Voluntary

The fourth year’s in the hall
sitting in gilded silence.

The Head is talking.
Uniform, behaviour
and lunchtime lateness.
A litany of regulation
for summer’s insolence.
They sit without disturbance,
absorbing the assault
upon their childhood’s anarchy.

Sunlight, escaping through
the curtains from the air outside,
kindles five faces in the front row.
They shine like brass,
expressionless as wishes.

A trumpeter practises. In a room
somewhere he picks his way
through three strands of a tune
in a cannon of repetition.
An apprentice following the master.
In the echo of the corridor
it’s hard to tell where youth
takes on from age, the one
becomes the other.

The words, the notes, the sunlight
counterpoint each other round the space
we try to fill. A bell rings.
The morning’s lessons have begun.

Balkan Pine

In the days since I fell
my skin has hardened –
red-brown, stretched tight –
weeping from the craters
where their bullets came.

If you come now, I smell of water, earth;
pine forest clings to my clothes.
There is no corruption. You smell
the men who did this,
who went away laughing.

 Ford 1999

.

The Parachutist

It is about to be a moment Bruegel
could have painted. There are the builders
on the roof next door working, their hammers
reporting in the still air. From them to the edge
of the world a red square has opened. More tiles
are neatly stacked beneath them, waiting. A tractor
is going about its business reorganising nature.
An aeroplane is in the dreamy faraway
blue of the sky, And a man is falling.
For the record, he is working for the BBC.
He is filming a careful reconstruction
for a programme that lines up miraculous
survivals. It is his third jump of the day,
and his last. For the sake of Continuity
he has struggled into someone else’s
equipment as well as into someone else’s
moment not to die. He takes his two mile
walk on air. His helmet camera rolls.
The men on the roof look up. Across the air
his shouts are clear, “Oh no, Oh no, Oh no,”
They watch him loosening the tie of life to life,
and feel their own precariousness threaten.
He ends a mile away through trees in marshy
ground and leaves the world in silence. It takes
the searchers hours to dig his body out.
For days he’s falling through the village overhead.
Planes circle in our heads. He never seems
to land. An ending has us in its grasp.

Ellingham
February 1993

The Wigtown Women

In 1685, two women were executed
at Wigtown, Galloway, for being
Covenanters. Both called Margaret,
they were 19 and 65 years old.
They were tied to stakes in the
harbour and drowned by the tide.
4 men, convicted of the same
offence, were hanged.

 

God’s tide is coming, Margaret.
God’s tide is coming.
These stakes they have driven
Into the foul slime

Between their dry sinful lives
And the eternal sea
Are here to hold us to our faith.
Stout ropes that wrench

Our wrists, keep us to our covenant
With Him, as did his
Nails. Regard not their cries.
They shame themselves.

The sea will not wash their sin
Away when our lives
Go to Him. We die as upright
Christians, they to fester

In their beds of fever or sullen
Age. No quick rising
Waters will cleanse their filth.
The cold will cling

To us, will cleave to our heart’s
Core, but His Fire there
Will burn harder than hate’s laws.
We are but women –

Bodies meant for pain and giving
Life. Men, who spent
Their days in fields or hammering
Their praise, they hang

In air, strangled, broken necked
Like crows on a wall.
Poor things to be so separate
From life in death.

We they do not torment so.
Hand back our bodies
To the Lord. Think on this
Margaret. Do not despair.

One given body, one that’s
Yet to yield. That’s all
We are, and coming to His love.
Forget the cold around

Your breast. Drink deep.
Our names are there.

Whithorn
August 1995

Republished June 2018

The poem implies the elder woman gave the younger courage. In fact she was drowned first, so that her death might change the mind of the younger woman. Young Margaret did not yield, and the Episcopalian executioners allowed her to drown when she would not break her oath.

More than a Wordsworth

Above Dove Cottage, the coffin road dispatched the dead
to Ambleside and consecrated soil. Last journey of the flesh,
with rests upon the way for those who bore the box
and contents back. A time before. In Wordsworth’s day
The traffic had reversed. His body went the half a mile
to make it home. And now he’s with the others
in their private plots – a wealth of Wordsworths in a yard
of ground – father and son, daughter and wife.
A line of stones, chained off, and up against the wall.

His Town End house is now a shrine – a shop
and place of purchase on a past when words rang out
like gold or shining water in the hills. Now Names
display their praise in hopes paid homage brings
in leisured cash, and visitors whose memories of school
conceal those daffs, that cloud. Videos and books
uplift the heritage on sale. Quill pens predict
that writing still has possibilities in store.
Above, the fells. The silent graphite mines once worked
the smooth and slippery stuff that pencil makers
wrote their lifeblood in. Hard not to see the brightly
painted childhood tins, though makers and their families
are long since gone. And Wordsworth? Did he write
with pencil or the quill? Someone will know whose
livelihoods his slow and revolutionary hand supported.

His start was Cockermouth – At last I find a link.
A town that knew my father’s name knew his. Go down
the greats, and there you’ll see them play. The poet
child, and unknown ancestors of mine. Good men all.
Though dead, your words and blood were worth the
trouble that you took. I doubt that mine will live as long.

 Grasmere 2006