A Sense Of Place

 

COTTON

Rowans and running water
Falling through a rocky gorge
Hung with trees and ferns:
The smell of  rotting leaves and peat
And acid soils.
Father Faber's oratory
Has become a ruin now,
But still I love the French
Red sandstone church and school
Like a château stolen from the Loire.
Here all the walks are circular
Another bonus if like me
You like to walk but like to feel 
That from the outset you are coming home.
My roots need acid soil:
Here on a Welsh clay waste
I remember Cotton,
And think wherever I might make my base
I am a bit too acid for the place.





FIRST LESSONS IN LIFE

Every mortal Jack and Jill
Inevitably tumbles down
Whatever summit they might scale,
And the bough will always break
On sleeping babies, hurling them
Along with cradle on the stones
Of the unyielding here and now.

So don't waste time or lose sleep
By going  looking for lost sheep:
Just wait and they'll come home to you.
Beware the goody goody boy
Smug in the corner with a pie:
The wicked always get the plum
And kiss the girls to make them cry.
.
For nothing fails quite like success
So dream and eat your curds and whey
Indifferent to arachnid guilt
And leave ambition to the bore
Whose insulse pedantry condemns
The sleeping shepherd in the hay
While the blue boy blows his horn.

Be as contrary as you wish:
But never pop your weasel.
If roses make you sneeze, beware!
Don't forget that tolerance
Will keep the household dishes clean.
Remember though to say your prayers
Lest someone throw you down the stairs! 




HIGHCLIFFE  REVISITED	

     Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequorum ventis,
     e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem;
    (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Bk II, ll 1-2)

This was a thriving religious house
When I came here in sixty-seven,         
But now the roof has fallen in
The altar open now to heaven.

Feeling like one of Mr Waugh's
Misfit heroes I return
To find the stone New Forest stag
Above the gable did not burn.
		
After our finals we came here
To celebrate: the priests were kind:
Inviting students to their peace
To leave their studies and unwind.

A learned priest had pointed out
To one who wanted to know all
Of poetry,  Lucretius's verse
In  stone above the castle wall.

We came to have our barbecue
Upon the beach, we stayed all night
And watched the cold grey dawn come up
Slowly above the Isle of Wight.

We made our fire on the beach
And there we held our agape
It was a gloomy meal because
We all were parting the next day.

And now some twenty years have passed
As I retrace my  steps to where
My  carefree days came to an end
And friends no longer would be there.

And so to find a burnt out shell 
Where once a castle graced the place
Seems but a symbol of  my thoughts
As I stand here: a burnt out case.

Over the ruins stands the tag
Whose irony now seems facetious:
To my nostalgia now it teaches
The cosier ethic of Lucretius.





CATHEDRAL CITY

Golden in the slanting autumn light
Seven queens stand silent like a game of chess
Seven, with an eighth I cannot see,
Are conclaved in an ancient mystery
I do not know but hope that they can bless

This place they have kept vigil over
Through centuries of darkness, war and blood.
Upon this spot a Roman temple stood
And garrison which brought the Empire's Pax
To the Dumnonii so long before

A great cathedral stood above its stones.
Celt and Roman, Saxon and Norman rest
United now in death beneath these towers
Whose shadows touch a trench dug as a test
Which shows the past in row on row of bones

The Christian centuries have not exorcised
The Old Man altogether from this place
Sometimes I faintly hear pipe, drum and accordion: 
The rhythms of a much more ancient race
And feel the shadow of the Wicker Man.



 ROY CAMPBELL READING  HARD TIMES

Facts, facts, facts:
Define a horse, or even worse,
Define a hearse.
You can't, of course.

The supple rider
Knows more than reader,
Would be a leader:
Acts, acts, acts!



LANDSCAPE NEAR ARLES

Lonelier than ever now
He painted in a frenzy to escape 
The demons which pursued him from within. 
Unhinged to vision by his grief,
Paint was his only real relief .
.
He plastered analgesic layers
In ever thicker brushstrokes but in vain:
His inner turmoil somehow caused
The landscape to distort and writhe
Like something unwillingly alive.

The landscape would not keep still
Under the shimmering southern heat
Which sapped the spirit and the will.
The cornfield crows cawed out, 'Defeat.' 
Only the sunflowers whispered, 'Hope.'

Peace might come dropping from a starry night
When in the empty streets he could look up
And see eternity in cool points of light
From a deep blue sky ablaze with stars
Or in the glowing bars see joy in life.

Soon he would leave this landscape and this heat
For the eternal stillness of the ordered garden,
Whose fountain guards the secret rose of peace,
Whose borders mark a final end to pain
And all the angry voices have to cease.




SPIDERS

Black or brown they startle
Too stark a contrast on a clean white wall:
A splash of something nasty
Like blood or excrement
Or something thrown in anger.
They lurk high up on walls or ceilings
Like guilt or else anxiety.

They sit for days then suddenly
They scurry to a new vantage point.
Sometimes they watch for hours 
Insanely waving their front legs.
In a nagging, mad, 'I told you so.'
What I dislike about them most
Is that they have too many legs!

All night they spin in corners
Their webs of dark deceit, invisible
For weeks: cobwebs the only token
Of their sinister malicious presence.
The fear and loathing they provoke
Reminding us of webs we weave 
When we too practice to deceive.







RUDYARD

A crisp October day
The lake is low and still
After the summer drought.
Groups of boys in canoes	
Paddle idly about.

Forty  five years have gone
Since, a child on my father's bike,
For the first time I was brought
To this place where now I choose
To spend my time in thought.

The Lady of the Lake
Stands landlocked high and dry
Her boathouse useless now
Until the autumn rain
Swells the lake again.

Beneath my feet dry sticks
Wind -plucked from the trees
Are brittle as old bones
They snap like broken dreams
Upon the cold grey  stones.

Kipling's parents found
A peace beside this shore
They carried with them when 
They sailed a world away
To serve in India

We hurtle to the brink
Of the third millennium
Of Christian culture now.
What would Kipling think
Of the England of today?

He knew that a true gent
Could have the common touch
But he would find today's
Vulgarity too much.
A nation's values shrunk

To a grubby balance sheet.
The  vision to create
A Civilization gone
In the pursuit of wealth
Without morality.

Before the decade ends
May we find again
A light that will not fail
To teach our children the
Laconic virtue If.



A SENSE OF PLACE

Where do you come from? I was told
Is a Welsh question, but I like to know
The landscape that has formed a soul
Gave it its roots its loves and loyalties
Its sense of self: it is the soil
That gives the flavour to the wine.
I like to know what features form
The backdrop to your recurrent dreams:
Are mountains, lakes, plains, river valleys
Seascapes, cities with winding streets,
Pastoral farmlands or dark forests
The settings for your dreamtime's scenes?
I never will quite trust a mountain man
Will always think him set on power
But southern downlands rolling to the sea
Are home to those who dearest are to me.

Born on a border where hills turn to plains
And clay to loam, and millstone grit to sand
My roots are in two counties and two soils
Which adds a depth and interest to my soul,
But makes me feel one with no settled place.
So I still seek a landscape to call home
And envy those whose roots go deep and firm
Somewhere my ideal landscape yet awaits
Over the next horizon I still hope



THE COLD WAR

The lake is swollen by the winter rain
Its  glassy surface is unruffled
By a single heron gliding over it
Silent, sinister and  low 
As a bomber slipping underneath
Some foreign radar's vigilance.
The ground beneath my feet is white
With a spattering of snow
The trees are all in bloom with frost:
A scene evocative of fear and beauty
Whose central image is not lost -
The real Cold War is being fought today:
The elemental battle to survive
This winter and the government.
Its victims are no longer spies
Or men in uniforms caught in barbed wire,
But are the poor, the ill, the old:
Victims of their own land's new indifference.





MY GRANDFATHER'S COUNTRY

A shallow trout stream flowing over stones
Divides my grandfather's country now from mine
A long low house, white- painted and slate- roofed,
Stands in a little garden by the stream

The evening sun slants low over distant hills
And turns nasturtiums and bright marigolds to fire:
The lawn is green enamel in this light
A column of white smoke is rising from

The chimney stack at one side of the house.
While in the middle distance I can see
A fisherman quite deftly cast a fly.
Foregrounded though the house recalls my eye

Where he is sitting, smoking by the fire
I cannot cross the river or go in
To that inviting house not yet, not yet
The vision's real enough. The stream is death.




MOW COP

Midwinter's Day: the Cheshire plain beneath
Is drowned in fog, whose ebb and flow
Returns this landscape to the primal sea
Which formed it ten millennia ago:
An island once again this rocky knoll
For a few short days caused by the chance
Encounter of cold and warmer air
And for a while belongs alone to me
At the year's turning.

If places can be sacred, this hill is,
First to the small, dark race who fled
Before their Roman conquerors into Wales-
They thought of it as heaven's mill
Which grinds the stars to form the milky way-
Then through the centuries until the day
Hugh Bourne and William Clowes preached here,
It stood, a beacon both to faith and hope
At each year's turning.

Below me in the centre of the plain
The giant dish of Jodrell Bank breaks
The fog's surface like a Cornish wreck:
It shares my age and ever since my birth
Has listened to the music of the spheres.
In the far distance, invisible today, the crown
Of the Cathedral Church of Christ the King
Floats on this ghostly sea, a marker buoy,
At each year's turning

And why I feel the call to climb up here
Just once a year to meditate and pray;
To stand above the plain and leave last year
Beneath me; greet the new incoming from the west,
I am not sure. Perhaps I feel the centuries
Of hope which permeate the rocks and swirl
Around the plain below; but more, perhaps,
Because an ancient folly crowns its top
At the year's turning.




FIRE AND ICE

A heron skims the frozen lake
Silently and very low
The land is iced like Christmas cake
The bare trees blossoming with snow.

As if to contradict the cold
The sun sets like a ball of fire
It burns the clouds to red and gold
Like the old year's funeral pyre.

Contracted now to fire and ice:
Too cold for water, still for air
This day's a gem from Faberge
So highly prized because so rare.





BARTHOMLEY

The dedication is unique: 
Saint Bertoline, a Saxon saint.
Uniqueness is appropriate to
A place so singular. A church has stood 
Here for above a thousand years:
A haven and a shelter through that time
To all who came within its peace:
The catholic rector, Robert ffouleshurst,
Concealed for centuries within
These Church of England walls.
The bloody massacre performed
By the King's men has not destroyed
The peace abiding here.
Now Cavalier and Roundhead lie
With catholic, protestant, sinner, saint 
Reconciled in history.



ONCE

Once in the once and once only
When seeing was believing and wishes were horses
I set sail upon a sundance sea
My pinnace wedded to a following wind
That knew no crooked quarter
And Murphy's Law declared an amnesty.
And now on dreary days of rain
And charcoal sky and loneliness
And winter darkness when no-one calls,
The doldrum mood's dispelled because
I still remember once and know
That once could happen once again.


VINCENT AT SAINT-REMY.

Doctor Charcot tried in vain
To heal the Dutchman but the pain
Imprisoning his soul would not
Let love enter with a healing hand.

Only the Doctor's portrait stands
A silent testament to Vincent's hands
Which struggled to transform a mind's distress
And make a blessing out of ugliness.

Suddenly both pain and painting ceased
The black crows cawed, 'Despair, despair!'
The world you paint cannot be there 
And those creating  hands were his destroyers.






TIME TRAVEL

This tunnel leads me to another world
Of silence, water and slow time.
By slaveback, horseback, camelback or barge
Until the coming of the age of steam
Four miles an hour was the speed at which
The world had travelled from its very start.
Stepping upon this  towpath I return
To a world more ancient and more natural
Than that ten feet above my head
Where, choked by diesel and by petrol fumes,
Great lorries break the silence with their roar
Polluting all their way to Birmingham
And points beyond.

A man can now travel to the moon
In the same time a barge would take
To go to Birmingham, but I am sure
That Brummagem remains more worth
The time and effort made to travel there.

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