Month: Jan 2021

The Penguin Book of English Verse: 1970 Edition

I hold here in my hands
a book of English verse
collected over years
from English speaking lands.
The centuries traverse
this plenitude of peers.

All speak of love or death,
those two commanding states,
urgency of desire,
the quickening of breath
to which desire relates;
the all consuming fire

which all pervades our living
with the knowledge of our fate,
inevitable decline,
compassion and forgiving,
the struggle against hate
are subjects they define.

In one small volume here
the power of poetry
enraptures and enrages.
Contained is sage and seer;
our frail humanity
is written in these pages.

All speak of love and death,
the aching void of parting,
that rapture of desire
which overtakes the breath;
and of love departing
to the waiting funeral pyre. 

Scriptural

She hardly could conceptualise
without the evidence of her eyes,
the touted, much praised, paradise

that haunted all her childhood dreams,
had taken up so many reams,
so many books that burst their seams

with images; an imagined place
the faithful wanted to embrace
before it vanished without trace.

How could it vanish? Some might say,
surely it is here to stay,

so potholed with each vice and sin
you wonder how you can begin
to recognise the door marked In.

So she decided to forget her
wonderings of the Begetter;
further musing might upset her.

Respecting, though, the people who,
through faith, believed it all was true,
whose happiness was like a glue

that bound together broken hearts,
the sum much greater than the parts;
unlike the knave who stole the tarts

she left them basking in their bliss,
feeling it would be remiss
to share with them her deep abyss.

The Drop

They'd lose the toss and invariably take the field,
eleven in white on a Sunday afternoon,
a midsummer day, the sun at it's hottest height,
surrounding trees like ancient supporters applauding.
The umpires signal for the match to begin,
the fast bowlers on before they turn to spin,
and progresses through the long bee-hummed day.
He's fielding at mid-off, his gaze often drawn
to the varied greens against the spectating sky.
The batter plays to mid-wicket off his legs
but mistimes the stroke, ball catching the leading edge,
arcing steeply through the air, looping his way.
He's taken so many catches like this before
and cups his hands like a heart to receive the ball.
He's set and steady, it's descending at speed,
he hears it humming like bees as the seam rotates,
catching the air like a comet crashing through
a planet's atmosphere, till it slaps his palms,
the centrifugal force twisting it away
and down to the grass before he can react,
a misjudgment later ridiculed in the bar.
A dropped catch seems important at the time
and the match is lost but not just through his mistake.
The evening sun is lowering in the sky
as the aging trees still sway indifferently.

My Old Guitar

The battered old guitar I've played for fifty years
sits dustily in the corner, its harmonics muted,
no doubt still awaiting the arrival of a player
adept enough to release it from the monotony
of the same old three chord trick to which it's been subjected,
having drawn the short straw of being sold to me,
a mediocre musician with a semi-discordant ear,
who struggles to sound a note, often losing the key.

It's longing for a Django or, classically, a Williams
to release it from its torpor, condemned to the occasional strum;
to feel some finger picking, to take off on a flight
of rapacious arpeggios, an all consuming riff;
to find, at last, its voice, to feel, at last, its potential,
free from all constraint, to drift into its dream
of Hendrix, Page, Santana, who all have passed it by,
this Yamaha FG One Eighty, Red Label Nippon Gakki.

Strangely, it's become a collectors item I'm told,
sought after by the folk who think things can be owned.
Yet, despite my ineptitude, I couldn't let it go,
because it has become a symbol of something more
than just an instrument longing to be tuned.
It's something symbiotic I couldn't do without,
nor, I think, could it do without my love
of its mellow tone, the timbre of its veneer.

I have recently had it re-fretted and restored,
returned to the beauty of its former days.
The action has been lowered, effortlessly it plays
all those three chord tunes I struggle to recall.
And I have been inspired to honour its stoicism
by tending to its needs each ensuing day,
forgoing that neglect which I previously offered,
seeing it for itself; the core of my beating heart.

Bridges

To get across a life it's bridges we build,
span the light of our waking days
with alliances, compromises,
negotiate our walking routes,
cut avenues through the undergrowth.
These hours are lush like vegetation,
alive and drinking the succulent rains
that swell the raging rapids of desire,
the swirl and boil of racing, constant hearts.
These bridges can be made of ancient stone,
a huge suspension wrought of iron and steel
or merely a plank placed across a stream.
All have two purposes; to set us free,
so we can feel the joy of coming home.