Poetry

Five poems

1979, Inner Mongolia, China. (Photograph by Eve Arnold).

Reassured by her soft hand

he rests.

Eyes closed,

flat out against

flower-starred grass

which stretches

to all the compass points.

His snowy flank,

her full length,

clad in boots

and a rose pink dress.

They are pressed

against the earth,

grounded,

taking in its strength.

Sometime they will rise

and ride hard over the plains.

She will stand in the stirrups,

urge him on.

The lonely percussion of his hooves

calling up the ghosts

of long dead hordes.

Silence, stillness.

Only the wind moves.

Sister Anne

I didn’t want to, but they said

if I didn’t sign they’d send me back.

Not wanting that either I was stuck.

I couldn’t return but the price

of staying seemed too much.

I stood beside the tennis courts,

face pressed to the fence,

criss-crossed metal sparkling in the sun,

a herring in a net.

Sister Anne found me.

She was in her blue uniform and sensible shoes.

You won’t know yourself, she said.

Just sign here and we will make you well.

*

The others were old.

In the waiting room on shelves

sat rows of plastic dishes, pink, like shells.

In each lay teeth like cultured pearls.

A woman came out,

supported by a nurse.

Her eyes lacked life.

Her face, collapsed.

Her dead white hair

like Old Man’s Beard.

*

My turn. I lay on the bed, as if on a slab.

There was Sister Anne.

I tried not to look at the instruments.

The wires and dials and pads.

I counted backwards from ten.

I wanted then, to change my mind.

Afterwards I couldn’t remember

where I was, or why.

Sister Anne said I wouldn’t know myself.

Sister Anne was right.

Love poem

You ask what it is about you but when I try to say, my thoughts slip their moorings, my meaning springs away. It races ahead, mischievous, mocking. It dances and eddies ahead of the clumsy words which trail in its wake. So, words silt up my scribbled pages, dry as sand, as if all the letters of all the love poems in all the languages in the world, past and present and future, have come unloosed, unanchored from their sonnets, sestinas, villanelles and ballads, all forms, coalescing, cascading into some great river, a Ganges of love’s phonemes, flowing together, parting, re-forming, shifting shape, quite impossible to net on the nib of my pen. To say it well is like trying to snag the gleam of moonlight on a midnight sea. Or striving to describe the night while drowning in stars. Or struggling to catch the whisper of a sea breeze through marram grass. Let go and see if inspiration blossoms in the space between us; these words a tentative envoy from my heart to yours.

Celtic Feast, a triptych, 1974 (John Bellany)

Left

He stands as if crucified, framed by yellow, red and cream. It might be that the skeletal spars of wrecked boats (perhaps the Flamborough Light, the Harvester, the Heldona, the Merlin or Excelsior) were reclaimed, as was the way, to provide timber for rafters or frames of doors in the Black Houses. Behind, oceanic blues and greens and more red like a sunset at sea provide a backdrop to the fisherman whose spread-eagled arms are like gull wings or the creamy fins of a great skate. His sou’wester hat is pulled down like a visor or mask, only the lower half of his face is visible: his Bible-black beard and grim red mouth ready to take drams to warm the cockles, keeping the cold at bay.

He looms or leans on a ladder, like a patriarch, peering in through the aperture, watching the bird-headed woman with saffron yellow breasts who cradles, like a child, the ink-black lobster, fresh from the creel, its claws snapping. Opposite the woman sits a pinstriped eagle with piercing eyes. Smeared with more red, has there been a sacrifice, or is the bird-woman barren with only her lobster child, nothing else having been conceived?

Centre

A man stands on the right against a forget-me-not sky and cerulean sea. From under his puffin-head, mocking-bird hood, with red and blue beak, protrudes a fine red beard (nicely trimmed). He wears his cloak of white feathers and in his hands he holds a great white skate with dull, dead, turned-down mouth and pin-prick eyes. A long, thick, white fish tail hangs limp between his pallid thighs.

On his right, left as we look, stands a woman clothed in a robe as black and slick as the skin of a seal. Her face chalk-white, featureless, masked. She can’t be read but in her hands she holds a clownish doll with mirthless smile, head stuck on a pole painted in stripes of blood-red and milk-white. The doll’s grinning face nestles between her bare breasts, like an ill-conceived child. The man looks at the blank woman across the short space between them but it is as if they are separated by an ocean. Perhaps, soon, she will return to the sea. He had once thought of her as a catch.

In the boat at their feet in the foreground, stands a dog, a backward god who may (in the years around 1974) have been responsible for the great abundant, unexplained feast of cod, whiting, haddock; the gadoid outburst as it was named: a miracle of fishes. The dog has an owl’s face, the corpse-bird or night-hag, preferring the darkness to the light. In the bottom of the boat, a spiral shell, winding and unwinding; waxing, waning; birthing and dying. Here is the end in the beginning or perhaps the beginning in the end.

Right

Here a gull-headed woman, her face obscured by a curved yellow beak, looks out with blank, black eyes, framed by timber: scarlet, yellow and cream, against red and green, the colours of Christmas, the mid-winter feast. She could, with her white wings, be some sort of angel, standing on the threshold, surveying the scene. In her hands she holds a ragged fish-head like the barb of a spear that might be used to skewer a seal.

Next to her sits a small blue cat like a mourner at a wake, witnessing the deaths of the cock (who still looks alive with erect red comb and lively eye) and the crab and the sacrificial lamb laid out on a bloody plate, or, maybe laid out like pearls on an oyster shell. It is a Celtic Feast.

Pillar of Smoke

In Weschke’s painting,

a pillar of smoke, thick and black,

ascends from fields,

winds like a snake,

greases the air,

rises like crows’ wings,

coils like a serpent.

A crepuscular mass

against a yellow sky.

It is the season for burning the stubble.

All that was good has been taken away.

Wheat harvested, pulverised,

ground into flour,

like the bones of men,

or the shrouds of ash,

which coat the land,

after the bombs:

Guernica, Dresden, Hiroshima,

London, Nagasaki, Vietnam.

Burning the stubble means smuts on washing,

blackened hedges and damaged trees.

larks ascend from abandoned nests

while voles and hares and field-mice flee.

The stubble was gold

like the unshaven planes

of a young man’s face,

who might (had events not intervened)

have turned to someone

in the depths of night to say

“I love you” or “Ich liebe dich”.

Jenny Donnison