A Handsel

NEW & UNCOLLECTED POEMS

(2023)

COMING TO POETRY

An Ode

Reading you, John Keats, at seventy I hurt

pierced again by your beauty that is truth,

was truth to me and my fourteen-year-old heart.

Knowing nothing of nightingales, my melting youth -

still blind to the perfection of a Grecian urn,

deaf yet to Darien, Homer a closed book -

burst open to 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'.

This night my thoughts return

to that seeming simple-as-a-song ballad, to what it took

to have me come to poetry.

My joy forever? My truth and terror too.

This was the Cuban Missile Crisis, October '62.

In English, last week we'd finished St Agnes' Eve.

Next week, nuclear obliteration is due

unless there's a Khrushchev climb-down they don't believe

will happen. Countdown to doom.

Mr Valentine read us 'La Belle Dame' and into the room

came yon knight at arms, so haggard and so woe-begone

with the lily's pale anguish on his brow,

on his cheeks the rose fading, withering like our Now.

Was it to be all over and done

our nineteen-sixties sweetness scarce begun,

my warmed jewels never to be unclasped one by one,

my fragrant bodice never loosened, nor by degrees,

my unbuttoned garments fall rustling to my knees?

Oh I longed as I had never longed before

for my wild eyes to be closed, just once, with kisses four.

I couldn't sleep that night.

For next week we might

we really might, like you, poor dear John Keats, be dead.

I remember this so vividly I'm there

feeling again that middle-of-the-night deep dread,

standing looking out that window in the hall to where -

perhaps soon to be just gone, not here -

under the blueish lamplight our ordinary street

lay weirdly stilled and strange, like a Magritte

out of that art book off the school library shelf.

In my parents' room someone else not sleeping stirs -

we're all scared but you've to keep it to yourself.

Though day by day I see those wee tells betray their fears,

how they'd looked at each other, nothing said,

when Kennedy addressed his Nation. A blockade.

Now, hourly, when the news comes on I know

by their clenched attention to the radio . . .

It didn't happen. I am still alive,

still hunger for poetry, for life.

You never got to take sweet, silly, loving Fanny Brawne to wife,

John Keats, while I, who never thought to survive

into my beldame-years, must needs be stoical at seventy.

My Tom, dear husband of my heart, taken from me

and from this life he loved, an astonishing ten years ago.

I'm here. Birds still sing. Sometimes. I know, I know

I must try not to yearn

for all the sweetnesses gone and past return.

THE SPACES BETWEEN

for Leslie McGuire

The boy is ten and today it is his birthday.

Behind him on the lawn

his mother and his little sister

unfurl a rainbow crayoned big and bright

on a roll of old wallpaper.

His father, big-eyed, mock-solemn, pantomimes ceremony

as he lights the ten candles on the cake.

Inside her living-room

his grandmother puts her open palm to the window.

Out in the garden, her grandson

reaches up, mirrors her, stretching fingers

and they smile and smile as if they touched

warm flesh not cold glass.

More than forty thousand years ago

men or women splayed their fingers thus

and put their hands to bare rock. They

chewed ochre, red-ochre, gritted charcoal and blew,

blew with projectile effort that really took it out of them,

their living breath.

Raw gouts of pigment

spattered the living stencil

that was each's own living hand

and made their mark.

The space of absence

was the clean, stark picture of their presence

and it pleased them.

We do not know why they did it

and maybe they did not either but

they knew they must.

It was the cold cave wall

and they knew they were up against it.

The birthday boy is juggling.

He has been spending time in the lockdown learning

but though he still can't keep it up for long

his grandmother dumb-shows most extravagant applause.

She toasts them all in tea

from her Best Granny in the World mug, winking

and licking her lips ecstatically as,

outdoors, they cut the cake,

miming hunger, miming

prayer for her hunger to be sated.

The slim girl dances

and her grandmother claps

and claps again, blinking tears.

Another matched high-five at her window.

Neither the blown candles nor the blown kisses

will leave any permanent mark

- unless love does? -

on them on this the only afternoon

they will be all alive together on just this day the boy is ten.

CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS

Maytime and I'm

on a fool's errand

carrying home this bunch of the dandelion clocks

which Shakespeare called chimney-sweepers

and a friend tells me his wee grand-daughter

in the here-and-now calls puffballs.

I'm holding my breath, and them, this carefully

because I want to take them home and try

to paint them, although

one breath of wind and in no time

I'll be stuck with nothing but a hank of

leggy, limp, milky pee-the-bed stalks

topped with baldy wee green buttons, for

golden lads and girls all must

as chimney-sweepers come to dust.

On daisy hill by the railway bridge

one lone pair of lovers laze in the sun.

A little apart from her, he lounges

smoking a slow cigarette and waits

smiling, half-watching her weave a bluebell chain

that swings intricate from her fingers, hangs heavy

till she loops it, a coronet upon her nut-brown hair.

I'm wondering is this to be her something blue?

She calls out to me, I to her,

as folk do in these days of distancing

and I can hardly believe it when she says

she never in all her childhood

told the time by a dandelion clock.

She's up to her oxters in ox-eye daisies, this girl.

The ones my mother, Margaret,

always called marguerites but never

without telling me again how my father

writing to her from France before Dunkirk or after D-Day

always began his letters Dear Marguerite.

The saying goes that a maiden

crowned by bluebells can never tell a lie

the girl informs me, solemn as she

crosses her fingers, each hand held high.

The smoke from her lover's cigarette is

almost but not quite as blue as

the frail blooms - time, truth and a promise - that

she's braided together on this their one-and-only

sure-to-be-perfect summer's day.

Oh Marguerite Margaret my Mum

who never got to be as old as I am today

did you ever hear tell of this proverb?

Oh Mum how much I wish I could ask you

this and so many other

small and silly things, but

golden lads and girls all must

as chimney-sweepers come to dust.

FOUND POEM FOR THE POLLEN SEASON

Slender foxtail grass

Yorkshire fog

silvery hair grass

floating club rush

silky bent grass.

barren brome grass.

Meadow soft grass

Marram grass

sweet vernal grass

mountain melick

loose sedge.

great panicled sedge so

easily

Blue moor grass

mistaken

sea hard grass

for japanese blood grass.

glaucous sweet grass

bearded couch grass

Lyme grass

common quaking grass

wood millet grass

switchgrass also known as

sheep's fescue

great panic grass

wall barley

perennial rye grass

wild oat

pendulous wood sedge.

darnel.

OCTOBER EQUINOX

Wild,

wild weather, that ragged crow blown across the road like

a scrap of ripped old black binbag and every time the wind drops

the air full of the roar of the rut, each maculate leaf

a leopard changing its spots

WINTER WORDS

brave snowdrops on the ground

scant snowdrops from the sky

a wishbone on the windowsill

GLOOMY DECEMBER

These are the shortened...