Simon Jenner

Radio Dawn

If memory's fretted and tightened home

its distorted intervals can sing.

An all night Indian Prom;

eleven years back, Radio 3's first 3 a.m. interval

first flickerings into wolf hour lives

the quietest of insomniac cultures

shuffling the sweet dry-twanged thought

of such permanence

as the raga wound to that time

the player's hair tight turbaned

this mensuration of eternity

a flattened fifth, augmented decade;

 

in the way leaves - mine, the broadcaster's -

flitter open at that hour, cascading

hair, notes, unlooked-for words

that showed these all diminishing

on a ground where trance is burned away

as the intervalic life collapses

my chromatic years lack a sounding board;

he breaks with a young, academic apology

for his shaven head

that lost its glitter home

as it inched back to slow-curled luxury:

"I once vowed saffron, silence".

Angela Carter

MY CAT IN HER FIRST SPRING

With the spring coming, my cat is beginning to bud.

sprouting nipples all along her long white breast,

this long-legged, adolescent she.

And in the strange

country fitfully lit by the inward-turning suns

of her yellow

eyes, such alien trees shake out moist leaf  

and the seed-crusted ferns uncoil with a slow blindness

in the rich fruit-cake of her dark recesses

where the wrinkled

intuitions her summer roses stir and tremble

in their sleep

for spring is coming, and the fat buds bulge.

© DEBJANI CHATTERJEE

 

A Square of the Raj

(For Renee D’Arcy Haigh)

 

In Ranchi two cemeteries lie side by side,

silent above the steamy plains.

 

The Christian cemetery, still in use,

has gone native and unkempt;

wild weeds straggle expansive

in a blasphemy of tall grass.

There is no thought of keeping up

with the departed Jones’s over the wall

 

whose military plot orders a square

of the Raj, meticulous forever:

a puny foothold in the wilderness.

Tombstones stand in midget uniform size,

rows of English pocket handkerchief lawns

spread green in front, only kneeling space

to read the carved names on stone.

 

My husband and I come on a personal mission,

a family matter, an attempt at human meeting.

Like ghosts we glide in the soundless air.

1533197 CORPORAL

W D’ARCY

ROYAL AIR FORCE

30 MAY 1945 AGE 38

reads a tablet, under RAF wings

and with a cross below;

clean cut as on every stone of every

husband, brother, father, son.

Does he seem closer now, I wonder,

to the man who grips my brown hand?

Do all here sense our presence?

With flowers and Ganges water

I salute my father-in-law,

bid him and his comrades rest.

 

Three gardeners in sepoy khaki,

government-appointed, water and tend

the graves of strangers who shed

their bodies so far from home

in a fading bugle cry of empire.

They rush to don cloth caps and shoes

to be photographed at attention,

teeth flashing, by the obligatory memorial,

proud of their handiwork

this side of the wall.

 

 

[This poem is reprinted from Debjani Chatterjee’s collection, Albino Gecko (University of Salzburg, 1998)]

 

© DEBJANI CHATTERJEE

 

Hungry Ghost

 

Today I went shopping with my father

after many years. I felt I was back

in time to when I’d follow grandfather

to the market, smelling the spicy scents,

drinking the sights and mingling with the shouts.

Neither buyer nor seller, I would float

like a restless spirit, hungry for life.

 

The market is bigger. I have grown too.

There are more goods as distances have shrunk.

The prices are higher. I understand

about money and, alas, its bondage

of buyers and sellers. Almost I wish

I was again that hungry ghost, watchful

and floating through the world’s noisy bazaar.

 

 

[‘Hungry Ghost’ is reprinted from A Little Bridge by Debjani Chatterjee et al (Pennine Pens, Hebden Bridge; 1997)]

 

Debjani Chatterjee’s website is at: http://mysite.freeserve.com/DebjaniChatterjee

Michael Holmes

TO BARBARA  (& the Beatles)

Do not wear red tonight

for red is the colour of the dying sun

as it falls away from life into the unending dark;

do not wear my sun now it has gone.

 

Do not wear green tonight],

for green is the heavy colour of lost hopes

and vain desire - do not dress yourself

in leaves fallen through these fingers.

 

Do not wear blue tonight

for blue hangs like a cradle from

an empty sky, the focus of an

innocent, unerring, indiscriminating eye.

 

Do not wear grey for these

are my feelings, do not

wear black, for this is the

dark river of despair; do not wrap

yourself in rainbows snatched from tormented skies.

 

Come to me alone and weeping;

come to me naked end with fear,

and with transparent fingers

We will fly the crippled fig-leaf like a kite

through smashed illusion and a hopeless year.

Sonja Ctvrtecka

THE MUSIC ROOM

Open landscape

Sandy orange brown haze

Sun shining down

Old house once a rich man's home

the only remains the music room

people sit quietly upon the ancient floor

imagine the music floating across that open land

desolate echoing human frailty,

lost dreams years sway by.

When their music plays towards

this Indian desert scenery

drone and flute

make everything seem as is;

in the sky or ground?

Music the landscape opens.

Daisy Abey

Running With the Wind

As silence begins to echo

Moonless nights are alive

My garden a fox path

Beneath the conifer hedges.

 

Every sense alert they pounce

Airborne black jets

Peewits raise the alarm

Distantly dogs bark.

 

Their noses quiver, ears prick

They twitch their brown brushes

Territorial instinct,recognition posts

Smell sour rusty steel.

 

They prowl the hen-runs fruitlessly

Moving eyes listening ears

Dance with hind legs up in the air

‘Foxes carry no keys’.

 

Peering nocturnal green glow

Lightning flashes oscillating

They live with the wind, run with the wind

And leap unchallenged the shadowed dark.

 

My Own Prison Cell

Steel sashes grind grooves,

Weighted walls, dead air, my trembling heart

A world of silence, solitary yet

With the odour of molten metal.

 

I make my bed, hours turn and return

And roll into its hot sweat pool

The phone still, isolated reinforced iron door

In vain my eyes travel from corner to floor.

 

My terror sinks between green curtains

No escape route to the enticing blue

A book opens, shuffles and settles beneath

My obscure mind’s empty drifting arc.

 

I invade round the narrowing inches

Winter shaking the bare birch body

Packed within wind, cold shutters

My breath fades, revives and fades again.

 

I wonder and wander my limbs fail,

Amazed at my staggering existence

I force the lock with a rusty metal key

Struggling again to set me free.

Jeremy Reed

Commend this Broken Man

for John Wieners

Where do they go, like rubies in the dust

deposited by a hailstorm

and left to sparkle in the aftermath,

those lyric poets broken by demand,

the State etc., and today my mind

retrieves John Wieners, builds an image round

his solitary foray into the streets,

a gay club where the diva dies on stage,

and where is there to go, please tell me where,

his eyes are fixed on diamonds in displays

the luxuries he can't afford

from a lifetime of enduring hotels,

one nighters, all the endless solitude

of writing poetry against the wall.

His books are legends to the few who know

that sacrifice, and how the word transforms

the deepest pain into something that's shared.

Commend this broken man, this name,

may he be touched by angels and the light

isolate him a moment in the crowd

before the wolves bay hungry in the night.

Wendy Oliver

SPELL-BREAKING

This is the junk-market

Where all my dreams have been

Doing  secret trade.I recognize

Tile-shards like those I found

ln childhood fresh-bombed ruins

Still coloured and childhood dreams.

Here an abandoned corset

Ono shoe and a brown goatskin

Are wrapped round rubble,

'Come away’ you say ‘I fear it’

As I do in the dream, when I am alone.

But id I ever see in sleeping

Journeys through slum-clearance

That—like a devil’s war-engine

To besiege the sane skull-

Five stone steps that mount

To a bricked-up doorway, no going through

Even as a ghost?

Magenta rosebay willowherb

Drugs me with weed-scent, how velvet the

bricks are!

The trash bright as eye-shadow

Insinuates itself.

Streets of a Roman market

Can have been no narrower

No more cobbled. Stumbling

We've almost ended the inevitable

Crossing of wasteland

Unscathed by thicketty bush-thistles.

bed-spring foot-traps.

Approaching the highway, lifting your face

to the full-lit

Theatre o sky ‘How beautiful!' you say.

But in the lead-clouded back-stage still I sense

As if in sleep, whoever stands in waiting

With cold breath and with aah! black wings.

 

AN END OF WINTER NIGHT

 

Pavements of Cambridge, whetstone under frost

Sharpened her steps on alleys and arcades.

Back of Magdalene the river was standing stiff

As a new-pressed Ackerman print, tree-copperplated

And in King's College chapel stalactites

And stalagmites of stone

Made a tremendous cavern where her whispers

Turned from mist to icicles.

Lodging that night was hard to find and cold

Under one blanket and a fraying coat.

But life was inside her—the beginning of one—

And she was glad it held its own still heat

With no help from the weather or the bed.

It seemed that in a well-upholstered season

She would have slept insensible

Of that internal constant generating,

But here she was and gradually grew warm

And warm enough to sleep.

By morning the room glowed, and when she left it

She stepped on shining pavements, heard the river

Shifting among its broken shell, and the organ

Warning the shaking buttresses of King's

That cold Clare Hall was melting in the sun.

Mark Floyer

EDYOUCAYSHUN

I teach them the dark ones

the manics, the drunks, the suicides.

 

Dosed up on Dothiepin I usher

my healthy young charges

 

through denial and despair -

let a "Plank in Reason" chink

 

and – ‘The Belljar’ descend,

let them-"hit a world at every plunge":

 

Lowell

Sexton

Lowry

Plath

 

I call this 'Edyoucayshun' -

I should lead them out, toward, beyond

but I let them fall so they can rise.

LAURENCE JAMES Untitled even the most persistent bloody cough   in the house’s shut up   you are  entering the final stage of la bohème   dusk comes in and deepens putting the squeeze on like a tide in non-liquid guise   permitting the moored vacation- and vocation-craft to relate closer and closer to the off-white cottages   over the way to the extent each, roof’s slate watershedding pitch is gone in the light-ebb   dusk-flood and what have you of this best skyscape in the land of eire the exact same way   a keel blade does in the salt displacement of the bay taking up the middle ground

 

© BRIAN G D’ARCY

Remembering Anne

(Sojourn on Haworth Moor)

Yes, thou art gone! and never more

will feel the wild wind fresh against your face,

nor see the skylark rise above the moor,

nor treasured childhood memories retrace.

 

Yes, thou art gone! and never more

will pause, and in that quiet interlude

find respite from the clamour and the roar,

and dream again your dreams in solitude.

 

Yes, thou art gone! and never more

will race beneath descending winter skies,

nor mourn discarded leaves that summer wore,

nor hear the moorland’s melancholic sighs.

 

Yes, thou art gone! and never more

will wander where bright waters catch the sun,

nor see the beauty that you saw before.

But here your spirit stays – though thou art gone.

 

 

[This is based on the opening line of Anne Bronte’s poem, ‘A Reminiscence’: “Yes, thou art gone! and never more”. It won 2^nd Prize in the open poetry competition run by Salt Town Poets in 2001.]

 

© BRIAN G D’ARCY

In Skibbereen, County Cork, in the six weeks leading up to Christmas 1846 almost 200 people died of fever and starvation in the ‘sanctuary’ of the workhouse. Another 100 bodies – half eaten by rats – were found in derelict houses in the town. The name of Skibbereen was to become synonymous with the Irish Famine of the 1840s.

 

Skibbereen

 

Here pity wept for all that might have been,

and young and old saw all their dreams decay

when famine cast her shroud on Skibbereen.

 

Here fever’s poison occupied unseen

the crowded homes where starving people lay.

Here pity wept for all that might have been.

 

And here, too deep a silence came between

all those who watched their loved ones fade away

when famine cast her shroud on Skibbereen.

 

And here, as Death’s chill shadow veiled the scene,

they tried to hide their fears and knelt to pray.

Here pity wept for all that might have been.

 

And here, within the graveyard, lay obscene

and wasted bodies - left in disarray -

when famine cast her shroud on Skibbereen.

 

Here people cried to God to intervene

and tried to hope - till hope became dismay.

Here pity wept for all that might have been

when famine cast her shroud on Skibbereen.

 

 

© BRIAN G D’ARCY

 

The Dying Place

 

Lest we forget, this tale we tell

of Skibbereen, the dying place,

where endless tolled the funeral bell.

Lest we forget, this tale we tell

of horrors time cannot dispel

when famine haunted every face.

 

Lest we forget, this tale we tell

of Skibbereen, the dying place.

 

 

[These two poems about Skibbereen are reprinted from Brian G D’Arcy’s collection, Tha Shein Ukrosh: Indeed the Hunger (Bellasis Press, Sheffield; 2002)]

Brian Hinton

Against Deconstruction

 

Discourse decays. I sometimes think the telephone's a

parody

of beyond the grave - your distant, disembodied voice -

and it is bodily contact we crave; my letters are more

serious of course (and one-sided). Semantically, a good read

can be endlessly rehearsed and recast our choice

of what emotion to dare, which here stutters to the raw.

 

Passion's out of favour in this cool new world, sex

is a function of language, parole of your particular body

from the langue of my undifferentiated delight in woman.

The last adventure is playing Adam and Eve, our text

reads ecstasy as a night from heaven, so why do I cry

to God in orgasm, popping your clitoris like a panic button?

 

A fatal difference of body and mind -1 rehearse theory,

loose ends that deconstruct the whole. Speech courts

negation

but still we joke, skin to skin, at the ridiculousness of desire.

In bodies, like books, I refute Lacan's divide of Imaginary

and Symbolic, our selves forged by experience, the titillations

of late capitalism my deepest beliefs, for which I'd open fire.

 

State functionaries state the obvious- that we create

meaning from a vicious stew of desires, needs, opposites -

unravelling curtained darkness from the merest

loose thread,

Well, I'll knit together open and closed, innocence and fate,

to summon those spectres self and soul, attempt the politics

merely of man and wife, seek gross particularities in bed.

 

When you left, you left yourself - my room is all

the lonelier for your disembodied clothes, your detritus

of life, a pair of discarded knickers patterned with a rose.

I sleep with them underneath my pillow, rehearse the small

comforts of memory and long in limbo for your sweetness

to return, clinging like a drowned man to the telephone.

Michael Haslam

CROSS GREEN

 For Barry Tebb

 The pallet trucks keep running back

into the backs of docked containers

whether I am there or not.

 

I could be pinpointed, one among a gang

of casual agency pickers, there for the

pre-christmas rush, December 1999 —

that was just before the new millennium.

 

We are human filth, but close to the heart

of logistics. This is a warehouse.

Those are the wagons. And there are the roads.

 

Cross green is a work song.

I am on my break. The last one

for the nighshift, just before

the bleak first break of the day

for the next just when —

 

We dock us tabs and curse

and spit and cast us

plastic cups

beneath the portakabin that's a smokers' shelter.

Leavings. Remnants. Crisps for rats.

 

If God made Christmas,

we should not respect him for it, though

we like a break of sorts.

 

— The night wind rush;

a spot of glow.

The first of day. A crimson lustre

and the sun's first yellow blush.

 

We are living the seasonal influx

Desperate as The Aire,

from the minibus at dawn.

 

The weekend blooms, I should say looms,

with the promise of an age-old blessing

in our cups.

All time is slipping by by

minutes on the clock.

We'd buy, if we couldn't sell

our feelings back

to ourselves in reflux —

in reflection, in the abstract, at a discount

making up for what we've been

in deep cross green.

 

24 2 2003