Obsolescence
First, it’s the language that goes, a whole lexicon
Of words, classified as ‘redundant’; then its
The context, the subtle nuance, the use of
Neologisms that you’d never heard of,
The pancaking of opinions, one
Upon the other; contemporary theatre,
street art, book-club politics,
Theories about raising children
and the mindless exhaustion
of child-rearing, and managing
the little dears
None of which you are expected
to know anything about,
(Remembering only too clearly
Their first tears), now deemed
Not to have a clue
Living in the grey-haired margins, as you do.
Welcome to insouciance, that
Awkward place, unsure now
Even of your shadow, feeling
Your words curl and wilt and all
That wisdom you held dear
Being trashed, devalued,
No longer wanted here:
Across the room you sense an
Air of irritation, eyes shifting
Face to face, holding back
a veil of mild contempt;
just in case.
Then there’s the diminution of comprehension.
Opinions, views, once so carefully
Hewn and crafted, no longer countenanced.
The audience who used to play attendance,
Having slipped away, leaving
An inverted hierarchy, a disturbed connection,
An erosion of common ground,
a sliding scree; lacking roots
The world’s become a shiftless thing, and you,
Have lost your hold on terra firma
Let go, let go,
you hear them murmur.
Obsolescence beckons. In a nod to
A long-lost childhood, you are put on the boring step,
an infant again, seen and not heard:
Waiting to be weaned from this absurdity:
Later, caught in a family photo, a time-worn face
Filling a space amongst the staggered generations.
Propping up the family tree as leaves
Peel off and flutter to the ground. It’s the Fall
From family favour, an autumn requiem
But no-one hears.
And no one grieves.
The shame of being irrelevant; who’d have assumed
It would come so quickly, a simple hug, a Judas kiss,
Some hush money, a little bribe or two
A holiday abroad, dinner for two
While all the time being groomed
For empty pastures, fallow fields, cast into the shadows,
Just like this.
Were we the same, bullying our elders?
Perhaps people were more polite then, perhaps
In a matriarchal world, things went by a different name
And elders earned their place by playing the game,
Trading in the coinage of acquired wisdom
Not now; the currency has changed.
As has the world.
Our only offer is a retreating world of tedium,
With all its partisan views, the sum of all
We’ve ever learnt and felt and known and seen,
Of all we were and could and should have been,
Now put into a box, placed in a hole
Box to box, womb to tomb, lust to dust,
How embarrassing we are, without gifts to bring,
Without the least semblance of trust, self-control
our movements trussed in string, locked in a cage
Listen. Hear the aged ones sing
and feel them rage, rage, rage.
Maybe, in the passage of time
someone will ask,
Who was that person in the photo
Were they related, were they family
What did they mean to us? But I doubt it,
They’d balk if we were to ask them
offer up some kindly words, some civic talk
make the semblance of a fuss
While noting all the things we lack:
Each generation seeded in
The one before
Tilling new soil, never looking back
Will You Not Remember
Red strips of cloud fell off the shrinking sky
And light began to fail us as we walked
Down valley, past the two-bar gate, its hinges
Red and rusting: there, stopping to talk
I let my eyes lie full upon your brow
And loved you in that moment, then and now
But you would not remember
Beside the stream, beside the matted heather
Water rushed on blindly, spun and eddied
And as you leaned, my shy hands gently steadied:
I kept them there, just longer than was needed
And grew the love that I had long since seeded
But you would not remember
And through the wood and back to where began
The walk, brushing the boots, scrapping that cloying earth
From underneath; turning back from heath to trampled path
And shuffling ever slowly back to birth
When coming to the fence, like love, unplanned
Across the stile I gently brushed your hand
But you will not remember
And then, my gentle one, as we sat there
Upon the roughhewn plank, I stole a glance
At your sweet face, your soft and willowed face
Sweet-cradled in your hands, your cheeks a-dance
And, pausing as the thrush flew overhead
You felt my heart and softly turned your head
And will you not remember?
The Winning entry in the McCarthy Stone Thomas Hardy Poetry Competition, March 2021
North Coker
We’ll start at the beginning, in the paddock
Near the bridle path, where the sow last held court,
The sty’s empty now, the last scrappings of gruel
Dried up and gone, just like the piglets, and their mother;
Gone girls too; admire, instead, the thatched rooves,
hamstone porticos, it’s too cruel to dwell on
pigs in digs or worry where the summer goes
Past Honeysuckle cottage, house by the forge, rooks
Spying from trees, and you and Somerleigh, and me and
Daphne too – such casual friends yet such abiding glue . . .
A hangover of red letterboxes,
Holly Cottage, hanging mugs, a scented breeze
And Squealer’s exhortations, animus mundi, pleading,
Save our souls too. . . .
And so the world turns on the waft of old drains,
smudge-prints of foxes, Sweetpeas, skies of
cornflower blue; somewhere a bonfire burns,
crisp leaves, the husks of dead flowers, bins of
empty words and wasted hours, beginning
of the summer’s end. Listen!
The whispering mimic of the aspen tree, the arching
shadow of a fleeing cyclist, the burrows and underways
signs warning of adders, wild rabbits and badger setts
Old men on ladders, rotting fruit and still born berries
Hay rising in the fields, a tractor red and rusting
Sounds of pigs rutting, grunting, squealing,
It’s the waning of days and something has diminished,
shrunken all of us, kicked out our stays, blunted the last
semblance of animal feeling . . . .
Mid-Summer Blues
I have started to live my life vicariously in the village
Spying through the hedge at goings-on in the
Street. This self-same hedge where tenants live
Two blackbirds and their bairns. Each day they’re at my door
reminding me of ‘seed for birds in need’, a charity
I push as penance
Something I do gladly
Desperate to do good –
Oh Lord save me,
From being a menace
In the neighbourhood
I need help badly; I realised that when waiting anxiously for
Melons to grow, counting the steps to the café (closed), still
Ten more than I’d supposed, tracking down the sound of
mowers, wanting to see if they’re petrol driven or
electric and if the latter, how they avoid the cord.
Oh Lord, save me
From the happy pill
And things that don’t matter
Waiting to feel ill
God, I’m bored
I am now reading every notice on the telegraph poles, inspecting
the street’s recyclable rubbish every Wednesday morning, seeing
how many bottles of wine have gone down, sending the NHS a warning,
Tracking the packing from Amazon, what people have bought
to sustain them, explain them. All the time conscious of nature . . .
the veritable din of rooks, the greenery, the tedium of books, the never ending scenery, the same soundtrack, groundhog day
Give me two metres of social distance,
Reward for my persistence,
Give me the key to lockdown, I’m tired of resistance,
So the world’s out of reach:
Just tell it to the crowds
on Bournemouth beach
from Lockdown Sonnets *
- In the End
What will survive will not be love
Or disaffection, but indifference
For sure, you may feel the cold puff
of mortality as life is snuffed out, may even
mutter some shallow penitence or be winded
by the passing; but it won’t last,
not even for a paragraph before you fall back
on the old familiar stories, digging through the chaff
It’s better this way; better for one and all
To think him the love child of Bram Stoker
Or of Judas Iscariot, riding for a fall
Than imagine there was anything worthwhile
About a life spent playing the joker –
Just press delete, redact him, close the file
- Thomas Hardy on Love
When Emma died, there was such an outpouring of
Grief from the old man; elegy after elegy dripped
from his pen onto tear-smeared pages; poems for
The ages devoted to Dear Emphmeral Emma,
His west of English girl; Thomas the poet
penned words of such delicacy to his swan necked love,
Sketches of Botterell, Beeny Cliff, the woman riding high,
etched as from above – and all she had to do was die.
Such a messy way to get attention, dying. And then to
Put up with all those fine poems suffused with guilt and
Remorse, masquerading as lost love; his pilgrimage to St
Juliot’s, his over wrought mourning, her ailing in rhyme
While all the time he’s mining his memory, levelling the score:
Warning: It’s fake love. Poet’s love. Don’t give him the time.
3. Deflection
There’s a rumour that our hegemony is doomed
That rising seas are plotting to drown us;
And while the planet will survive, mankind will not
It’s not the storyline that we’d assumed; yet
There are signs of moss and creeper on the shard
Foxes in the Mall, rabbits in Hyde Park
Birdsong in the trees, green snakes in the grass
The sound of running water, songs of the lark
It’s not a lark though is it? We’ve all
been tumbling down through Eden since
The Fall; ignoring the Ark; lessons
Of plague and pestilence. Like Saul
we’re just weak penitents taking
the easy way out, taking our haul
4. Responsibility
Free range eggs are on my shopping list
(though other eggs will do); I care about the
Provenance of such things; that hens are free
To range within their well-fenced runs
Free from the darkroom and the hunter’s guns
And from the foxes wandering in the fields
And from the hovering axe, allowed to be
Just poultry focused on their paltry yields.
I don’t eat veal now; focus on beef
With cows and calves, I can justify
the difference; at least, that’s my belief
In the field, the lamb stays close to its mother
Who watches over it, nurtures it, keeps it safe
When I eat lamb it’s never that one, but another
5. Bees
A bee bangs his head repeatedly against my study window
I try to let him out, but he won’t be persuaded; he doesn’t
Know the deceptive qualities of glass, that what looks
Clear is often not; things being seldom what they seem;
you’d think that all of this would be apparent
To the bee. But he keeps butting at my window pane
Believing only what he sees. He should use other
Senses not think that what’s transparent is the sky
I leave him there to die; strange really how we blindly follow
False leads, trusting in what we see; how we end up in
Rat’s nests, blind alleys, life’s little conundrums
Concussed by constant battering against the glass I
Feel his pain, watch him go numb. He should know
there’s more than one way out, another mountain pass
- Old Bones
My poetry reads like old bones, stiff and aching
growling a rusty dirge; no-one listening
Can’t tell if it’s the sound of waves breaking
or the fractures of a heart. My words need oil, I know
To grease my synapses, to lubricate my rhyme
And I need time to pull my poem apart, to strip
the chassis down. On the sea edge the stones are
glistening, yes, I need to become explicable
While I am able; it’s no good just pretending, placing
Words in any old order; I need to find the muse again
From somewhere in the ocean; I search beneath
The waves’ curl, find succour in an oscillating swell,
rolling out its murmur: this is your home, this
is where you first gave birth, brought up your poem
- Osler’s Wharf
Osler’s wharf, opposite the bakery, is past
Shaky now; rickety planks of matai, leeched
To the river bank, plodding on daft kauri
piles through the clench of glutinous mud into
the brown stream of water; Opposite, the
outlet pipe from Swifts spews blood and
offal into the dirge, drawing the fish upstream,
tempting young boys to drop a line and dream
Many a day, string wrapped round a piece of
driftwood picked from the river’s edge, hook
dressed with snail sans shell, I sat upon that wharf
and waited; sometimes feeling a herring bite, once
a lazy kawhai, but usually catching nothing more than
clouds, passing thoughts and whispers of the shadow man
8. Mowing Lawns
Do I need to do this? Mulching buttercups and daisies
Into a neat green swathe until my lawn emulates
The Oval on opening day, grass shaved within a whisker
rolled flat and baked. After all, there’s no play in
My back yard so I could relent, but my desecration
leads to an inexplicable feeling of satisfaction, a soothing
vista, pleasing to the eye; it’s teaching mother nature
just who’s boss. And if it’s not cricket, who gives a toss?
Shame comes only slowly. For too long now
I’ve ignored the common bent, the meadows the Red fescue
Waiting for my conscience to come to the rescue, teach me
of our planetary doughnut, we are of nature’s scent
It’s time, blithe spirit, dearest heart, to give up cutting
grass, put away your scythe, go back to class.
9. Sad white men
Today I find I’m on the wrong side of the ledger
without the chance to comment or make redress; muted
by a new wave of human-tide, young, loud and
angry, apportioning blame for the unholy mess
We’ve left the planet in; shame they tell us, shame
On you, old white men, for what you’ve done,
sucking life out of the planet, plucking the money tree
stuffing your lives with injections of folly, growing
richer and fatter; What you’ve handed down is debt
and a scarred human condition; you lost sight of the ends
that matter; yes, we know you never truly saw what
you were doing, the damage to your health, your friends
Your warped definition of wealth driving all ; yet not too
Late to make amends; Physician, heal thyself.
10. Alone
Alone we are born; and die alone: that much we know.
Yet how much time we spend pretending otherwise
That we are loved and cared for in connected ways, that
DNA and love and friendship binds us so. Only by
Growing old do we understand how tenuous the ties,
That vast emptiness within; those unuttered words
caught in the throat’s constriction, another memory
lost after the cord has broken and the body dies
It was not always like this; it is something we learn
As we grow up and first encounter
shadow men. We start to put up fences at each
catastrophic stage, rings around the trunk, building
impregnable defences. That’s when the layering
begins in earnest, as we age, get drunk, move out of reach.
*Which are not really sonnets at all in the English or Petrarchan tradition. Like the original Italian meaning of the word, they are ‘small sounds’, but other than having fourteen lines, the rhyme scheme is irregular as is the number of syllables in each line. This reduced and simplified form has been called the Baxterian sonnet after the poet James K. Baxter.
from Poems in Exile
The First Rook War
Rooks strung out along the power lines
So many crochets and quavers
Angled south-east, north-west, up and down
Flat notes on a music score
There is purpose to their vigil: a reason
To scan the tree-serrated eye-line
Lift the ragged hems of clouds, keep an ear
For whispers on the woodland floor.
Yesterday the wind gave warning; this
Morning the sky was purple-bruise; for the
World they – and we – had known was leaving us
And no way back, not now, nor evermore.
For out there, on the coast, gulls were mapping
Their flight-paths, inland raiders from
A beastly sea; herring gulls
Eyes full of menace, armed with cadences and
Looking for war.
Not where they should be
Not the proffered enemy
It foretells a new zeitgeist
Not the normal state of affairs; as in life
The old ways are distorted, we have to look further, closer
Even the countryside feels broken
Placed on alert; anticipating danger
No longer from the foe you know
But the stranger.
What Lies Ahead.
It hits you, suddenly, the realisation that it will all end one day,
And not so very far into the unreadable future
At some point everything will be compressed
Into a pandemonium of flesh and marrow
And your life, as an accordion with the air suppressed
Will play a wheezing requiem, before you exit, for a final time.
Frustrated that you cannot choose the moment
Utter those last words you always meant to say,
Private declamations, simpering apologies, septic guilt
All that will be left hanging in the context of a careless life.
The Antithesis of Noman Standing
- Time and Tide Waits for Noman
When I was young and free and the world was first laid bare
Startled and nude as a skinned peach
I did not bother to chase time for I knew it was always there,
Coming at me, floating into reach
Once, I rode the tides like pumice,
Porous and unsinkable
washed out of the sky, at such times
Death was unthinkable
Now I think of nothing else
Nightmares of bodies dashed on rocks
And someone at home, waiting
dumbstruck by the heartbeat of the clock
I was oblivious to it all,
Conscious only of
The tide abating.
While just around the corner
In a tinpot, tea-cosied world
My old adverseries
Time and Tide
Lay waiting
- Noman is an Island
I don’t need the company of men
Or women for that matter not armed with a pen
As I am, which I use brutally
To create my effigy, shadows casting shadows
To suffocate the loneness that
I feel,
Cut off from the main
A loneliness that screams, thy will be done,
For as I knelt and prayed, not for courage
As once I would have done
But to be afraid
To be cast adrift, a loner, on an island, to be
that island, noman’s island
To be unmade.
3. Noman is worth crying over
Men are an abomination, that truth was self-evident
Before the geneticist filled in the dots and told us so
Even before the revelation, before the enquiry, before the Judas kiss
Was made public
Before the show trial
Before the story turned up in The Mail
Before the last nail, we all knew this
Before the jury (skirted? et tu, Grayson?) assembled and this poem was
used as proof of an overwhelming deception
we all knew
It was time to go
We had long known it, of course we had
But its fiery alphabetic rhetoric left us stunned
Stupified by the brilliance of a super nova
Leaving only me standing, as ever, an exception
Drink, you bastards, drink, you ugly munchkin bastards
Noman is worth crying over
Whatever you may think.
4. Greater Love Hath Noman
She thinks I don’t care
She thinks I don’t know the connection
She thinks too much, methinks, of things
That lack direction; the ceremony, the harelip rings
The flowers; it is all symbols and observances
The giving or the taking and the giving back
She’s on the wrong track, silly girl. Give it a whirl, spin the bottle
check with the chap above
I have the greater love.
Of course, it is all comparative, whose got what and what love means
and what it is that hides behind the screens
it is pure theatre, made for the showman
with grandiose gestures, scrambled sentences
sweet allure; some love the Lord, others love the tyke
Say what you like, Greater love hath Noman.
5. Noman’s Land
I have been lost between shores for as long as I can remember
trapped in a chrysallis, neither one damned thing or another
exiled in my portion of unmanned universe
So damned weary, life’s hardly worth the bother
Days spent waiting for the hearse.
There is a tipping point in people’s lives; would the world
Have noticed had they never been? Now, I despise self pity
Self abrogation, but hey, hot dog in the city, I know the scene
Know the score, the has-been and the might-have-beens; once
was shown the door
Oh years ago; Would that I would go away people will understand
They will say he took too much, expected too much, he had become trite,
An unfortunate accessory after the fact; he showed no tact, no human
qualities, a cripple looking for a crutch, it was all too much
An outcast now at home
In No-man’s Land.
Some thoughts on the short story. . . .
Like Ian McEwan, late of Chesil Beach
I don’t like books that overreach
That pride themselves on pages written
Nor, if I’m truthful, am I smitten
By flowery names and distant places
Leading to a form of stasis
Worth ‘too much detail’, ‘too much story’
I’m a simple chap, a jackadory
And bred to sidestep words en masse
And while the learned think that crass
I think that Ian’s point of view
Is one I’d happily eschew
So spare me all those lengthy tomes
That line the walls of stately homes
They’re not for me, I’m sure of that
The Cat in the Hat is where I’m at
I’m a novella sort of fella
and like a simple story teller.
Wendy Cope
Too many words to scan
In one vowel swoop
An overpowering mien, oh yes, and mean
While carrying the can
For some poor dope; pausing between scenes
losing all hope
O call out the guards, notify the Pope
If anyone can cope then you can
Wendy Cope
Poems about pater; pitter-patter poems
Does it matter poems
Poems without a grievance
Poems from broken homes
Poems in tomes and honeycombs
With couplets strung out
Hanging by a rope, but then
You’re not the sort of poet to mope
If anyone can cope then you can
Wendy Cope
You sit there, flitting from book to book
Reading your words away; who’s to say
A clever chap wearing an Oxbridge look
Might not persuade your poems to lose
The form you dressed them in; then it’s the slippery slope
When words come loose and metaphors elope
When gravitas sets in and kills all hope
But you’re the sort of poet that’s going to cope
Wendy sea-scope, see, you’ll cope.
The Passing of WE52 MJE
The back story is that in May 2014, I was travelling from the funeral to the wake of my Aunt Margot when my car, a PT Cruiser (it was the initials that did it for me) ground to a crunching halt. The car had run out of oil and on my return to Sherborne (thanks to the AA relay) I was informed it could not be fixed and its value was such, that the offer of £150 for scrap was as good as I could hope for. I couldn’t bring myself to consign my wheels to the scrapheap and held on to it. Then, when I had finally given up on it, an engine was found and in mid-November, the car had its transplant and was deemed roadworthy once again. But its resurrection should not detract from the pathos, the grief that gave voice to the lines printed below.
Between the funeral and the wake
The life oil ran out; it was to signal
another passing; not a patch on Margot
with her 93 years, but to see a car go
without warning, before its time was spent
with nigh a ding and scarcely a dent
Can only end in tears.
She was a mere slip of a chassis
Classy but born out of her time
I loved her gentle lines, her only crime
Not to inhabit Chicago or some other no-go
zone. Oh Al Capone where are you now,
my violin case lies empty, like my heart,
grieving alone in the back window
A black widow
awaiting the bandage of time
for a world ripped apart
clunking out of rhyme.
She was only 12 years old when she went
On the cusp of adolescence,
Twelve measly years old; touch her!
Feel how cold steel is
O God! the horrors of obsolescence
Of body parts, no longer needed
Fittings and gadgets superseded
And warning lights never heeded
Feel her abiding presence
Won’t you
Sense the passing of menace.
I remember her last tax disc whether
Twelve months was a risk – no, I thought
She would always go on and on
I never dreamt she would desert me
That her life could not always be bought
And now she’s gone
And begorrah, it’s hurt me!
WJ52 MJE
It’s taken this long to know my number plate
Too late, I hear it saying to me, it’s your neglect
That means I’m going to end up wrecked
Packaged in a cube, an art installation
when you could have saved me
At the last petrol station.
I’m sorry
Like your tyres
I’ve let you down
I only wish I’d been that lorry
To have carried you back home
To rust, to rest
Beneath a garden gnome
That would have been best
So what of you, my PT cruiser,
Your body work needs work
Your motor’s failing; you’re no longer the bruiser
I married
Sure, you carried me for a while
For many a serendipity mile
But you’re a loser
Insult and flat battery that’s you
Why would anyone choose you
From a car yard? Do the hard yards, buddy and confess
That underneath your bonnet, you’re a mess
You know when I bought you, I was quite emphatic
I didn’t want an automatic; I’m one for changing gears
Travelling the roads for the rest of my years
That was the dream, that was the plan
Not to end up a cruiser abuser
But a travelling man
Wending my way through life
Or at least, Cornwall and Devon
Strapped in with the wife
For my natural span
Sat-naved to heaven