Poetry blog: Your sonnets sang to me

David’s my local farmer and no fool.
He likes a poem but it has to rhyme.
He still recites the ones he learnt at school.
I showed him my free verse. He has no time

for slick word puzzles, for my lack of frills.
The rules we write by are to him a tease.
He likes his poems full of daffodils
and preferably dancing in the breeze.

The old ones fire him up. They still excite
They sing to him; have beat, their words are bold.
He reads my stuff. His praise is just polite.
He longs for cohorts, for purple and gold.

Should we ignore him, put this down as fuss?
We must make sure we don’t write just for us.

After Helen Maria Williams’ To the Curlew

Urged by the rhythms from a drum shore;
his moon-brown feathers winged by the gale,
the sea-wader chants his first Kyrie wail,
with these low notes surging water-rills pour.
Like you, unsociable bird, my steps explore
the billowed salt-ribbons and the stony dale
alone. Forgetting my love in the whale’s veil;
as losing my mind’s worth suits me no more.
Instead I eye-net water patterns dressed
in poured crystal or raven when winds blow.
Reminded when the sheen on the sea’s breast
purls calm as my past moments used to flow.
But when the salt-fettered thread does not rest
both tide and I are stitched in our woe.

Small dark stone still standing, yet old as Earth,
names this combe; signs this seat which celebrates
a life cut short just four weeks past its birth.
A lass who never grew so she could wait

and stare across the gentle slopes; hear shrieks
of buzzards circling high above the hills.
Too young to walk the ridge ’til old joints creak
and feet cry out to rest. The aching stills

as walkers settle on her bench of grief.
Too young to now explore the drover’s road
shaded by long dun fingers tipped by leaf;
to gain sufficient years to now be slowed.

The trees and combe hold close this place of rest.
Sit here, enjoy, remember you are blest.

of drudgery i sing oh god i’m bored
this head is vacant and this heart asleep
my feelings took a package-trip abroad
and left me drab alas too drab to weep
my spleen lies burnished on a spanish beach
and shares a beer with disdain fear and wrath
while i have sudden lost all power of speech
so while away ten days in silent sloth
they sent a postcard what is that to me
sans teeth sans eyes sans taste sans everything
air mail alicante → leigh-on-sea
All Right Mate? Senoritas Got Some Bling!
i clutch onto but one cantankerous dream
in which the bastards lose their sun-tan cream

From high above the lawyer’s world looks small
and people’s lives are Google-Earthed away.
Yet there are many here who, feeling all
set against them, found on their testing day
they were not alone: for beyond the reach
of law’s rough balancing of guilt or blame
you took the time to understand that each
was more than just a number or a name.

El Bosque, untouched by turmoil, unstressed
by day’s toil: there thought is, of sudden, freed
and, caught in the thermal’s lark-dressed
joy, flung cloud high. You have no need
to cross question, to explain or wonder why:
just spread your wind drawn bow bent wing and fly.

But our eternal winter will not fade
where lines of power droop like fractured limbs.
Look there on hills: the sheep have plugged the snow,
their ice-caked lambs men pull along on sledge.
A farmer cries into a microphone. His crops will fail.
A lonely primrose dares to tread the woods
and crocuses like small umbrellas gape, then close.
The eastern wind digs deep into our throats,
the hope for warmth and springtime dashed
with every passing hour. The clocks leap back,
the evenings somewhat lighter, but still grey.
We mourn a planet that has lost its way.

The medical tents are already there,
hydration stations stacked, waiting in line
on Patriots’ Day downtown Copley Square;
Newton and Darwin lauded in stone,
between Armani, Gucci and Beacon Hill
above The Common’s late flowering blooms
where we tourists follow The Freedom Trail
painted in red; history’s open wounds;
lives ended by home made back-packer bombs,
destroy people they never even saw,
ball bearings, nails, tearing apart limbs,
some only saved by strangers schooled in war.
As we question again whose hate, whose fears?
Boston’s magnolias shed waxen tears.

The boot’s full of bulging sacks, heavy as corpses.
Free firewood. After lugging them in, trundle off
down Malaxa mountain. A scatter of goat turds
on the road glow like dark chocolates: free compost.

Better than horse manure for potassium,
Giorgos told me, after I’d spread
Leo’s stable muck around the orange trees
banking on getting a better crop next winter.

I flick turds into a sack with a piece of the wood,
loose patience, lift them by hand. Forgot the trowel
I used yesterday to edge out crowded century plants.
Century plants flower in ten years, not a hundred,
Giorgos said. But either way I’ll quite likely be dead.
Someone will see them, I say to the road ahead.

Dad said Grandpa died on foreign ground,
reported missing, body never found;
some double bluff so he could be a spy.
Which could explain a second story: why
a friend was called upon to view his corpse
in down-south London, in between the wars.
And there it rested, when somebody said
‘Seen later with a woman. Wasn’t dead’.
We found the papers Dad had never seen:
Unfit for service, June 1916.
One man, three myths, too late for explanations,
a string of lies, confusing generations.
Perhaps in desperation Gran had tried
to shield her son. Much better Grandpa died.

Magdalena asleep on the sloping heel of a hand
That cups a juncture of the hills. A brief
Respite from work and wonder, a relief
To furl her thoughts within the folded land.

She dreams the creek along a sieve as green
As Venus, dreams the centuries that led
The blue oak to explode, and dreams her head
Is full of all that fire and stone have been.

And from the iris of her dreaming soul
The night-black pupil flies, the Judas bird,
Threading the reddened beads, the lucent word,
On swift and liquid silver. Truth be told!

His alchemy redeems an ancient debt,
His song dissolves the cold coin of regret.

Underneath the grey swathe of uniform in the war zone
I scarcely detected a heart beating
But if it was, it could scarcely be called my own
I had become so used to a life of cheating;
I confessed to things I hadn’t done, worse
Dismissed the authors who had gained much fame
Saying their lack of ideology was a curse
That damned their work and vilified our name;

But someone infiltrated my post-box
Had sent a live poem, one of my school friends
Who had studied ballet and had worn bobby socks
And had taken to writing for merely personal ends;
It was not me, I swear, who ripped the poem into shreds
And threw it out the window on the students’ heads.

I do not know how to describe your love.
In all our years I have not heard you say
it more than once. You do not sing d’amour,
or write love poems, or spray it from Moet
or Yves Saint Laurent. There’s no hasty slot
at Tony’s near the loos before they close,
or gestures in a black Ann Summers crotch
you badly wrapped, or that Tesco’s red rose
you thrust me; like a last thought, when you come
back from your mum’s. No silver-plated charms
reduced in ‘The Big Sale’ at Ernest Jones.
No February fireworks beneath the stars.
No heart laid on your sleeve, no card you care.
I do not know how, but it’s here; like air.