Nos. 8 & 9

Another couple of poems, to bring this group nearly to an end. Amazing how fast time goes when you’re trying to keep on top of the garden (and build shelves, cupboards, steps etc etc,) yet how slowly the same time crawls when you’re waiting for a payment into your bank account to at least paper over the yawning abyss therein….

“In the First Month” I can guarantee is from 1980, “She Has Stood Here….” I’m not so sure about – wouldn’t even recognise it as one of mine if it wasn’t for the Richard/Blondin bit at the end, which feels like me, and I know I was kind of taken up with that story when I heard it somewhere around middle school (History, they called it). Back then Richard The Lion Heart seemed a bit of a hero, rather than just another mismanager of the people’s wealth; and I guess I must have identified with stupid faithful Blondie – reminds me somehow of little amenable Britain tagging along whatever criminal nonsense big bruv USA gets up to…. Despite this (happily) the poems are off on a different tack altogether.

8. In the First Month

Your lucid eyes are clenched
Against compassion. Quickly I fall from complacence
Through helplessness and quicken to (measured) fury against

Your fury. But suddenly she comes; she is all
Enveloping you.
I watch it happening, appalled, as

You soften back, I name you traitor, ruthlessly
To leave me stranded on the high bank of anger
While you return safely, helpless

Complacent, glutted, drowsy, sleeping.
I think if I could understand you and have
That maternal monstrous compassion, even

When swords become ploughshares and enemies embrace
Over their dead comrades, in the end I might
Also understand the world’s rage.



9. She Has Stood Here….

She has stood here in this path
And in every step you take
You echo her way, her will.
She is a dark enchantress
To one such as you, surrounded
With stone walls of enchantment.

What have you done that is your own?
One thing, only one:
Released me from that night of stone,
Flinging her back against the wall,
Opening a chink of light
Where I flew out to a world of colour.

I will not willingly go back
Into that echoing prison
Even to save you, love.

Now she has made you take
This enchanter as
Your champion, this dark knight
Because of whom you believe
I have imprisoned you
(Because she holds you slave

And I am free). I cannot fight.
I am winged but armless.
The woman’s power has quenched the light.
I can only sing under the prison walls
As Blondin did for Richard
To win him home from his wild crusade.

More Eleventh Ten

I’ve got a computer again, thanks to Rachel’s efforts – Steve the Computer Guy wasn’t able to help me this time, but Rachel seemed to be able to conjure a better deal than what was actually offered by someone-or-other, so I can finally get on and get this last group of poems out of my hair.

Broadly, these ones reach into an area still occasionally whispered about by men (and some women too) in dark enclaves and secret redoubts, “the Feminine”. The picture – ah, sorry , was going to reproduce a picture of the “Venus of Willendorf”, but as far as I can see (which may not be far, as there’s a forest of gobbledegook to negotiate and it’s too late in the day for that thank you) you have to pay even for well-known pics of well-known 25,000-year-old statues…. n’mind, you can use your imagination, (assuming Disney hasn’t copyrighted that phrase) – anyway the pic I had been going to insert here may not represent the principle at its most elegant, but in times past people never forgot that Woman, the Feminine, was always an emanation of the Great Mother, and sometimes identified with Mother Nature or Mother Earth, and of course Robert Graves’, etc Triple Goddess, “nymph mother and crone” (I never liked crone much, but I think there was one – feminist, I assume – writer who made a false etymology connecting with word with “crown” rather than a pig’s carcase, which I understand was the “true” etymology (Dutch, I think, or Low Germanic at any rate, they were all a rough muddy bunch). Whatever, deeply chaotic she was often considered to be, but always held in highest regard, and a force always to be reckoned with.

,

ha ha that’s my attempt at inserting a picture – now I can’t get rid of these effing boxes, which remind me of my bedroom for which the same complaint holds good

2. Lucifer

You yourself the earth
And you the cave
And in the cave a man is wrapped
Who lies there all night
And never gets up to depart
While an angel guards his head.

You yourself the cave
And you the man
The darkness and the angel
Wrapping them all around
While all night long the thirsty earth
Lies, fully moulded, receptive.

You yourself the man
And you the earth
But when the light rushes in
The earthquake, and the cave pours liquid
Water blood and semen
The dark angel spreads its wings.

You yourself the earth
And you the light
The darkness and the man
The thirst and the thirst quenched
The earthquake and the angel
The wide open guardian, the drenched head.

**

3. Jesus and the Lilies

When I shut my eyes like this, I can see your face:
Only as I see it at moments, it is in ecstasy –
Eyes close, lips parted, features flattened back:
The nearest I come to a saint’s face, to a saint’s effigy.

So now I feel intruded in this woman’s-place
Where God’s grace is the grace of sensuality;
I glimpse only my stubbornness, my woodenness, my lack
Of natural release, my cracked-u sense of unity….

Yeats screwed his women then called them nuns
When they’d got haggard; Rilke dammed up his spunk
For months, then spurted sonnets to make anyone gasp –

Jeanne d’Arc had a dose of Auld Nick’s icy seed,
That’s plain. But it’s all one: like the lilies in the field,
Surpassing Solomon, you have God in your nectared clasp.

**

4. (Botticelli, Velazquez)

Tomorrow on, I promise… But look who comes
Surfacing in the light: and her skin is dry,
Her beauty high and bright as her bright
Planet, while spiritual flowers drop round her –

Venus herself (the darling) who stripped and lay
Full-length before her mirror and preened herself
(Her back-view’s in that old Diego painting
Making an artefact of her body).

Perhaps, in time, I may get the balance right:
Delight in head and shoulders, and from there down
No longer flounder in the ocean
Pleading for help from the one who drowns me!

**

5. Festival in the City

Festival in the city; the coloured flags up above,
The crowding streets, the drink spilling, the young boys
And girls are even making love in the streets.
High in the air the dragons cross and re-cross,
The amber dragons, filling the air with wing-beats,
But the people below are drinking and making love.

Festival in the air; hotter than seven summers
The dragons’ breath curls round the spires in gusts.
Below, the streets cross and re-cross like a maze;
The cathedral opens, the sanctity of the day persists,
The women’s clothes conceal their flesh from all eyes –
High above them the coloured glass Pieta glimmers…

But the Virgin’s dress shows up her lovely breasts
And the sleeping god’s hand left between her thighs.