
Of seabird's eggs
That sea wrack taste
That he learned to endure
Of bird rendered par
Plucked from the jaws
Of the searing white sky
Gathered in clutches
From the teeming shore
Of Tern Island's crouch
Low on the Spey

At Tugnet perched on the jaws of the river
Prowling again, ready to bite
Its own forcing channel
Through the huddle of Kingston,
The fishing museum is a snapshot too
The salmon an idol rendered in plaster
The faces of fishers close to the bone
Positions frozen in the rhythm of effort:
In this designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
My father aloud remembered
Who never came home
From the tumult of waters that closed in on their eyes
As the ravenous drag-netting flow took its dues
Amongst the fishers of Garmach.

And his brother my uncle
Loudly contemptuous of change
The Shire engineers had sought to enforce
By blasting a mouth to bite on the frenzy
That sent cottagers scattering as the waters rose
With the might of far mountains
As their drift snows unfroze:
Emissaries of granite
The first floods took back
A mile's width of plain from the scratchings of men.
How long was his love for that river
In its unbound abandon
And the headlong salmon
Soaring high from its spate
And how broad his contempt
For the efforts of those
Who tried to impose
The violence of order
On its deep dark flow.


2. The Clachan

From the Braes close by Sconser
You can glimpse it across
The reflections of mountains broken by Orca:
The hamlet of Clachan on Maclean's Rathasair
Strung out like pebbles randomly there. See
A small white house on the lip of the sea
Backed by a cliftan that hoods it in lee
Where a limpeting aunt, clinging on,
Gallinaceous in both aspect and voice
Celebrated her centenary
As a consequence of choice.

In exile in Moray the places remain
In vivid incarnations
Of the spirit of place
Arduish, Oskaig, Suishnish, Rathasair
That Sorley invokes on every page
Of a landscape that lives in every soul
That grew by its lochans
Heron speared, bold,
Or foraged for cockles
In the old harbour's bowl.

Though the Sound in its violence roars
(Impossible to broach)
And the breath of the Arctic icy and frantic
Colludes with Winter's reproach
The enduring sensations are wide blue and clear
And the shadows of woodlands
Harbouring deer.

She speaks the names
Like a liturgy of peace
And peoples her memory
With strong honest kin:
Women whose work was all of a piece
In hewing and setting the cornerstones of weathering
And dark bearded men whose gathering guile
Kept the pot in every cottage, croft,
Filled with the herring, mackerel, cod
And the laird's lost yearlings.
Mutton and venison taken by night
The fish by day
On the Sound's glacial light


3. Garmouth

Where the river meets the sea they returned
To tend the plot they took back by hand
From rank and gross neglect
And each for all the generations of us
Makes vivid the times
Before their currents intertwined
Mingled breath and gave voice
To my brothers'
And lately, to mine:

Like the Arctic Terns of the Spey
And the sea cleaving otters of Clachan
Neat on Raasay's shore
The exiles I've taken
(With my father's search for more, meaning enough,
Or my own, running from unease of place
Or the ambiguous myths I made to beguile
And to make it easier to seem than to be)
Have circled me back
Day by year's long day
To where I sit to breathe awhile
On the rocks of Arduish
Or by the Spey's swollen race
Where both Ted Hughe's tooth and claw
And Sorley's gentle geomancy are.

The black and white images
From my families' albums
Teem in my stillness
Like circling Terns.

Sunday 23 June 2013

"Port Bou" (1933) by Sylvia Townshend Warner

Through the ruined walls
the unflawed sea.
And to the smell of sunned
earth and of salt
sea is added a third
smell that cries; Halt!
I am what will be

familiar to you
by this journey's end.
I am, stale, the smell
of the fire that quenced
the fire on this hearth, that brought
down these walls, that wrenched
this wound in the ground.

I am the smell
on all the winds of Spain.
I am the stink in the nostrils
of the men of Spain.
I have taken the place
of the incense at the burial,
I have usurped the breath
of the rose plucked for the bridal,
I am the odour of the wreath
that is held out for heroes
to behold and breathe.
I cordial the heart,
I refresh the brain,
I strengthen the resolved fury
of those who fight for Spain.

"Some make this answer" by Sylvia Townshend Warner

Unfortunately, he said, I have lost my manners.
That old civil twitch of visage and the retreat
Courteous of threatened blood to the heart, I cannot
Produce them now, or rig up their counterfeit.
Thrust muzzle of flesh, master, or metal, you are no longer
Terrible as an army with banners.
Admittedly on your red face or your metal proxy’s
I read death, I decipher the gluttony to subdue
All that is free and fine, to savage it, knock it
About, taunt it to stupor, prison it life-through;
Moreover, I see you garnished with whips, gas-bombs, electric
barbed wire,
And affable with church and state as with doxies.
Voltage of death, walking among my fellow men
Have seen the free and the fine wasted with cold and hunger,
Diseased, maddened, death-in-life doomed, and the ten
Thousand this death can brag have reckoned against your thousand.
Shoddy king of terrors, you impress me no longer.

"Drawing You, Heavy with Sleep" (1932) by Sylvia Townshend Warner

Drawing you, heavy with sleep to lie closer,
Staying your poppy head upon my shoulder,
It was as though I pulled the glide
Of a fun river to my side.
Heavy with sleep and with sleep pliable
You rolled at a touch towards me. Your arm fell
Across me as a river throws
An arm of flood across meadows.
And as the careless water its mirroring sanction
Grants to him at the river’s brim long stationed,
Long drowned in thought; that yet he lives
Since in that mirroring tide he moves,
Your body lying by mine to mine responded:
Your hair stirred on my mouth, my image was dandled
Deep in your sleep that flowed unstained
On from the image entertained.

"The Sick Assailant" (1936) by Anna Wickham


I hit her in the face because she loved me.
It was the challenge of her faithfulness that moved me.
For she knew me, every impulse, every mood,
As if my veins had run with her heart's blood.
She knew my damned incontinence, my weakness,
Yet she forebore with her accursed meekness.
I could have loved her had she ever blamed me,
It was her sticky irritating patience shamed me.
I was tired-sick. It was her business to amuse me,
Her faith could only daunt me and confuse me.
She was a fine great wench, and well I knew
She was one good half panther, one half shrew,
Then why should my love, more than any other,
Induce in her the silly human Mother?
She would have nursed me, bathed me, fed me, carried me.
She'd have burned her soul to thaw me, she'd have married me.
I hit her in the face because she loved me,
It was her sticky irritating patience moved me.

"Prelude" (1935) by Edith Sitwell


FOR GEOFFREY GORER


WHEN our long sun into the dark had set
And made but winter branches of his rays
—I left my heart.
                            So doth a shadow leave
The body when our long dark sun is gone.

Now the black chaos of the Polar night
Melts in the hearts of the forgotten Dead;
—The tears turned ice about each loveless head
Are changed into bird-plumaged bird-voiced springs
And the sap rises like a bird that sings.

The cold wind creaking in my plant-shrill blood
Seems spring beginning in some earthen bud
Though immemorial, the winter's shade
Furred my cold blood wherein plant, beast, are laid,
In that dark earth from which shall spring the soul

As dark and broken hints of sciences
Forgotten, and strange satyrine alliances
Of beast and soul lie hidden in the old
Immensity and desert of the cold.

Hoarse as a dog's bark the furled heavy leaves
Are hairy as a dog: furred fire barks for the shape
Of hoarse-voiced animals; cold air agape
hines to be shut in the water's shape and plumes;
All things break from the imprisoning winter's glooms;

All things, all hearts awake—
Until the gold within the miser's heart
Would buy the siren isles and many a chart
From dream to dream, and the death-blinded eyes
See beyond wild bird-winged discoveries.

All creatures praise the sun in their degree:
The mother bear with thick forestial fur
And grumbling footsteps, lumbering primal sleep
Of the winter earth, as furry as a bear
And grumbling deep,No longer sees her cubs as a black blot
As clots of thick black darkness; primal form
Is shaped from that thick night—
Begins from this black chaos: life is light.

The stunted long-armed gardener mossed as trees
Has known before his birth—
For he was born and shaped close to the earth—
Best of all things are water, and hot gold
Of the rough fruitful sun: best of all things are these.
So the slow gold of his hot days and rays
Ripened within our earth and changed to fruits,
So the cold twisted water changed to roots
Of apple-trees.

But I, a harpy like a nightingale,
A nightingale that seems a harpy, mourn
With my heart changed now from a black blind stone
That rolls down the abyss, to a ghost gone
Or a black shadow cast
Upon the dust where gossips of mean Death—
The small and gilded scholars of the Fly
That feed upon the crowds and their dead breath
Still buzz and stink where the bright heroes die
Of the dust's rumours and the old world's fevers.
Sometimes in the arena like a drum
My heart sounds, calls the heroes from their shade
Till with the march of tides, those tall ghosts come
Where Fortune, Virtue, Folly, Wisdom, these—
Mimes garbed as aeons, by horizons bound—
With monstrous trumperings of suns at war
Amid earth-quaking rumour of crowds whispering
And bull-voiced bellowings of tropic light
Contend...
                 And the huge bulk of Folly fell
From her world-height in the arena. Hell
Has dyed its fires upon the fairest faces
And where the hero smiled, bare Death grimaces.
But one who changed the complexion of all nights,
Whose lips have fired Persepolis, to me
Spoke then of eagle-winged Icarian flights
Of the steel men across an ageless sea,
And continents and quays where the one nation
Of the blind smiling statues still abide
Beneath giant suns whose sound no man hath known.
And huge horizons and the enchanted tide,
The azure unattainable and wide,
These they have known, and in their marble veins
Are all the summer sorrow of the rose,
And siren waves.
                            In the agonic noon
When the black pyres and pyramids of shade
Are mute as solemn and revengeful ghosts
Left from the tombs of night, I, a ghost laid,
Walk like a ghost among the city ways
Pressed on by hungry continents of stone.
Pressed on by hungry continents of stone.
Yet still the light brings life to those unborn
And still the statues hear the sirens' song
Across the deep-boughed gardens of the sea.
Where the first founts and the deep waterways
Of the young light flow down and lie like peace
Upon the upturned faces of the blind,
The crooked has a shadow light makes straight,
The shallow places gain their depth again,
It comes to bless;
And man-made chasms between man and man
Of creeds and tongues are filled.
                                                    The guiltless light
Remakes all things and men in holiness.

"Maternal Love Triumphant, or, Song of the Virtuous Female Spider" by Ruth Pitter

Time was I had a tender heart,
But time hath proved its foe;
That tenderness did all depart,
And it is better so;
For it tender did remain
How could I play my part,
That must so many young sustain?
Farewell the tender heart!

A swain had I, a loving swain,
A spider neat and trim,
Who used no little careful pain
To make me dote on him.
The fairest flies he brought to me,
At first I showed disdain;
For lofty we must ever be
To fix a loving swain.

But soon I bowed to nature's ends
And soon did wed my dear,
For all at last to nature bends;
So in a corner near
We fixed our web, and thought that love
For toil would make amends;
For so all creatures hope to prove
Who bow to nature's ends.

Ere long the sorry scrawny flies
For me could not suffice,
So I prepared with streaming eyes
My love to sacrifice.
I ate him, and could not but feel
That I had been most wise;
An hopeful mother needs a meal
Of better meat than flies.

My eggs I laid, and soon my young
Did from the same creep out:
Like little cupids there they hung
Or trundled round about;
And when alarmed, like a soft ball
They all together clung;
Ah mothers! We are paid for all,
Who watch our pretty young.

For their sweet sake I do pursue
And slay whate'er I see;
Nothing's too much for me to do
To feed my progeny;
They'll do the same for me some day -
(Did someone say Says You?)
So still I leap upon the prey
And everything pursue.

Two bluebottles that loved so dear
Fell in my web together;
They prayed full fast and wept for fear,
But I cared not a feather;
Food I must have, and plenty too,
That would my darlings rear,
So, thanking heaven, I killed and slew
The pair that loved so dear.

But most do I delight to kill
Those pretty silly things
That do themselves with nectar fill
And wag their painted wings;
For I above all folly hate
That vain and wasted skill
Which idle flowers would emulate
And so the fools I kill.

Confess I may some virtue claim,
For all that I desire
Is first an honest matron's name,
Than which there is none higher;
And then my pretty children's good -
A wish that bears no blame;
These in my lonely widowhood
As virtues I may claim.

I look not here for my reward,
But recompense shall come
When from this toilsome life and hard
I seek a heavenly home;
Where in the mansions of the blest,
By earthly ills unmarred,
I'll meet again my Love, my best
And sole desired reward.

"If your loved one prove unworthy, why then" (c.1936) by Elizabeth Daryush

For -

If your loved one prove unworthy, why then,
by this much you're the freer: if the block
to which you're bolted warp and shrink away,
why then, it only gives you further play,
makes life rough for you, of course, with its knock
and rattle, with defections' loud sudden
jars, but your own quiet integrity,
tried thus the more, has but more room to be.

So says one truth, but soon says another:
Now in your soul-tissues a wrong sap stains
the white rose that you were; your heart sustains
the wild-thorn traits of your grafted partner:
when the mistaken marriage mortifies,
it's your own branch and stem and root that dies.

"You Should at Times Go Out" (c.1936) by Elizabeth Daryush

You should at times go out
from where the faithful kneel,
visit the slums of doubt
and feel what the lost feel;

you should at times walk on,
away from your friends' ways,
go where the scorned have gone,
pass beyond blame and praise;

and at times you should quit
(ah yes) your sunny home,
sadly awhile should sit,
even, in wrong's dark room,

or ever, suddenly,
by simple bliss betrayed,
you shall be forced to flee,
unloved, alone, afraid.

Saturday 22 June 2013

"Old Love and New Love" (1934) by Naomi Mitchison

My Love comes behind me
And he kisses me just where -
What has come in your minds now?
- Between neck and jersey
My bent neck is bare -
Are you thinking, are you thinking
That you might have been kinder?
- And I know that my hair
Curls a little, curls a little -
And your hands that remind me,
And your breath in my hair

My love comes behind me
And his lips are like bees -
What has come in my mind now?
- That light on the clover,
That settle and tease -
I am thinking, I am thinking
As my eyes look out blindly
And I stiffen at the knees,
Of my new love, of my new love,
Who is fonder and kinder
And is far overseas.

"Beauty the lover's gift?" (1933) by Winifred Holtby

"Beauty the lover's gift? Lord,
What is a lover that it can give?"
- Congreve's Millamant

Never mind now. You have done all that was needful;
You have given my eyes their blue and hair its gold.
You have taught my body to move with a grace unheedful,
And I am beautiful now. I shall not grow old.

You have me made sure of myself, and I am grateful.
'I too was adored once' now, and once is enough.
Why should you look at me, then, as one grown hateful?
Why should your voice grow harsh and your gesture rough?

Have I not thanked you well for your gift of beauty?
See! I acknowledge it. I am your work of art.
You modelled this gold, this rose and this pearl to suit ye.
Is it my fault, if you say that I have no heart?

Did you teach my tongue to be kind and my fingers tender?
Did you ask me to spill my sweetness to quench your flame?
You cried to my lips 'Be red!', to my hands, 'Be slender!'
They have obeyed. You have only yourself to blame.

"Woman Alone" (1935) by Naomi Mitchison

A woman comforts a man, staring
Beyond his pillowed head, thinking
Of other things, of needful cooking and sewing,
Of flowers in a vase, of the idea of God.
She is giving only her body.
But the man is comforted, he does not know,
Blinded by customary eyes, lips, breasts, tender hands,
That woman’s mind is faithless
It is not with him
Nor with any man, for to her all men are children.
She has been sucked by baby men, giving them her body
As she now gives it.
Suckling, she thought of other things,
Staring out gently over small, breast-pillowed heads, thinking
Of necessary things.
Faithless.
The woman alone.

"To Some Young Communists from an Older Socialist" (1933) by Naomi Mitchison

Under the cold eyes, the cat eyes of those young,
This car, cutting corners, into the ditch slithers;
And the middle-aged, mucky, stained and strained dither,
Feeling themselves fools, watched, their war-scarred withers wrung.

So we say, won't you help with the car, wise ones we want to trust,
But they won't - why should they? - they will walk fiercely, singing, with friends:
No drugs for the old duds, nor care for the dud cars not worth mending,
Leave it and walk, they say, that's good enough for us.

We try to, walk, warily re-adjusting wrenched sinews,
But oh it's too hard, comrades, we can't, you've killed us, we're dead and done,
Leave us by road-sides, sunk, head in hands, it may be sunny,
Dreaming no more of the dances that fairies in fields renew.

As for the car, we don't care much, it had jolly gadgets,
If someone finds and mends and drives it, we musn't mind,
Nor that, hoping to help, with you to give and take kindness,
We have been left to a fate worse than we once imagined.

Tolerance and irony were the things we once hated.
Now there is nothing but that - you've cornered, corralled the rest.
Look, our car's luggage of high violent hopes is only socks and vests:
Kick them away, careless, marching, you and your mates.

We who were young once in that war time, we are now not young but apart,
Living with photos of friends, dead at Ypres or Menin,
Remembering little of lies or truth perhaps defended;
We were hit then in the head, but now, hopeless, in the heart.

"On August the Thirteenth" (1934) by Frances Cornford

(At The Mount, Marsden, Bucks)

Out of this seemliness, this solid order,
At half-past four to-day,
When down below
Geraniums were bright
In the contented glow,
Whilst Williams planted seedlings all about,
Supremely geometrically right
In your herbaceous border,
You had to go
Who always liked to stay.
Before Louisa sliced the currant roll,
Re-arranged the zinnias in the bowl,
All in a rhythm reachless by modernity,
Correct and slow,
And brought the tea and tray,
At half-past four on Friday you went out:
To the unseemly, seemly,
Dateless, whole
Light of Eternity
You went away.

"A Woman Knitting" (1938) by Lilian Bowes Lyon

A thousand years the flesh of the wool growing
Between my fingers, cast on or cast off
by shifting needles, by the unfertile bone,
The sturdily-flowing
wool was, for a thousand years, the tough
smooth strand of life, and I, the woman vigilant,
        wore my heavy crown.

The future between finger and thumb, informed,
fulfilled, made ponderable by the weight of longing, how must I
         wear it,
now my vision mended
is strictly wound into a ball of pain?
Whence came the wild-bee stitches warmly thronging
as though mid-summer’s murmuring thoughts had swarmed?
Ah bloom of flesh! A thousand years are ended,
and I, the spirit, the vagrant, am uncrowned again.

"Pastoral" (1932) by Lilian Bowes Lyon

This field has buried men; is browed
With easy gold; day's Midas touch
Turns all to richness, only these were ploughed
By poverty under, pave a roofless church -
Kindle no saffron cloud.

There nothing want, are nameless loam;
But hungrier bones we knew as boys
Stand gauntly erect or swelter out their doom,
Live grist to the machine that still destroys;
And wolves sing harvest-home.

On evening lea unearth long sighs,
The lingering testament of their pain;
Tear open this sepulchred acre till they rise
And call Peace hypocrite, who dumbly stain
With blood her pastoral skies.

Tuesday 18 June 2013

extracts from "The South Mountains" by Han Yu (韓愈)


(i)
Gazing as I climbed a high peak
I saw them huddle closer together,
Angles and corners jutting as the air brightened,
Emerging patterns in a needlework;
Or interfused in a steamy haze
Pierced through by sudden glimpses of heights and depths
As it drifted at random, winnowed without a wind,
And dissipated to warm the tender growths.
Sometimes a level plain of cloud settled
With scattered peaks exposed above,
Long eyebrows floating in the empty sky,
The lustrous green of paint newly touched up;
And a single strut of broken crag protruded,
The upreared beak of the Roc as it bathes in the sea.
In spring when the Yang waters in secret
And from deep within breathes up the glistening shoots,
Though cliff and crag loom tall against the sky
Their outlines soften like a drunken face.
In summer's flames, when the trees are at their prime
Dense and shady, and deeper bury the hills,
The magic spirit day by day exhales
A breath which issues in the shaping clouds.
While the autumn frosts delight in punishing
The hills stand starved and stripped, with wasted flanks
And sharp edges which zigzag across the horizon,
In inflexible pride scorning the universe.
Though winter's element is inky black
The ice and snow are master jewellers,
And the light of dawn shines over the dangerous peaks
Constant wide and high for a thousand miles.
In daylight or darkness never a fixed posture,
From moment to moment always a different scene.


(ii)
North of the great lake of Kunming,
On a brilliant day, I came to view the mountain.
It dropped straight down as far as I could see
Trapped wrongside up and steeped in the clear water.
When ripples stirred on the face of the pool
The rowdy monkeys hopped and skipped,
Shrieked with amazement to see their shattered shapes,
Looked up and gaped with relief that they had not fallen in.



(iii)
Fine weather since yesterday.
My old ambition is satisfied at last.
I've clambered all the way to the topmost peak,
Scurrying with the flying-squirrels and the weasels.
The road dips in front, the vista opens
Far and wide over crowded bumps and wrinkles,
Lined up in files like processions
Or crouched like grappling fighters,
Or laid low, as though prostrate in submission,
Or starting up like crowing pheasants;
Scattered like loose tiles
Or running together like converging spokes,
Off keel like rocking boats
Or in full stride like horses at the gallop;
Back to back as though offended,
Face to face as though lending a hand,
Tangled like sprouting bamboos
Or piled like moxa on a wound;
Neatly composed like a picture,
Curly like ancient script,
Constellated like stars,
Conglomerated like stationary clouds,
Surging like billows,
Crumbling like hoed soil,
And some like champions, Fen or Yu,
When the stakes are down, eager for the prize ahead,
The foremost and strongest rearing high above,
The losers looking foolish and speechless with rage;
Or like some majestic Emperor
And the vassals gathered in his court,
Even the nearest not too familiar,
Even the furthest never insubordinate;
Or like guests seated at a table
With the banquet spread before them,
Or like a cortege on the way to the graveyard
Carrying the coffin to the tomb:
And some in rows like pots
With others sticking up behind like vases:
Some carapaced like basking turtles,
Slumped like sleeping animals,
Wriggling like dragons fleeing into hiding,
Spreading wings like pouncing vultures;
Side by side like friends and equals,
Ranked as though in due degree,
Shooting apart like falling spray
Or introducing themselves like lodgers in an inn;
Aloof as enemies
Or intimate as man and wife,
Dignified as tall hats
Or flippant as waving sleeves,
Commanding like fortresses
Or hemmed in like hunted prey;
Draining away to the East
Or reclining with heads to the North,
Like flames in the kitchen stove,
Like the steam of a cooking dinner;
Marchers who will not halt
And the stragglers left behind,
Leaning posts which do not topple,
Unstrung bows which no one draw,
Bare like bald pates,
Smoking like pyres;
Unevenly cracked like diviners' tortoiseshells
Or split into layers like hexagrams,
Level across the front like Bo,
Or broken at the back like Gou.



(Three extracts from a poem of 102 couplets, all ending on the same rhyme, about the mountains south of the capital Chang'an, including Zhongnan (South Mountain) and Taibo.)

Translated by Angus Charles Graham

"An Arrowhead from the Ancient Battlefield of Chang-ping" (c.800) by Li He (李賀)


Lacquer dust and powdered bone and red cinnabar grains:
From the spurt of ancient blood the bronze has flowered.
White feathers and gilt shaft have melted away in the rain,
Leaving only this triple-cornered broken wolf's tooth.

I was searching the plain, riding with two horses,
In the stony fields east of the post-station, on a bank where bamboos sprouted,
After long winds and brief daylight, beneath the dreary stars,
Damped by a black flag of cloud which hung in the empty night.

To left and right, in the air, in the earth, ghosts shrieked from wasted flesh.
The curds drained from my upturned jar, mutton victuals were my sacrifice.
Insects settled, the wild geese swooned, the buds were blight-reddened on the reeds,
The whirlwind was my escort, puffing sinister fires.

In tears, seeker of ancient things, I picked up this broken barb
With snapped point and russet flaws, which once pierced through flesh.
In the east quarter on South Street a pedlar on horseback
Talked me into bartering the metal for a votive basket.


Translated by Angus Charles Graham

Thursday 13 June 2013

"Holy, Wholly My Own" (1987) by Colin Mackay


I will think no more
for thought is aggravation,
will creep to no more gurus
for they are shrewd thinkers on thrones of power,
will blow no more joints to enrich
the exploiters of the world, but will return
back down through the green door
to the place of my beginning,
where all stone commandments are broken,
where all cold idols are thrown in the sea,
where no cage stands, where no chains bind
in a land where there are
no crosses,
and I will be at one
with the reeds and the the foxglove,
at one with the heather
and the wild broom,
I will sink into the earth,
this my flesh my body my blood will be,
and the flowering hawthorn will know
me in its roots,
and the whaups will cry for me,
and the white clouds will be my prayers,
and I will be no more a servant  of They Told Me To
but holy and wholly my own,
and will in all things find
the pure beginning
as it was in the beginning
when  the wind first ruffled the earth's green hair.

"Phantoms" (1987) by Colin McKay


(for George Gunn)

O I remember myself in the screaming Phantom
napalming far away in a battle-green land,
rich in weaponry English and Cyrillic,
I remember flitting gunships
lithe as meccano dragonflies,
and we within them
red sweating dogtagged
crowned spirits on the throne of our own meat.
Evenings then were canned with beer
and mosquito bites;
heavy metal rock fanfared the jungle
and we, patrolling,
knowing the Ho Chi Minh trail had this time
finally dissolved itself in a silent rain
of Agent Orange,
and the lurking enemy, everywhere,
knowing we were wrong
and pumping guns at us,
bullets from Gorky and Tula, shiny Kalashnikhovs,
and in the guitars' wailing, riddling the rainbow bridge
back from flower power to technology,
and our bodies lying leaking in the detla
beside the ruins we has liberated
and they liberated from us
now dead as Jimi Hendrix and a million others
and wondering then
in the chanting No Satisfaction bombsmoke
if ends are only invented for the means,
and the means for the pleasure of attaining?

O the laments we sang for Haight-Ashbury!
for the withering flowers of a little St Francis town
grown too large for its humanity,
for the dirty-faced City of the Angels
burning garish with neon,
for the kaftaned beautiful people seeking
their own loveliness in earthly amber
grass mirrored in the fires of Hanoi!
Those were the days, my friend.
Sunrise yellow with the glow of righteousness,
our faces bright as new-minted coins,
as smiling Buddhas polished by temple servants,
as Allen Ginsberg wobbling his hairy belly
through starving Calcutta streets
grubbing poems, sutras, incantations
out of other people's wretchedness,
whispering "sex revolution is good for you"
to the soon to be dead skeletons of Bengal.
Ah those were the days - when
paid armies guarded us, navies protected us,
tin birds kept their droppings from us,
and we chanted our little mantras of discontent
outside mortuary walls, in the shadow
of the office blocks that would soon
swallow us whole with suits
and mortagages, policies, luncheon bouchers, pension schemes and prams.

One night I rose to count myself and found
that I was loose change from the age of plenty,
little piles of sweaty much-handled hope,
promissary thinknotes tissue-thin
devalued below use,
and I cried then, A dream! a dream!
I am tired of too much reality!
And there on the dusty street between
saloon and livery stable, guns flashing,
I was Shane,
the lonesome Shane, the avenging
cowboy white-clad against
a gang of black-leathered tyrants.
And I woke,
and stood before my window,
and looked to the West and saw
a giant city that was lit with despair
that stank futility,
and looked to the East and saw
a barbed-wire labour camp reeking
of death, dictators.
And the both neighbouring blocks television godeyed
purveyed the same trivia.
British seamen of Invincible and Hermes
streetwise in Dallas, fighting old time stuff
with Argentinians high on Los Angeles de Charlie,
trading same weapons, trading
same flickering screen images -
realer death than the death their guns bring
administered by Kojak and co. nightly -
trading same ad-men's slogans,
trading same everything beneath
two different flags.

O television pop world
of toothpaste and handsome people!
I see I am now a Mirage in your eyes,
an Eagle, a Falcon, a Mig 23, 25, 27,
a Tupolev, a Tornado, a Sukhoi, bigger
better, deadlier armed than before,
swingwinged and shining and lethal,
when in my own sad fantasy fact I am sitting
slumped in sweaty shirt and pants after a night
spent straffing the emotions,
staring at a sunlit breakfast table
with blank and stupid face.
And I turned from the place of aerials
where the screech-hawks of power sit perched
and wandered off, away, far away,
down a long corridor crying for
God to return to the breast of his image
that is lonely, O so lonely, and wandering lost
across the plain, hammered on by the hooves
of daemon horses where
God's jackass
bray.

Howl the lonely city where men
come staggering out of bars, they
walk like cowboys, neon canyons bear them,
blind buses carry them on streams of light
to angry women
warders in furnished cells -
                       and they grin.

And though they could hold the thought that lights the beauty of the stars
and leap forward through death
and through the doors of oblivion
there between eternity and the night and the sea
where Blake and Shakespeare and all the prophets
are unread and need not be read -
                          still they grin, grin.

Howl the broken country whose warm lovely blood
chills in the night wind
in the stares of pale unfriendly faces
that obey the State and its laws
that obey Those Who Must be Obeyed
that commit not the crime of poetry -
                               that grin.

No friends, I am not mad,
for I have seen them on the clear horizon,
ghosts of television wars lifelong,
of Algeria, of Indochina, of Ulster
and Ogaden, Sinai and Afghanistan.
I have seen migrations of silver planes
with wing stars red and white
crapping napalm, crapping bombs
high explosive, nuclear, thermo-nuclear, biological.
And I with my tin six-guns
ready to be a hero
firing off caps against such missiles
that some bored but competent officer in the Urals
will launch with a button
blasting philosophy and idealism
and eternal consciousness to hell
in four easy minutes.

                               A dream! a dream!
                               I am tired of too much reality!

For there were six million peace-loving Jews
who whispered wise words to Hitler's power
and herded themselves obediently under the whip
and boot, whispering wise words
in the cattle trucks, within sight of the execution pits
that "there is no place without God",
yet they found a place without God
grey-shaven shuffling to the gas chambers.
And the few who fought
in the rubble and sewers of Warsaw, said
"Tomorrow in Jerusalem - but today
little flock, we are alone. If thine enemy
offends thee, kill him."
And now the childrn of those heavenly Jews
hung on meat hooks in Belsen
are driving tanks through other ghettoed towns
being cursed into the future memory of other
big-eyed children who forget nothing.

                             A dream! a dream!
                            I am tired of too much reality!

Gone are the cowboys, gone are the kaftans
and the saffron robes and Shane
and Ginsberg and Hendrix all overdosed
somewhere in a millionaire hotel
and left behind - you
scarecrow humanity,
whose sufferings shall be writ in letters of fire
in the book of damnation
that shall be told against us your tormentors
and against us their children to the last generation of us,
to the end of the time of us, and the ending of all the days of us,
to the us coming of the us judgment
that narcotic dream of justice
when my goddam ashes will go crazy with delight!

Lady be mine, while there is still time
and there's a country made for two.
We can find its door if we know no more
than any man and woman do.
Before falls the fire from the blue blue sky
#on some lunatic's launching day,
lady be mine, O lady be mind,
let's fuck our lives away.