Two Stoned Poems

Stones Circle


Like nomads at the vernal equinox
my stones grow restive.  I'll double-lock
their shed!  I've a life's work there,
catalogued and safely stabled.
But you can't squeeze gratitude from stone
when the thrust of bud and time
unlocks their wanderlust.
There's my footloose granite, anxious to be gone;
quartz nursing itchy feet;
irascible old pumice, rotten
with travel bug. Batch of globe trotters!
They'd cluster, cheek by jowl
on common beaches. So while they plot
I'll crouch at the keyhole, alert
to the changing tempo of their rumbles.
At all costs I'll fence that huge momentum.
Feckless collection!  I've offered them a roost,
an end to voyaging.  And yet, like madmen
furious in asylums whirl, they roll
and roll and spurn their meals of moss.




Doubts in Limestone Country


The compass memory hesitates between
a sense of longing and of not belonging
in other shires. Stone walls?  Stone sheep enscribed
in strata mapped like ribs of half-ploughed bone
beneath the torn edge of an autumn sky?
Or chalklands perfect as the shoulders
of girls asleep through afternoons
of slanting rain, all their misgivings blurred
in the first unfocussed signatures of love?
Bone, shoulder, reassemble.  Choose.
The needle locks.  The traveller no more
can set his charts of time or place, or force
a pathway through his self-,deceit,
wanders and doubts his craft.
Rib or shoulder?  Shoulder or bone break?
Doubts like a lodestone with its instinct snapped.
.

Carol From an Island Without Trees

These are tunes of empty weather,
the sky too much a brawl
for wing and feather, rain
to corrode the vestiges of summer,
the Atlantic ransacking all.

Sing of a loveless island swept
by unlovely weather,
shoreline of grey and ochre where
one seabird sprawls and slides
from citadel to citadel of gale.

Weather for beak and claw,
not wing and feather,
that gongs in sea-caves,
raves of the ended summer
and nothing done, and this
is the end of singing weather.

Then the song, like wing and summer,
like love and feather, is gone.

Posted for the Theme Thursday prompt - MAP


MAPS


Years later, maybe, you'll come upon old maps
boxed with your youth and dusted with misgivings.
And perhaps  they'd crackle if unfolded, 
as the first frosts hard on the heels of autumn crisp the leaves.
Beware! They lure like carillons wrenching you
back over moorlands where the curlew grieves.


Leave maps as metaphors you tramped among . .
A boot-cap scuffles and chunks of rock dislodged
whirr down to silence, falling far too long . .
memorials of hushed October glens
where voices drift miles and the ice-axe chink
lies like a bell note on the misting air.


Sip your memories in the firelight, but . .
let your maps be, or your finger
tracing paths once taken, could lead you
to years that rise like runs of scree,
and browsing through your autumn days, unfold
times creased with use and truths that dropped apart.
For those far, remembered hills could clasp love-close
dried blades of grass that pierce you to the heart.

In Your Own Words


Four vowels comprise her name -
say deft, say kiss, dance, death -
four smoke rings, linked exemplars
of her faculty, her advocacy
and her carnal grammars.

To formulate the margins of her eyes,
four steps to duskfall, moonfall snared
to mirror her momentum and her style -
say topaz, amber, auburn, black -
her lip and boyish shoulder, archer's stance,
and one impatient gesture of disdain,
an earlobe tethered in a straying curl.
Laughable? Now say charm, say warm, was warm.

Or perhaps subsume her
in four fragrances, four dialects
abandoned but still braiding
here with then - orchid, Havana,
Lentherique, quinine - to wrench the noose,
affirm and reaffirm her.

Nothing is willed or planned or made
inevitable - ever, say is it ever? -
even by chance, by one too many faces
in a room - but somewhere
leaves ash to smoulder
as she left scents on gowns, in cars -
whisper October, whisper smoke and gold -
forsook her shoes by doors left open -
say go, don't go, grown old -
or charred the lips of unfamiliar tables
with her frank, familiar,
discarded black cigars.

Prolonged Immersion.

Rebuke, or pity? Spurning all life-skill guides,
oblivious to shellfish jaws and stings that leave
sure swimmers keeling, she dived young, keen to prise,
eviscerate and string the seeds.
                                                  The first heave
mesmerised.  The seven sea-tentacles unfurled,
artful to drag her down. The laden wrecks
rebuffed her questing hands.
                                             The glass-green swirl
yawed, paused and shifted her past hope of land.

Meshed with slow swells she grins and glides,
adrift on moon-drugged tides, which at their flood
roll, roll her  shorewards, till brine cold rhythms guide
this prisoner from deeps misunderstood.

In the sea's time, formless remains are hurled
naked, flesh gorged by seabirds, spent, unpearled.

 Revenant


At parting, saying -
"Let us agree we both prefer
'Goodbye' to tears.  Learn to accept
and not condemn. The past
never was the future's stage."
A carriage window sliced this valediction.


Work, infidelities and towns
slipped by to undiscovered ends,
while the unquiet ghost for half a lifetime
turned triumph - yes, even that - to puffs of smoke -
(Mists laid on English shires at twilight,
fingers on a candid lip in sleep . . . )


Then in some undistinguished capital,
Buda?  Trieste? - in just that sort
of backwater cafe where conversations
hatched against despair
stutter towards another rented pillow,
the smoky lights revealed -
skin no longer absolutely young,
the smile that lay in wait -
a dress that could not - surely -  be the same?


"No logic, dearest, please,
or laying blame.  I answered only
the motiveless appeal of happiness . . "
(Quoting another poet! At such a meeting!
I should have . . . )
Ah, but her fingers, placed
with such complicity, such care,
placed where the bloodstroke like a habit burns,
sought my acceptance of her affirmation.


My actress on her stage,
ageless and English,
her tear precluding tears.

New Year Poem

"In Memoriam" . . . .  Alfred Lord Tennyson

Lovely Christmas Poem

"A Christmas Life" . . . . by Wendy Cope

White Christmas, Anyone?

Five "Snow" poems.

"London Snow"  . . . . . .      Robert Bridges

"Snow in the Suburbs" . . . Thomas Hardy

"She Tells Her Love" . . . .   Robert Graves

"Stopping by Woods" . . . .  Robert Frost
"Snow" . . . . . . . . . . . Edward Thomas

I cannot find the following poem on the Internet, so I cannot link to it from its title.  I break my rule, therefore, and post it in full.  I heard it on the BBC, in the summer of 2009, in a programme fronted by John Prescott, formerly our unlamented Deputy Prime Minister.  Bloggers from outwith the UK may not know that Mr. Prescott was formerly a ship's steward, then Shop Steward and thence to political prominence as representative of "Old Labour" in the Blair government.  The poet, Maurice Harney, was an engineer in the UK Merchant Marine.  This is a lovely little "regret" poem . . .

A Time For Sea

I shall acknowledge age

when the call of far wild seas no longer stirs my blood,

when I shall not see as a boy would see

the beauty of homebound ships harbouring on the flood.


Only then will I sit in the lee of warehouse walls,

Conjuring dreams from the river's mist.

Only then will I weep an old man's tears

For times that I have known,

For lips that I have left unkissed.

Maurice Harney