STILTED
I worried today that my mind was crumbling.
We walk on stilts through the marshy days.
Nothing is forever, not recall, not the knees
we always took for granted.
We are caught one way or another out,
suddenly snagged like bees or birds –
those air-owning go-as-you-pleasers.
Wobbly on our stilts, we can observe now
how sea inundates the sweet-water marshes
by sudden breach or slowly by seeping.
GOODNESS
Kathleen Ogier Dennis 1904-2004
Goodness is even rarer than...
for example making lists of similes
previously thought up by man
for its rareness. And is unfair.
You'd think you could strive for it as for a cup -
God's gun and off you go
scudding to the line with look-at-me,
haven't I done fine?
Not good. That's all made up
by wishes, hopes and people like popes
you ought to steer clear of.
The race for goodness at its worst
is cutting people up and to stop
that is difficult.
Those for moral road-hogs to go to
are the dogs.
Goodness is a gift
possessed by plasterer or polymath
or my Cousin Kath.
Poems
LINES UPON A YOUNG LADY’S SOMETHINGTH BIRTHDAY
(For Jane Shaw, April 2004)
It’s often from a trick of light or something unexpected
poems lift off in quick short flight.
Apart from that, the poet feels neglected.
But then a subject is proposed and the subject’s worth it –
and hope comes back the word might glow
more than in prose and find readers to unearth it.
This subject’s one I feel sure that I shall warm to
(so join the queue at Sainsbury’s) -
I cannot be, dear Jane, the sole one to inform you
that all of us privately may salute in
those we cherish at least as much
as public shindigs do, however high-fallutin.
Poetry lets private feelings out
through particular glass ceilings:
it’s what the whole damned thing’s about,
our real human meaning. So let’s recall
some years ago when you were eight
helicopter, grassy slope and how you told me all
your head had in it. Princess Anne was landing
at Aykley Heads but you, not she, amazed me
with a so exact, so open handing
to me your life of then. Birthdays ending in noughts
are like every day we wake to –
time, people, where we are, those thoughts
our heads have which we become more careful with,
thoughts never told so staggeringly
on steep ground as you could then and did
to this one, old now, trying to relate in verse
the shelving value we grow in others,
the secret blessing we have for them, and nurse.
WORDS & RAIN
For Julia Darling
‘Gazebo and placebo’ – rare rhymes
I noticed as the rain came down
and someone never met before confessed
that her doctor had prescribed a gazebo.
She thought it unlikely (we were smokers
out in the rain) – a deer from Africa?
on the NHS, even in election month.
About as likely, she said, as ever using
the words she had confused in a poem.
’Midst smoke and water, I heartily agreed.
GLIMPSING
Signals of love are unmistakable –
they are now and again, no more than that
and nothing to do with the blundering cruel industry
stuffing it all down our throats, confusing it.
They hop up like hares, wild or wilful
to make sudden runs; and if you have seen them
you don’t forget. Most of us have them
and all of us would, because we foreknow
even if they never come. Wish them, not will them
is how it is. To say bless these sightings
is like religion in its various terrible clothing.
Grateful, but make nothing of it,
grateful to perceive them
flitting like hares, rare as them.
