Selected Poems

by Cunard, Nancy; Parmar, Sandeep;

  With armies and tyrannies, rough law-codes, impositions:

  ‘These are the dragon’s teeth’.

  And another time,

  Trekking across an American desert, with a flask and a banjo under the arm,

  Pioneer, buccaneer, emigrant, prospector –

  Learning the solitary crag, affiliate with the empty plain;

  Night in the juke-box – man’s brother; gone by dawn,

  On, west. And then a long poem written about the time of sundown

  Under a wind-carved pillar, with a vague-à-l’âme – but also with a plan.

  (Down that long slant of centuries the metal is always gold,

  Old Celtic gold, and the thread blue, that blue and green and grey

  Of certain flints – and eyes – that blue as much stone as sea,

  Pristine, eternal.)

  Force out of old northern time: ‘Contigo pan y cebolla’,

  The Spanish says it best: ‘Sufficient with you bread and onion’;

  More is not asked, all being here – forgetting never:

  War within war, man within life, life within struggle –

  These must be won.

  Whose Desert?

  Bou Ahmet Ben Sikri Bey foresaw a war;

  It came: two hundred thousand into Spain.

  Jusef evoked the Riff, baring a scar,

  And cursed the roumis; then came war again.

  Hussein on a car was in it, and at times

  Too crazed to pray, then called to Allah: ‘Heed!

  Blow then a stench accidiae from your climes

  And raise your devils from the Shott Jerid.’

  And Maître Tahar, his Tunis now the world,

  Mused in a masterly Arabic: ‘Carthage stood

  Where guns now shake and deathly smokes are curled,

  Fasces and Swastika – death to their brood –

  But after annihilation of these dogs

  Whose conquering wing above our Islamic rags?’

  Dordogne

  Creysse, Lot, on bank of Dordogne,

  Two hundred souls, their oxen, truffle-pigs,

  A grey village round a blond castle-keep,

  Puffed out with trees, the night-sky prickled with stars

  O-brightest-of-all in September-crispest-of-all;

  The talk earth-flavoured, the smell of the hot cep in it all

  Through the wine and garlic –

  Do you remember, Henry

  We were there that 1930, and I made you work;

  After the day’s bucket brought in from pump

  You sat at the piano the oxen had dragged from Martel,

  Composed Henry-Music and were loved by the people of Creysse:

  ‘A brown man, a beautiful Negro, in a red and blue car…dropped from the sky…

  Now look how he plays’ they said, and we all drank together at the inn.

  We didn’t look so much at the world then, that pre-Marchukuo year,

  The village was the scene, not death’s international roustabouts.

  One night I sat on our grey steps and saw her, the old crepuscular,

  Bowed over the boiling, the whole boiling, and wrote of her – this:

  Steams, but not in any now-dry now-flooding river washes

  All the sheet and weave of the region in a slow stew;

  Her copper’s a day of judgement, compost of noon and night stuff,

  Filed-sweat, tavern-sweat, love-sweat, death-sweat, all of it,

  Heats of maize and tobacco acre, roads and the boisterous market.

  Lifting – oh lay brotheress – all these robes smartly, while she grieves

  To a little girl attendant of the grease that groans

  In crease’s prison, of the tears

  Old dribble and spent sweat print on the square of

  Shirts, of the tortured strings, telescoped, corkscrewed

  Enfeeblement of pot-wipers, wrenched bib, kerchief invalidate

  Its colour-with-age-I-tell-you prismed,

  And the plain dust itself in the apron!

  Shameless this tough green

  Woollen that will no down, with its goose-gabble.

  Hierarchy – the big ones go underneath,

  The ill-though-of valence and the history of a windy night –

  Cheek by jowl by towel sheet,

  Et la serviette éponge qui sut se marier;

  Mayor’s frill drover’s wipe…

  That summer-blouse was before her first –

  The graillon’s in the glory-hole…soot!

  Blood’s brown braggadocio come to your reckoning…

  Auspice! Hog spit on it – vanishing of vanities –

  Cunning the red winestain: to ink thou shalt return.

  Not a bubble out of the load,

  Appointed all, with a quiver of socks at copper-brim,

  And here’s a month’s chat slowly, slow-ly…

  Old yes-and-no woman

  DOWN with the stars into the pot

  And UP with the devil – company’s company

  … Where a pin’s none… Sangdieu!

  She sets four stones

  Cardwise on her stacked pyramid, and the sparks prick

  Fire into charcoal nightlong, and she pats it…

  ‘Si c’est pas honte de ne pas envoyer tout ça plut tôt –

  A perishin’ shame on them sending me all that at one go.’

  Dordogne,

  Land of the walnut, chestnut, goose and vine,

  (Land of red hearts), land of caves prehistoric.

  Chellan, Magdelanian, Musterian, Cro-Magnon man

  Left more than a line or two here: the rump of a bison

  Limned in ochre or umber, the curve of a feline

  Crouched, the span of a taut bow.

  Land of red hearts – today the masquisards are on the causse

  In the sparse thyme of winter, raking of the shepherd’s hut

  A stockade with bombs and rifles, somewhere there above Rocamadour

  Somewhere above Marennac, and Fages, the great ruin,

  Places like that –

  The red heart turned into armed fists against the Boches and Vichy

  On the causses, the high stony remote empty hilltops –

  Salut, best of peoples and regions; we shall meet again.

  Dordogne,

  All day in Lascave’s entrail the stalagtite drips to the stalagmite.

  Dorgdogne,

  All day all day wives wash against your stones…

  O time with dual face, now whole, now facet,

  Speed the great battles. Mort à l’envahisseur;

  And to all traitors, double death.

  Previously Unpublished

  or Uncollected Poems

  Soldiers Fallen in Battle

  These die obscure and leave no heritage,

  For them no lamps are lit, no prayers said,

  And all men soon forget that they are dead,

  And their dumb names unwrit on memory’s page.

  Pale heroes when their ghosts are all assembled

  On the dry, untilled fields of common death,

  No man to number them with living breath,

  And nothing there that to this life resembled.

  Their ways were set to meet the paths of war,

  There opened a low sea of deadly strife,

  And they sank deep, surrendering this earth’s life,

  And were made prisoner and enchained therefore,

  But none cared deeply in the morning crowd,

  Who walked like hypocrites, with bare heads bowed.

  Remorse

  I have been wasteful, wanton, foolish, bold,

  And loved with grasping hands and lustful eyes

  All through the hectic days and summer skies,

  And through the endless streets; but now am old

  And ill and bad – content with discontent,–

  Enduring the discomfort and the blows

  With sunken head and hear
t that shaking goes.

  Resigned to sit and wait in punishment,

  A martyr without claim, a parody

  Of classic crowned apostles and sweet saints

  Now praised in marble and in gorgeous paints

  Or singing in loud scores of harmony….

  I sit ashamed and silent in this room

  While the wet streets go gathering in their gloom.

  Uneasiness

  Tonight I hear a thousand evil things

  Between the panels and the mouldering floor;–

  Small bitter things with hearts and, maybe, wings,

  That curse their bondage yet entreat for more

  Free wicked time and space to hurt our lives,

  And bring unthought of ill-luck to us all;

  Undreamèd horrors, stories of old-wives,

  Armies of corpses hid behind the wall

  That creep and grind and tear each other’s souls

  And fight with devils in a horrid tongue,

  Making sleep flee away beyond the Poles….

  All this I know, although the night is young

  And ling’ring breathless, full of timid fear,

  Waiting in terror for their hour that’s near.

  Brigit

  Here, at that time, sat a woman – I see her yet

  In the full of all her colours, I see her close,

  Her green eyes growing strange, certain green turns strange

  When some particular mood runs into it,

  Then goes full green again.

  Her hair, how red, how red, nor fox; nor ruby,

  Nature had made of it one of its mysteries,

  An air-filled moss it was, and it also frothed,

  Water and breeze together in harmony

  Above the pale, most gothic, perfect face.

  She moved as fine hands move along harp-strings,

  In such dresses as might be supposed to enrobe such things:

  One was sea-green, with veils that floated and swam,

  One, a pale poppy-red, with green, of same kind,

  One in that blue and red that have come together

  To put the sunset’s battle out of mind.

  I think there was also a heavy purple dress

  Sewn with ancient golden coins…What contradictions!

  For, all in all, she was The Aquamarine.

  Her name was B R I G I T –

  Born only in such times was such a queen.

  Victor and Nancy at Pertenhall

  in Feb, Say, of the Early Fifties

  Morning begins with a boot thrown by an irate colonel

  Across the floor below, in a shower of pills,

  With the cousin above, half-young, half-old, cursing on waking up

  At the ghastly onomatopoeia (what is it called, aerophagitica?)

  L’aérophagie – air-balls in plain English in the stomach, oppressive, day-long, day-long,

  Wind on the heart – in plainer English yet.

  Then, after the painful ascension into day for both of us,

  Comes the hour of the silver gin tray a few minutes before lunch,

  And a gulped double is taken by the colonel, now restoring himself –

  (Who never was anything of the kind, but was just Cousin Victor);

  The cousin of above (me) drinks slower, savouring it all.

  And then comes nice, quick English lunch in the Adams dining room,

  With our ancestor portraits, how well hung, on the walls there:

  Cunard, Cunard, Cunard, and Cunard again – I say to myself

  Realising suddenly that the colonel has finished before I’ve even put fork to plate…

  Oh dear, oh dear, this tardiness of mine – perhaps due to the aerophagitica?

  But why will he ask me what I think of world affairs

  At the moment itself I try to push deep freeze peas into my mouth?

  Then comes a long, beautiful drive across invisible Midlands

  Cousin Victor driving so well, less walrussy now, it seems,

  And my aerophagitica gone (alas how temporarily) –

  And so – let’s say – we are going to splendid old Hinchinbrooke Castle,

  Across the ever-flat of Beds and Hunts,

  With its delicate colouring that only some dead French painter

  Would know how to set down, or want to – I’d be thinking,

  Cousin Victor driving on, smooth as silk, exploding at ‘these preposterous females’

  On their rocking bicycles ‘with their great, beastly breasts!’

  ‘How true,’ I think, ‘that pair of she-hogs, pah! And their hellish colours so close together:

  Pink and canary yellow – an apricot mixture of woollies –

  Pumping along with their great sagging breasts,

  In the way of the colonel, too, on this smooth MacAdam road,

  Of the invisible, misty Midlands.’

  And so we nearly arrive at lovely Hinchinbrooke Castle

  (Cromwell’s relics are there, its hostess an old friend),

  When up comes a column of local Borstal boys,

  Marching, by order, in enforced file,

  And I, who want to smile or even shout at them ‘Good-day, good-day’,

  Guessing what prison life must be – out of sheer sympathy –

  Am silenced by the colonel shooting a sharp look at me, from one round icy, blue eye…

  And then we say to each other, simultaneously:

  ‘What shall I leave you, darling, when I die?’

  And so we arrive at Hinchinbrooke, all my aerophagitica, thank god, gone.

  And then we sit and talk by the glorious open fire,

  With darling Rosemary, hostess, mother of six, how young yet and fine, and very handsome,

  And I think: ‘Your dad was certainly un grand sabreur,

  That is, he was ever and ever after all and any a skirt,

  Any skirt seemed to attract him, your dad, that grand “bottoms-up” man, Ralph Peto;

  And you, dear welcoming Rosemary, are his daughter,

  Out of lovely on-drinking Ruby, the Scot – that I knew when both of them were first engaged…

  Oh yes, how time passes…’

  Grown children come in now to the blaze and glow of the logs,

  Drinks are had, old books, so finely kept, looked at and admired,

  And then the colonel stands up, in his twenty-pounds worth of splendid English shoes,

  And back we go motoring in the dark the thirty miles or so to Pertenhall;

  And then again the lovely drink tray, after our boiling baths,

  And the good, gulped-down dinner, with the ancestors looking on,

  And then back again to the wonderfully warm sitting room, with its pink and blue chintzes,

  Its ineffable taffetas curtains, blue-green turquoise painted walls, and panelled door.

  Twenty could well sit here, but thank god, only the two of us – I think – for the moment, together,

  With our talk about all the hithers and yon of a possible next world war,

  And the colonel getting cross, and, I suppose, perplexed at me;

  ‘No, no! Well, yes, another tiny drink – indeed, why not?’

  And then Victor, no longer the walrussed colonel, turns on the Radio,

  And what comes out of that? Goons, admirable Ustinov, and Bach in excelsis…

  Then again our preposterous talk about next war, and more,

  With Victor saying ‘You’re too subjective and emotional, and all that,

  But…well…that’s why I love you, after all.’

  I saying: ‘Not at all, not at all. Despite my dreadful aerophagitica

  I am writing my book, here, now and every day

  On George Moore, and come of it what may. Yes, darling, despite all our asperities,

  I thank you, coz, for your company, the darling dogs, and the facilities

  Of here and now – and how, and how, and how!’

  (Oh Lor’, oh Lor’r />
  I could take my head into my hands, remembering those times, even now…

  Gone, gone for ever – and Tony died there before,

  As I saw, and lengthily saw.)

  Then finally, but not so late to bed;

  As we go up those cold and lovely stairs,

  The Silver Fox gleams down (that was father’s in 1881),

  That you, Victor, housed for me after its nigh-thirty years sepulture in my London bank;

  And then I think already: ‘Tomorrow’s another day,

  When Cousin will be transmuted into Colonel Walrus once more,

  And ‘All’s to do again’, as Shakespeare knew.’

  What’s done is done and finished, done for ever.

  And damn this pother and fuss about ‘future wars’;

  All life’s a bundle of broken shards and spars,

  With a few touches of yellow, red, green, blue

  To prick the heart a little further, further,

  But that’s no thing of patience, ever, ever;

  There is no consolation, never, never,

  Take it or leave it, all’s one, in this century’s weather…

  Yes, I suppose they’ll come, those future wars,

  Indeed I do – bearing yet greater sores…

  But now to bed and sleep – even if one wakes up

  Smack at 3.30 AM, though why? The cup

  Of mind-thought-heart has overbrimmed, maybe,

  Even in sleep – Oh lord, dear me, po’ me;

  Am I so overbrimmed with ‘ought’ and ‘naught’,

  Lying, quiescent, in this lovely bed,

  Possessed day-long by my single George Moore thought,

  All pencil spent,

  In lieu of tea with Victor down below?

  What one likes best, one clings to most – For me?

  Just pad and pen.

  And so in bed, solus, worn, always sad,

  Suddenly waked by the thought ‘What’s good, what’s bad?

  Oh me, po’ me – better to be just dead?’

  And then the pricks of ‘Yet again tomorrow,