Poems from an earlier incarnation

Do you have some work for which, irrespective of the passing of time, you retain a lasting fondness?

Photo by Taylor Wright on Unsplash

I suspect we all do; those nuggets we wrote when we were a different person, and which — though we’re now someone else entirely — we wouldn’t change. From four decades ago, here are three poems I still love…

Cormorants Diving

I stood on the sea-wall
and watched cormorants diving
into the cold grey sea,
you nearby
- watching me watching them -
knowing I had not seen you
nor spotted your sophisticated
remote control device.
You fooled me with your body
and its language -
and as you fooled me then,
so the cormorants rise
always where I did not expect to see them.

Cormorants diving, you say,
is a simple matter of being able
to hold your breath under water.

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Skipton

The dales were flooded.
At the top, snow on the ground,
ice in the cracks of the dry stone wall;
below, in remorseless cold,
Skipton
grey and grim.
All that way
and still the big hills in the distance,
still in the sun.

Evensong time;
the uneven peel of church bells against the hills
spilling into the flooded fields.

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St Ives
(for W.H.Auden)

Were you here, struggling for context,
you might concede how things change -
or not changing, how they are fixed:

sons like fathers; daughters, mothers;
a patchwork of forlorn tans,
plastic balls, dark glasses, and bathers

splashing at the edge of an inevitable sea.
You might argue how even this
- from bathing rags to cream teas,

beach towels to broken bottles -
might manufacture a cry
(or at best, some feeble rattle!)

against what is to come.
Men, too soon grown old, play football
in mimicry of younger days; and sons

(yet to know of their tragedy!)
endure the legends of the Tellers.
Young men - wearing puberty

like some gaudy medallion -
stride the beach, striving for an image
only time and disappointment can bring.

A pulse of caravans brings them South
(along arterial roads, you might have said)
clogging motorways, blocking the mouths

of narrow lanes they cannot navigate.
They arrive over-burdened,
and what they leave behind is opaque;

memory lacking a peg to hang it on.
History is a fading parking ticket;
the remnants of suntan lotion;

tatty books upon the chalet’s shelves;
your craggy face in the mirror.
And then we drive away ourselves,

and all the while imagining
the indefinable talent
Old Masters had with suffering.

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These poems are included in Selected Poems 1976-2022.

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