The wonderful artefact, man of the useless hands.
There in the riddled tree, hanging in darkness,
There in the roof of the house and the wall-hollow,
The new like pearl, the old like magical amber,
Hidden with cunning, guarded by fiery thousands
(See where they stream like smoke from the hole in the gable),
There in the bank of the brook the immortal secret,
In the ground under your feet the treasure of nations,
Under the weary foot of the fool, the wild honey.
RUTH PITTER
Sin
Take off the business suit, the old-school tie,
The gown, the cap, drop the reviews, awards,
Certificates, stand naked in your sty,
A little carnivore, clothed in dried turds.
The snot that slowly fills our passages
Seeps up from hollows where the dead beasts lie;
Dumb stamping dances spell our messages,
We only know what makes our arrows fly.
Lost in the wood, we sometimes glimpse the sky
Between the branches, and the words drop down
We cannot hear, the alien voices high
And hard, singing salvation, grace, life, dawn.
Like wolves, we lift our snouts: Blood, blood, we cry,
The blood that bought us so we need not die.
D. GWENALLT JONES
translated by Rowan Williams
Lovers are Separate
‘Do you hear the bells?’
‘What bells?’
‘The swinging bells the singing bells
Downed bells drowned bells
Hear the flying sound the dying sound
Tossed sound lost sound
Of the old bells sea-cold singing bells
Under the sea.’
‘Bells? I hear nothing
But the even breath of the sea.
And look, oh come closer and look with me –
From this rock we stare down into depths so clear
We should see any bells that might be there.
No, there is nothing.
Only the chrysoprase water, deep,
Making a large, bare, twilit room
Such as I’ve wandered through in sleep,
A dream home …’
‘Yes; but I tell you I hear the bells ringing!
Almost, I see the wild swinging
And then the swung sound the up-flung sound
Balanced high aloft – high aloft – listen now, right overhead!
Hear it top-
-pling stumbling sliding and tumbling
All down the silver air into the green sea
To be lost.
Again lost
As the dead
In that hollow sea.
‘And still you heard nothing?’
‘Alas, we could not have drawn closer and yet I heard nothing
But the even breath of the sea.’
FRANCES BELLERBY
Ends Meet
My grandmother came down the steps into the garden.
She shone in the gauzy air.
She said: ‘There’s an old woman at the gate –
See what she wants, my dear.’
My grandmother’s eyes were blue like the damsels
Darting and swerving above the stream,
Or like the kingfisher arrow shot into darkness
Through the archway’s dripping gleam.
My grandmother’s hair was silver as sunlight.
The sun had been poured right over her, I saw,
And ran down her dress and spread a pool for her shadow
To float in. And she would live for evermore.
There was nobody at the gate when I got there.
Not even a shadow hauling along the road,
Nor my yellow snail delicate under the ivy,
Nor my sheltering cold-stone toad.
But the sunflowers aloft were calm. They’d seen no one.
They were sucking light, for ever and a day.
So I busied myself with going away unheeded
And with having nothing to say.
No comment, nothing to tell, or to think,
Whilst the day followed the homing sun.
There was no old woman at my grandmother’s gate.
And there isn’t at mine.
FRANCES BELLERBY
from The Sound of the Wind that is Blowing
The land of Y Llain was on the high marsh
on the border between Caron-is-Clawdd and Padarn Odwyn
slanting from Cae Top down to Y Waun,
and beyond Cae Top was a glade of dark trees –
pines and tall larches – to break the cold wind,
the wind from the north.
And there were the small four-sided fields
like checkerboard, or a patchwork quilt,
and around each of the fields, a hedge.
My father planted the hedges farthest from the house, –
The hedges of Cae Top and Cae Brwyn, –
myself a youngster at his heels
putting the plants in his hand;
three hawthorns and a beech-tree,
three hawthorns and a beech-tree in turn;
his feet measuring the distance between them along the top of the ditch,
squeezing them solidly into the loose earth-and-chalk.
Then the patterned wiring outside them –
the square posts of peeled oak-wood
sunk deep in the living earth –
and I getting to turn the wiring-engine on the post
while he did the stapling,
the hammer ringing in my ears with the pounding.
And I daring on the sly
to send a telegram back over the taut wires
to the other children at the far end of the ditch,
the note of music raising its pitch
with each turn I gave the old wiring-engine’s handle.
My grandfather, said my father, had planted the Middle Fields
– Cae Cwteri, Cae Polion, Cae Troi –
but generations we knew nothing at all about,
except for the mark of their handiwork on Cae Lloi and Cae Moch
had planted the tall strong stout-trunked trees round the house,
and set sweet-plums here and there in the hedges.
And there we children would be
safe in a fold in the ditch under the hedges,
the dried leaves a coverlet to keep us warm
(like the babes in the story hidden with leaves by the birds).
The breeze that trickled through the trunks of the hedges
was not enough to ruffle the wren’s and the robin’s feathers:
but above the hedges and the trees, above the house,
aloft in the firmament, the wind was
tumbling the clouds, tickling them till their white laughter
was unruly hysteria like children on a kitchen floor,
till the excess of play turns suddenly strange
and the laughter’s whiteness scowls, and darkens,
and the tears burst forth, and the clouds escape
in a race from the wind, from the tickling and the tumbling,
escaping headlong from the wind’s provocation –
the pursuing wind outside me,
and I fast in the fold in the ditch beneath the leaves
listening to its sound, outside,
with nothing at all occuring within what I am
because of the care and craft of generations of my fathers
planting their hedges prudnetly to shelter me in my day, –
nothing – despite my wishing and wishing …
J. KITCHENER DAVIES
translated by Joseph P. Clancy
The River God of the River Mimram in Hertfordshire
I may be smelly and I may be old,
Rough in my pebbles, reedy in my pools,
> But where my fish float by I bless their swimming
And I like the people to bathe in me, especially women.
But I can drown the fools
Who bathe too close to the weir, contrary to rules,
And they take a long time drowning
As I throw them up now and then in a spirit of clowning.
Hi yih, yippity-yap, merrily I flow,
Oh I may be an old foul river but I have plenty of go.
Once there was a lady who was too bold,
She bathed in me by the tall black cliff where the water runs cold,
So I brought her down here
To be my beautiful dear.
STEVIE SMITH
Correspondence between Mr Harrison in Newcastle and Mr Sholto Peach Harrison in Hull
Sholto Peach Harrison you are no son of mine
And do you think I bred you up to cross the River Tyne
And do you think I bred you up (and mother says the same)
And do you think I bred you up to live a life of shame
To live a life of shame my boy as you are thinking to
Down south in Kingston-upon-Hull a traveller in glue?
Come back my bonny boy nor break your father’s heart
Come back and marry Lady Susan Smart
She has a mint in Anglo-Persian oil
And Sholto never more need think of toil.
You are an old and evil man my father
I tell you frankly Sholto had much rather
Travel in glue unrecompensed unwed
Than go to church with oily Sue and afterwards to bed.
STEVIE SMITH
Infelice
Walking swiftly with a dreadful duchess,
He smiled too briefly, his face was as pale as sand,
He jumped into a taxi when he saw me coming,
Leaving me alone with a private meaning,
He loves me so much, my heart is singing.
Later at the Club when I rang him in the evening
They said: Sir Rat is dining, is dining, is dining,
No Madam, he left no message, ah how his silence speaks,
He loves me too much for words, my heart is singing.
The Pullman seats are here, the tickets for Paris, I am waiting,
Presently the telephone rings, it is his valet speaking,
Sir Rat is called away, to Scotland, his constituents,
(Ah the dreadful duchess, but he loves me best)
Best pleasure to the last, my heart is singing.
One night he came, it was four in the morning,
Walking slowly upstairs, he stands beside my bed,
Dear darling, lie beside me, it is too cold to stand speaking,
He lies down beside me, his face is like the sand,
He is in a sleep of love, my heart is singing.
Sleeping softly softly, in the morning I must wake him,
And waking he murmurs, I only came to sleep.
The words are so sweetly cruel, how deeply he loves me,
I say them to myself alone, my heart is singing.
Now the sunshine strengthens, it is ten in the morning,
He is so timid in love, he only needs to know,
He is my little child, how can he come if I do not call him,
I will write and tell him everything, I take the pen and write:
I love you so much, my heart is singing.
STEVIE SMITH
The Long Garden
It was the garden of the golden apples,
A long garden between a railway and a road,
In the sow’s rooting where the hen scratches
We dipped our fingers in the pockets of God.
In the thistly hedge old boots were flying sandals
By which we travelled through the childhood skies,
Old buckets rusty-holed with half-hung handles
Were drums to play when old men married wives.
The pole that lifted the clothes-line in the middle
Was the flag-pole on a prince’s palace when
We looked at it through fingers crossed to riddle
In evening sunlight miracles for men.
It was the garden of the golden apples,
And when the Carrick train went by we knew
That we could never die till something happened
Like wishing for a fruit that never grew,
Or wanting to be up on Candle-Fort
Above the village with its shops and mill.
The racing cyclists’ gasp-gapped reports
Hinted of pubs where life can drink his fill.
And when the sun went down into Drumcatton
And the New Moon by its little finger swung
From the telegraph wires, we knew how God had happened
And what the blackbird in the whitehorn sang.
It was the garden of the golden apples,
The half-way house where we had stopped a day
Before we took the west road to Drumcatton
Where the sun was always setting on the play.
PATRICK KAVANAGH
Epic
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided: who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’
And old McCabe, stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
‘Here is the march along these iron stones’.
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was most important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
PATRICK KAVANAGH
What Is a Man?
What is living? Finding a great hall
Inside a cell.
What is knowing? One root
To all the branches.
What is believing? Holding out
Until relief comes.
And forgiving? Crawling through thorns
To the side of an old foe.
What is singing? Winning back
The first breath of creation:
And work should be a song
Made of wheat or wood.
What is statecraft? Something
Still on all fours.
And defence of the realm?
A sword thrust in a baby’s hand.
What is being a nation? A talent
Springing in the heart.
And love of country? Keeping house
Among a cloud of witness.
What is this world to the great powers?
A circle turning.
And to the lowly of the earth?
A cradle rocking.
WALDO WILLIAMS
translated by Emyr Humphreys
Listening to Collared Doves
I am homesick now for middle age, as then
For youth. For youth is our home-land: we were born
And lived there long, though afterwards moved on
From state to state, too slowly acclimatising
Perhaps and never fluent, through the surprising
Countries, in any languages but one.
This mourning now for middle age, no more
For youth, confirms me old as not before
Age rounds the world, they say, to childhood’s far
Archaic shores; it may be so at last,
But what now (strength apart) I miss the most
Is time unseen like air, since everywhere.
And yet, when in the months and in the skies
That were the cuckoos’, and in the nearer trees
That were the deep-voiced wood-pigeons’, it is
Instead now the collared doves that call and call
(Th
eir three flat notes growing traditional),
I think we live long enough, listening to these.
I draw my line out from their simple curve
And say, our natural span may be enough;
And think of one I knew and her long life;
And how the climate changed and how the sign-
Posts changed, defaced, from her Victorian
Childhood and youth, through our century of grief,
And how she adapted as she could, not one
By nature adaptable, bred puritan
(Though quick to be pleased and having still her own
Lightness of heart). She died twenty years ago,
Aged, of life – it seems, all she could do
Having done, all the change that she could know having known.
E. J. SCOVELL
Northumbrian Sequence: IV
Let in the wind
Let in the rain
Let in the moors tonight.
The storm beats on my window-pane,
Night stands at my bed-foot,
Let in the fear,
Let in the pain,
Let in the trees that toss and groan,
Let in the north tonight.
Let in the nameless formless power
That beats upon my door,
Let in the ice, let in the snow,
The banshee howling on the moor,
The bracken-bush on the bleak hillside,
Let in the dead tonight.
The whistling ghost behind the dyke,
The dead that rot in the mire,
The Map and the Clock Page 31
