Collected Poems

A small man formed

One hour after forging into light,

Body-brain wrapped and blue eyes

Open to noise of rook and cuckoo

To stalk a rabbit in the meadow

Read a book, nothing less than

Blank before sudden turns

To evergreen or glint of water.

Hirsute and stern on bleak arrival

He lay down after a toiler’s day

Face to say: All right.

You gave me life, but death also.

Forehead creased on future worry

When hacking obstacles,

Indenting map-hair on moving palm

To say it doesn’t matter, go to sleep.

Struck a lifeline horoscope

Of luck, speedkid, handy with women –

Which years will balance

In give, take or ruination,

Seeing all but never everything.

Sleep beyond the iced bite of the moon,

Being what you are this moment

Free with innocence but lacking milk

Soon to become all you do not feel,

Advancing against

The normal hazarding inroads

That spin life into havoc:

Power to dissect visions

Like the yolk and mucus of an egg,

And build up certain freedoms from the moon.

A broad and solid oak exploded

Split by mystery and shock

Broken like bread

Like a flower shaken.

Acorn guts dropped out:

A dead gorilla unlocked from breeding trees,

Acorns with death in their baby eyes.

A hang-armed scarecrow in the wind:

What hit it? Got into it? Struck

So quietly between dawn and daylight?

With a dying grin and wooden wink

A lost interior cell relinquished its ghost:

In full spleen and abundant acorn

A horn of lightning gored it to the quick.

Trees move on Fenland

Uprooting men and houses on a march

To reach their enemy the sea.

Silent at the smell of watersalt

Treelines advance. The sea lies low,

Snake-noise riding on unruffled surf

While all trees wither and retreat.

Out of farm range or cottage eyes trees make war

Green heads, close as if to kiss

Roots to rip at quickening wood of tree-hearts

And tree-lungs, sap-running wood-flesh

Hurled at the moon, breaking oak

Like the dismemberment of ships,

At the truce of dawn wind trumpeting.

Sedate, dispassionate and beautiful

They know about panic and life and patience

Grow by guile into night’s

Companions and day’s evil

Setting landmarks and boundaries

That fight the worms.

Trees love, love love, love Death

Love a windscorched earth and copper sky

Love the burns of ice and fire

When lightning as a last hope is called in.

Boats on land they loathe the sea

And wait with all arms spread to catch the moon:

Pull back my skin and there is bark

Peel off my bark and there is skin:

I am a tree whose roots destroy me.

End of life and before death

Feathers dipping towards oaken frost

A bird heard that shot:

The ink sky burst,

Stone colliding with the sun

Echo stunned its wing

String hauled it down.

Gamekeeper or poacher

Cut its free flight to the sea.

Vice had tongue, veins, teeth

Dogs in panoply, pressure

To ring a sunspot fitting neat

The blacked-out circle of a gun.

Fiddle-tongue and spite

Hang as if asleep

Safe on his tipped world,

But lizard-shoulders hunch

Pulsate at a fly on slanting wall.

Belly smooth, feet stuck firm

A thousand volts of paralyzing tongue

Rifle out and kill;

Weapons in one stomach pit.

Death is quick when looked on,

Sweet as food when the lamps of paradise

Blacken a brain that one day

Hoped to know.

Sparking tongue ignites

A common wink and into oblivion:

The lizard unaware of upside down

Eats as it runs.

He meditates on the Empty Quarter:

Mosque of sand dissolving through eggtimer’s

Neck. Looks on camel-loads

Starting for Oman or Muscat

By invisible Mercator’s thread

That burns the hoof and shrivels

All humps of water. Empty Quarter lures,

He travels with his heaped caravan

Earth-tracks marked as lines

Of unstable land, golden sandgrit

Lifting up grey dunes near vulcan-

Trees and foul magnesium wells

That asps and camels drink from.

He throws off bells, beads, silk, guns

Knives and slippers, scattering all

No longer needed — camel meat

For scavengers, everything

But his own dishrags of flesh.

Naked and demented he hugs

A tree rooted in the widest waste

Catching dew from God at dawn

And dates dropping through rottenness,

Tastes the lone tree’s shade

No one can chop or whip him from,

Till one day ravelled in his own white flame

He abandons the Empty Quarter

And trudges back to terrify the world.

Burned out, burned out

Water of rivers hold me

On a course towards the sea.

Burned out was like a tree

Cut down and hollowed

No branches left

Seasoned by fire into a boat:

Burned out through love’s

Wilful spending

Yet sure it will float

Kindle a fresh blaze

Burn out again

On a stranger shore –

Unless pyromaniac emotions

Scorch me in midstream

And the sun turns black.

To keep them healthily in thrall

They build a little fire in the hall –

And burn their opulent home to ash.

A ruin is better than no love at all.

Dark and ageing timbers crash

Cats surround it at full moon.

Did they abandon love too soon

Full of happiness to see it fall?

Let it fall, in sight of all

It kept them long enough in thrall

As cupboards burn and timbers fall.

They’re still inside, nowhere to run

No windows through which they can crawl;

Only the trapped and burning see it fall.

It kept them like a snake in thrall.

A ruin is better than no love at all.

They smile unhappily to see it fall.

To burn out love is to burn a star from the sky

But can touch reach so far,

Feel the fire increase

Careful the heart but not the star will burn?

Star that pulsates like a fish:

My heart meets you in dark or light

To taste the waters of the star which says:

Trust once gone can never be restored –

Such love can surely be put out,

The power to break its fire with my fist.

Talking on the beach:

Love has broken its heart

Is a pomegranate split

A waterfall pouring in.

Each half lifts

Drifts out to sea,

Eaten clean as January boats

By frost and salt.

One will sink, one go free:

Withered fruit-husk without salt

Or soul. Could be you

And could be me, watching January waves

Erupt like whales and thrones and tractors:

Stones clash back into their places.

You wait for a boat to come

And snatch you from love’s pandemonium

Of humping tide and screeching stones.

But what shipwrecked you there?

Want to know, and cease to wonder:

The boat lurches into seas of danger

Waves turning phosphorous, turn fire:

Rowers begin work, and you not with them

When the numbness in you burns

Because you do not want to go, or stay.

Pomegranate is a far-off fruit

Scattered seeds fulfil no circle.

Love cannot kill

A broken heart, nor mend it.

The sea defends its dead

And those born from it,

Believes in broken hearts

Burns when it boils so.

No boat can stay, must fall apart

Floating through the open heart,

Like fruit bursting

At the shock of moonless water,

And two more hearts pulled in to slaughter.

Naked, naked, I never see you naked

As if to be naked is to tell lies

With the body that you show –

Cover it and keep the truth.

Hide naked, keep it close

You never let me see you naked

Unless half so by accident or tease.

Hide it carefully: those lies are yours,

Not mine, speak them loudly if they burn.

Belong to someone else, not mine.

I see you naked through them,

Through love, naked beyond the truth

That will not let you see yourself.

Keep your body for someone else:

The lies that hide you are less sure

Than the truth that blinds me.

It is time to part, before murder is done.

We have robbed each other of all we had,

Eaten bitter herbs of battleground and kitchen

And soaked our souls in them,

Digested the gall of trust so cannot give it back

In that pure state it was before:

Consumed ourselves by ignoble hatred.

So let us part like ghosts

And promise not to haunt each other –

Or make ghosts of others.

I haven’t found my hunger yet. When will I know

The hunger to eat these walls away?

The smallest creature visible to the eye

Ran the pallid whiteness up this page

And when I crushed it, hungry at its freedom,

I found a tiny spider made of brick.

It had lived on brick, the bright red dust of brick

That filled its dust-dot of a body and even the speck

Of legs it ran upon. Its life was fed by dust,

The dust of bricks, and it had slaked its hunger

On bricks, no question asked or thought of,

Eating through walls was its life, its vital hunger

For the walls it ate through, even at times

Without hunger. It was so realized

I crushed it, a reddish smear

On the page to remind me

Of the hunger that I know about at last.

Why don’t I write or speak the name?

No light at Hephzibah’s window,

So do not use ‘love’ in vain

Nor easily at this turn of the game.

Her name ignites the wind, breeds

Smoke in the snow of the heart

Gluttons the marrow as I watch

The bombed space

Phosphorized to blindness.

You cannot answer letters or my speeches,

A different man when salt burns

Till there is no more light.

Signals change before the gale

Wipes all traffic out.

Cogs and linchpins tattoo Hephzibah

So I can’t forget your name, or use it,

But continually hear magic syllables

Shriller than my curse

As I speed through

White headlights flooding the world.

She said, when the full moon’s tongue hung

Over Earls Court chimneypots,

And he circled slowly

Round the square to find

A suitable parking place –

She said: ‘Let’s go away together.’

‘Keep clear,’ he said. ‘You’d better not.

I’ll take you, but watch out,

For I will bring you back

If at all,

In two pieces.’

She said: ‘I’ll never want to come back

If I go away with you.’

‘They all do,’ he said.

‘I’ll bring you back in two pieces

And you’ll live like that forever

And never join them up again.’

‘How cruel,’ she said, seeing what he meant.

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘To take you apart completely

From yourself and make two separate pieces

Might be the one sure way of fixing

A whole person out of you –

Some do, some don’t.’

He was exceptionally nonchalant.

‘I’m not sure now,’ she said,

Screaming suddenly: ‘You bastard!

Let me get out, I want to walk.’

He stopped the car

But could not park it,

Someone with a similar problem

Was hooting him to move,

So she jumped free and walked away

Leaving him bewildered,

And in at least two pieces.

You talk too much,

Said one piece to another.

Silence and stillness

Are most prized in a whirlwind.

Panic is being caught

Between millstones of stillness –

Feel the bones of the body

Living out the heart’s pain.

The whirlwind will penetrate

The stockade of a gaze erected

That nothing can break through,

While waiting for the force

That will pull you into the body

And draw all pain away.

A lawn grows in the palm of one hand:

Trees in the other combust

To chase worms out.

Nothing can soothe the battered soul,

But love cauterizes madness.

Can’t get him out –

Sits right in the fireplace

Curled up tight

Olive logs send red flames

Feeling the chimney spout.

Cold and safe, legs indrawn,

Wan smile, squats in his fireplace,

Irons cold, hair neat

Away and safe unless

A crowbar can prise him whimpering free.

He smiles wanly because no one has.

If and when he would be normal,

A dead man on the street, smiles

In a mirror no one can smash:

A moonless grimace of victory,

Insane as the sun

That cleanses better than any fire

Or his prison it once burned in.

The chain is weakest at its strongest point:

The strong link by its heart helps weaker parts,

And so weak links grow tauter than they should.

Thus, taking too much strength

The whole chain crumbles

Broken at both weak and stronger points.

Water breaks the strongest chain

When a stormtide drags the ship away.

Power changes all equations –

The strongest link a strand of hair,

And weakest at its strongest point

Shares its heart with weaker hearts.

Midnight aches at the length of life

The endless day

Blocking the porthole-elbow of Bothnia:

One grand eye lit in twelve o’clock yellow,

Turquoise and carmine sun

A wound gouged by the night-dragon

Not yet asleep.

Day bleeds to death

Sea close enough to dip

The pen and write in.

No midsummer howitzer can give

A morphine blast and send the sun

To whatever will rise up at dawn for me.

Space and midnight fill all emptiness,

As lost love bleeds acidic dreams

Into the solvent sea:

Red like a Roman bath.

Frontiers meet over steppe and meadow

At burial mound, salt waste or winter hut,

Beyond danubes and caspians

Where sturgeon breed by reed and barge-hull –

But wood outlives

Asia or Europe, love shaped by heart-torn

Internal bleeding of the stricken forest.

Wood dies, and is born again.

In Irkutsk a swastika was scrawled

On a wall so I took my handkerchief

And spat and rubbed

But it was tough chalk

Wondering why those Red pedestrians

Didn’t grind it off.

I’d done the same in London

Walking to the Tube

And missing the train quite often,

But here it was ineradicable Russian chalk

Though I chafed it to the barest shadow,

No one taking notice on their walk

Down Karl Marx Street. I strolled

Away to let them keep it.

Apart from scraping out a concave mark

The crippled cross would stay forever,

And anyway why should I get arrested

For damaging The People’s Property?

Black ice breaking without sound or reason:

Water below moves its shoulders

Like a giant craving to see snow.

Ninety-degree cold preserves mosquito eggs

As the fist of winter

Pulls into the sun’s mittens.

The domed sun touches the horizon,

A totem in the lake sinking

Till its feet touch bottom and reach fire.

Stopped his cart

Refused food

Shook tin brass skulls copper

Turned to the sun

And pressed a horseshoe to his eyes

Spun a waterspout of words

Grave toes patterning the soil

Under a tree clothed all in green,

Chews beansprouts from his crown

Spins to pipe dance

Head between land and sky

Hand five candle-fingers

Fuelled by the gutters of his stomach.

Spins to music

Stick legs strut

In wide skin trousers:

Shouting melts and planctifies

Fisherboats and floating logs:

Recites alone and long

On Baikal fish and stork in one:

Sea that threatens fire-spiders

Copperbacks and claws –

Creep from the rimline lake

Feet to feel and lips to taste,

Have no heart but swarm

To eat from him and die of it –

As brass-hooved breakers

Break and draw them back

And he weaving

Over sand to green land

Melting and metalling

In blacksmith power.

Horses birds and torches flee

From tundra magic keening,

Flesh of man flying

Skinflags unfurling

In a merciless slipstream to the sun.

Drop, hear drums

Rend on the flight,

He so far within

Sly, taciturn and a bully when normal

Knowing he must keep that self out

Or power goes,

Be an old man forever

Carved in rock by the fire

After the last telling.

Drink, blackout, gutter-bout

Kick back nine swills of vodka

That put an iron band around

Thorned skullcap and fire

Of words toasting Life

Peace, Town or Cousin.

Bottles, heaped grub, dead towers in tabletown:

Wine descends in light and colour

As if the Devil had a straw stuck there

Greedily drawing liquid in

As consciousness draws out.

Death is the apotheosis of the Bourgeois Ethic.

Tolstoy when he felt it coming on

Left his family and set out for Jerusalem.

Death shared its railway station:

He in a coma heard trains banging

Where Anna violated life.

The fourth bell drowned his final wrath.

The Bolsheviks renamed the station after him

Instead of Bourgeois Death.

Ride it out, ride it,

Ride out this mare of sleeplessness

Galloping above the traffic roar

Of Gorki Street,

Weaving between Red stars

And the grind of cleaning wagons.

Today all Moscow was in mourning

Because there’s no queue at Lenin’s tomb.

I told them but they wouldn’t believe me.

Ride out this beast who won’t let me sleep,

Drags me up great Gorki Street

And into Pushkin Square,

Leningrad a rose on the horizon

Ringed by blood and water –

Pull up the blankets

And be small for a few hours of the night.

The poet sings his poems on a bridge

A bridge open to horizontal rain

And the steely nudge of lightning,

Or icy moths that bring slow death

Croon him to sleep by snow-wings touching his eyes.

Through this he sings

No people coming close to watch when the snow

Melts and elemental water forces smash

Between cliff and rock under his swaying bridge.

When the water thins, his sweat-drops burst

On scorching rocks like sparks from a flower pod;

Through all this he sits and sings his poems

To those vague crowds on either bank

He cannot make out or consider

With such short sight, for after the first applauded

Poem he let his glasses smash into the rocks below.

The bridge belongs to him, his only property,

Grows no food, supports no houses –

Cheap to buy with the first mediocre poems.

It spans a river that divides two territories –

He knew it and made no mistake:

Today he faces one and tomorrow the other

But from blurred eyes they look the same to him:

Green fields and red-roofed houses

Rising to mountains where wars can be fought

Without a bitter end being reached –

The same on either side.

He does not write a poem every day

But each pet territory takes its turn

To hear his words in one set language burn

And drive them back from each other.

In any rash attack they cannot cross his bridge

But broach the river and ravine

Down at the estuary or far upstream.

He listens to the stunning bloodrush of their arms

And shakes his head, never grows older

As he bends to his paper which one side or the other

Contrives to set, with food, by his hands’ reach.

Sometimes sly messengers approach at night

Suggesting he writes and then recites

Upon some momentary theme

To suit one side and damn the other,

At which he nods, tells jokes and riddles

Agrees to everything and promises

That for them he’ll tear the world apart

With his great reading.

He stays young, ignoring all requests and prophecies,

But his bridge grows old, the beams and ropes brittle,

And some night alien figures

In a half-circle at each dim bridgehead

Brandish knives and axes. Lanterns flash,

Blades and points spark like spinning moons

Gathering as he puts away pens and parchment,

Closes his eyes, and does not wake for a week,

Knowing he will once more dream

The familiar childhood dream

Of falling down the sheer side of the world

And never wake up.

But he owns and dominates his bridge.

It is his bread and soul and only song –

And if the people do not like it, they can cut him free.

Left as a desert:

Deserted by one great experience

That pulled its teeth and shackles out

And left me as a desert

Under which bones are buried

Over which the sand drifts.

Seven years gone like laden camels:

The gravel and the wind

Is piling this vast desert up

To one sky and one colour

And sky reflecting desert shapes.

The solitary heart lurks on the off-chance

That rain clouds will come and fertilize

The great experience that made this desert.

Love in the environs of Voronezh

It’s far away, a handsome town

But what has it to do with love?

Guns and bombers smashed it down.

Yet love rebuilt it street by street

The dead would hardly know it now

And those who lived forgot retreat.

There’s no returning to the heart:

The dead to the environs go

Away from resurrected stone.

Reducible to soil and snow

They hem the town in hard as bone:

The outer zones of Voronezh.

The thin moon sliced the heart out as it fell,

Then effortlessly made its way

To the earth’s true middle:

The only cure is to fall in love.

The moon gives back what it takes away.

Blocks of flats blot out the moon.

People live with happiness and work;

I left my love too soon, too soon,

So wait for me, it won’t seem long.

She put sugar in my coffee

Lit my cigarette

Fed my eyes with the glow of lost desire

Wept when I walked away.

Write to me: it won’t seem long.

Hull down: tanks are waiting.

I hear them coming through the dust.

Forests have turned into desert

Powdering the soul to ash,

But sand sends out new blossoms

Till flowers and trees grow strong again.

In the desert that was once a forest

Where eyes see only dust and fire,

Tears dry even as one drinks

On water freely flowing.

Sandgrains fly up nostrils

Turn cool in their protecting flesh,

Salting blood to make a forest

Before the soul can perish.

A brittle seed feeds on the deepest sandgrain

Where the sweated liquid of despair

Makes a forest from the driest desert.

Through a gap in snowlace curtains

Winter turns to fire and sun:

Heat makes the earth a board to spread on

Dust drummed solid by a white sun descending.

Needle-tips tattoo cat-scars on the sky,

Drum-beating letters burn: no escape

From the flat white iron of the sun,

No fauna living but serpent skeletons

Bleached so clean the weakest breath

Can blow such bones as dust.

The white-hot circle blacks out life:

Lie flat and stroke the earth

Before rain comes and rivers overflow.

Hope, a longing for something new,

Crushes the beetle of the past.

When hope takes hold its ruthlessness

Feeds on the purest fuel of injustice,

And sharpens the spike for action.

Whatever you want — bites the fingers.

Be careful what you want:

Wait for the chill river to separate the limits of desire,

For icy banks to break the watercourse

And sweep all venom clean.

Let go, feet tear ladder-rungs

Losing views of pepper dunes

Beyond ampersand trees

In the withered arm of the horizon.

Between the toll of heartsick

Into hole and hiding

The eye of winter’s snake-sun

Needles into the heart

Paralyzing both hands to let go.

Life begins when love’s game is ended.

Live, and death starts biting:

The game robs you of life.

A week of rain, and the house is an island,

A mudtrack after months of drought

Leads to the paved road.

A smell of spring freshens the brain,

And water slops at the bank as I wade through.

No black sky can finish off the never-ending game,

Or engines drown the memory of peace.

February forty times has arrowed towards spring,

None left behind,

Swirling fish that never vanish,

Colourless or rainbow

Twisting after strange journeys,

Paralyzing vast aquariums.

February is the tunnel’s end

A zodiac into soaking loam

When I watch the stars

To say a loud goodbye of welcome to.

Mimosa’s dead stench follows like a shadow

Never consumed by the sun

Or swilled by rain,

Rots like memories that went with it.

Be free, and endure happiness –

Summer like a dream from the grave

Rebuilds the heart.

Winter will bring an elegiac falling of the snow

And nurse the purest blossoms –

And green-eyed August

Spread the odour of a wheatfield’s death.

Choices bite however the performance.

Scattered seed can bring up crops and flowers

To rub out happiness or suffering.

Midnight comes at any hour.

Eagles out of sunlight bring it,

Shadows on the fields.

The sun throws broken eagles

Back against the stars.

The moon eats and grows fat.

The curtain opens to an empty sky.

Flesh to flesh: there are two hearts between us

Mine on one side, yours on the other

Through which all thoughts must pass

Mine intercepting those from you

Yours beating strongly (I feel it doing so)

Taking my thoughts into the labyrinth of yours

From sleep of me to sleep of you

Till flesh and heart join in the deepest cave.

Summer’s iron is on the trees

A new weight to bear

Leap-year sap rising through lead

Forcing flower to give fruit

Green flame shifting up iron trunks

To poke out buds.

Leaves hang all summer

Shaken by rain and wind

Shrived by a little heat:

Such yearly swing must wear them

To a death so flat by autumn

That blood draws back

And lets the leaves go.

Trees suffer in frost and snow:

Force-fed by soil, drained by age

They brood and bide their time.

How many summers can they take such weight?

How long is life, how rich the earth,

How weak the heart?

A rose about to open

Thinks air and sun

Can turn it into

Something it is not already.

The pink slit of life shows

Between tight green blades –

Hasn’t it seen enough

Without wanting everything?

Behind its packed unopened petals

Are roses still to flower

And blossoms not yet dropped;

Outside, those same are tempting it,

Scorched and shrivelled on the grass.

Rose about to open, why do you do it?

What force pushes

So subtly that it does not feel?

What beckoning power beyond

Draws it with perfume sweeter than

The one that will be made?

They promise nothing but the last decay:

The will to come or stay is not their own.

God did not write.

He spoke.

He made.

His jackknife had a superblade –

He sliced the earth

And carved the water,

Made man and woman

By an act of slaughter.

He scattered polished diamonds

In the sky like dust

And gave the world a push to set it spinning.

What super-Deity got him beginning

Whispered in his ear on how to do it

Gave hints on what was to be done?

Don’t ask.

In his mouth he felt the sun

Spat it out because it burned;

From between his toes — the moon –

He could not walk so kicked it free.

His work was finished.

He put a river round his neck,

And vanished.

Level-crossing signal box

With three and a half hours between trains.

Bells stopped, gates shut and blocking the line:

Levers taller than himself palisade the moon,

He on the safer side.

Elbows space aside and tunnels

The last green spitter of sparks

Up the stars and soaking turf towards London,

Whispers along, snarling, a retreating song,

Signals on gauges like slicked hair downarrowed:

Line clear for the next open crossing.

Guard in waistcoat and jacket

(Good to children who just want to see)

Iron dragons slip through his fingers a hundred times a day

Responsibility too great to feel power,

Warning others down the line of its approach,

He sits by teaflask and prepares a book,

Needs an opium-portion to become

Captain of a rusting steamer

Crawling the coastal buffs of Patagonia,

Or Nemo in his flying boat

Lording at the Pole or South Sea hideout.

A good tale every night is better

That the telly or a homely bed.

Trains growl on steel snakes

Straight and sleeping close,

Locomotive kings of the dawn

Behind signals from another cured of sleep:

Wide gates open for the first black arrow

A circle in its packed and moving forehead,

As he closes his book

And lets the day pour through.

Walls he sat by had fallen long ago:

The city smoked after capture and rapine,

No brick left upon another.

These barbarians — this boy

Sitting on the littered scrub –

Belonged to a Scythian family

Who found the city as if following

A far-back shutter-flash,

Crazed with hope after a famished trudge

Over steppe whose herbs

Scorched by the haze of the sun

Pulled horses’ ribs so far in

They were almost dead.

By tale and memory this Scythian offshoot

Saw a glittering metropolis,

People and laden horses queueing to get out.

No brick upon another. While the boy’s

Mother scraped at rubbish

He played at tapping stone with stone

Cracked lips moving at the sky

Waiting for her to find food,

And idly placing one brick on another.

A trench map from the Battle of the Somme:

Doesn’t matter where it came from

Has a dead fly stuck

At the lefthand corner

By a place called Longueval,

Rusty from blood sucked

Out of British or German soldiers

Long since gone over the top

Where many went to in those olden days.

Whoever it was sat on an upturned

Tin and smoked a pipe.

Summer was finished beyond the parapet

And winter not yet willing

To let him through the mist

Of that long valley he was told to cross,

While the earth shook from gnat-bites of gunfire

As if to shrug all men from its shoulders.

A fly dropped on the opened map

Feet of fur and bloated with soot

Crawled over villages he hoped to see.

Bemused he followed it

Curious to know at which point it would stop

And finally take off from,

For that might be

Where death would fall on him.

Scorning the gamble

He squashed the stolid fly

Whose blood now decorates the map

Pinned on my wall after fifty years gone by.

Night came, he counted men into the trench

And crouching on the last day of June

In the earthen slit that stank

Of soil and Woodbines, cordite and shit

Held the wick close to his exhausted eyes,

Shut the dim glow into its case

And ceased to think.

Lead melts. If I saw lead, I melted it

Poured it into sand and made shapes.

I melted all my soldiers,

Watched that rifle wilt

In an old tin can on a gas flame

Like a straw going down

From an invisible spark of summer.

He stood to attention in the tin

Rim gripped by fanatic pliers

From the old man’s toolkit,

Looked on by beady scientific eyes

That vandalize a dapper grenadier.

The head sagged, sweating under a greater

Heat than Waterloo or Alma.

He leaned against the side

And lost an arm where no black grapeshot came.

His tired feet gave way,

A spreading pool to once proud groin,

Waist and busby falling in, as sentry-go

At such an India became too hard,

And he lay without pillow or blanket

Never to get up and see home again.

Another one, two more, I threw them in:

These went quicker, an elegant patrol

Dissolved in that infernal pit.

Eyes watering from fumes of painted

Soldiers melting under their own smoke,

The fire with me, hands hard at the plier grip

At soldiers rendered to peaceful lead

At the bottom of a tin.

Swords into ploughshares:

With the gas turned off I wondered

What to do with so much marvellous dead lead

That hardened like the surface of a pond.

Armies have already met and gone.

When the best has happened

The worst is on its way.

Beware of its return in summer.

When fields are grey and should be green

Rub scars with ash and sulphur.

Full moon clears the land for its own view,

Whose fangs would bereave this field

Of hayrick and sheep.

In the quiet evening birds fly

Where armies are not fighting yet.

He looks a long way on at where he’ll walk:

A cratered highway with all hedges gone.

Green land dips and smells of fire.

Topography is wide down there.

The moon waxes and then emaciates.

Birds fatten on fields before migration:

Smoke in summer hangs between earth and sky,

On ground where armies have not fought

But lay their ambush to dispute his passing.