Poems
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Daylight Robbery
Silent as cut hair falling
and elevated by cushions
in the barber's rotating chair
this seven-year-old begins to see
a different boy in the mirror,
glances up, suspiciously,
like a painter checking for symmetry.
The scissors round a bend
behind a blushing ear.
And when the crime's done,
when the sun lies in its ashes,
a new child rises
out of the blond, unswept curls,
the suddenly serious chair
that last year was a roundabout.
All the way back to the car
a stranger picks himself out
in a glass-veiled identity parade.
Turning a corner
his hand slips from mine
like a final, forgotten strand
snipped from its lock.
from Captive Audience (Seren, 1996)
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Captive Audience:
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Twelve
I was twelve when I murdered for silence.
The senile hero from number nine
trained me to shoot straight.
Silence played a deeper tune
than my father's violin,
its bullets swifter and cleaner
than any note his dusty bow could fire.
So I shot this thrush in its hedge,
allowing it one last song -
the lullaby my mother sang,
my sister's piccolo in flight ...
before silencing it
and something else, forever.
I watched it fall through its cage,
the instinct to sing
still alive in its wings
then listened again.
A sea wind
bowed the field of reeds beyond.
from The Slipped Leash (Seren, 2002)
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The Slipped Leash:
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Between Two Bridges
‘ … See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.’
T.S. Eliot (Little Gidding)
8pm
Wind scales the river in its mud.
It squirms and pirouettes to the tide’s score -
dance of a reptile, forging its cast in silt.
Here comes a friendly stray, with marble eyes.
And here, someone’s ditched a fridge. Boats
ghost-boats, Anon’s boarded-up work
wait beyond plank and oil drum jetties
for names to be painted back - Angela ...
Dragonfly ... Pride of Newport ... Norma’s Ark ...
I look for her name. (It brought me here
from clearer water, twenty years upstream).
A swan drifts down to a castle’s ruin.
A train crosses. On board’s my teenage ghost.
“Tonight,” he mimes, “I’ll walk these streets with you.
I’ll break my journey here. We’ll walk all night
then one of us will stay and one take flight.”
Redundant steel poles form a queue.
Their heads sprout dead sprigs, buds
whose clenched fists shake at the blue sky,
its sails drifting, too easily, out to sea.
11pm
I meet him inside a symmetrical park,
where Edwardians, in ghostly whites
swing massive pendulums
and the moon rolls through football goals.
I meet him where they can’t touch us -
the bridge limpers, the black eyes,
the vet bills for three-legged dogs
the piss emporiums, the furnaces,
the palest faces to miss
the last train home.
I meet him inside a symmetrical park.
We touch fingers, touch trees,
kick through shallow leaves
through Hornbeam, Sallow Willow,
Maidenhair, Flowering Ash ...
The smoky heads on glass pillows,
the limpers from east to west
in time for the last bus
they can’t touch us.
2am
I follow his stagger up Stow Hill.
Taxi lights transfigure him,
draped in plastic road signs:
chevrons, white arrows
on blue shields - King Cone.
The wind beats its head on stone,
on glass, on Linda Barker’s smile.
Perhaps he has walked from hell
and perhaps I am dreaming him
but I follow him, past lock-ups
where a hell’s angel’s dream,
in pieces, is shown the light.
I follow him over the motorway.
Tracks, pylons, scrapyards ...
the town’s raw nerves
twinkle, a child’s dream
lulled in the moon’s headlamp.
I follow him under a railway bridge,
its thin, wire whine of breaks
or is it the wind’s harmonica?
Between two bridges I follow him
past a wave sculpted in steel,
a boat they found inside the mud
and thought an ark to save the port ...
The same current underfoot
drags us on. I can’t keep up.
I catch the breath of those who drowned
to keep afloat this listing town,
the steel hull of it.
Only the wind raises them
and a few words perhaps, a name
cut in marble or wood.
(I am not too drunk to salute them).
The bank runs out. He sheds his cape.
A smudged lamp erases him.
The cradle under the big bridge
is a pendulum, marking time.
It ferries its load, back and fore...
The river shuffles on to the sea.
5am
The river’s nightshift nears its end, slips through an arch of daylight.
Cranes, their loads still, have caught nothing but stars all night.
The first train. His face in mine and, mirrored, a half-raised hand.
He should smile. Soon he’ll be walking greener banks with his friends,
setting nightlines, building fires, though I shan’t envy him
except when he’s drinking it dry and, walking in this later time,
I notice the river, barely a slough of itself in the cracked mud -
as if the moon had taken a long straw to the years and sucked.
He pulls away. The wind puts its lips to an arcade.
A seagull on a barber’s pole waits to open its blades.
8am
Wind scales the river in its mud.
It squirms and pirouettes to the tide’s score -
dance of a reptile, forging its cast in silt.
Here comes the stray with marble eyes.
He seems to belong here. I watch him
chase and bark the river on its way.
And here, someone’s ditched a red armchair.
Prifardd of mud, I lounge in it.
A train crosses. A swan sails near.
Downstream, the cradle ferries its load
back and fore, back and fore …
as town and river rise from their beds.
Like parts of a clock the small boats
and their jetties rise. I look for her name,
the woman who brought me here. If I wait
I might drift, between two bridges, in my chair
like Angela … Dragonfly … Pride of Newport …
Norma’s Ark … I might find her.
from Ingrid’s Husband (Seren, 2007)
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Ingrid’s Husband:
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The Visitors
The women of my earliest years
fill this room's empty bay
without warning -
Brown Helen,
Catrin Sands, Gwyneth Blue,
Nightingale Ann...
Their songs
return to a stranger's hand
the keys to all past tenancies,
Heulwen, Dwynwen, Bron Y Llan...
I lie back, let them haunt,
the soft pulse of their lips
against the stone wall I've become,
Heather, Geta, Prydwen Jane...
listen hard across the dark
as their voices fade again,
Edith Smart, St Julia...
sleep with the bedroom door ajar
in case they should drift back in.
from The Milk Thief (Seren, 1998)
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The Milk Thief:
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The Breath of Sleeping Boys
Something is about to happen.
Legs are crossed fingers.
A cup falls from its handle.
A wall crumbles into the road
under the weight of a flower bed.
In their dreams
something is about to happen.
Saved and damned, saved and damned -
the breath of sleeping boys.
One wave breaks, another inhales
and something is about to happen.
Shrubbery trembles, blatantly.
November the 5th in Lilliput Road.
The introvert is out of its lid,
reads and repeats the word BANG
until the tarmac sky translates
madness back into stars, a life
into mute, mouse-like slippers.
Something is about to happen. Sh.
Here is the sound (let it pass)
of young blades, wading through grass.
The town's terrarium anticipates
that something is about to happen.
The wind adjusts its volume.
Peace carries a wicker basket.
Her dress takes in the new breeze.
With each step she's moving out,
stork on her heels, almost in flight.
Something is about to happen.
Winged eyes in a blameless dark
beat inside their hemispheres.
Their lashes are feathers dipped in oil.
Deeper than ocean beds, their dreams
rebuild Atlantis in domed air.
Saved and damned, saved and damned -
the breath of sleeping boys.
from The Breath of Sleeping Boys & other poems (Carreg Gwalch, 2004)
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The Breath of Sleeping Boys & other poems:
www.carreg-gwalch.co.uk
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Syd Bowen
More chapel than public house
though still village property,
one they’d call their own.
There were less and less like him,
dark-suited old boys
who took on the hedges by hand –
Griff Price, Vernon Probert,
Tommy Farmer – squeezed out
by the press of generations.
I name trees after them.
Their summers hung about us
in our sense of not belonging.
Syd Bowen’s here I think,
though last I saw of the man
he grew towards me, smiled,
passed the time of year,
shrank again, was gone.
Into the privacy of lanes.
from Time Pieces (Seren, 1991)
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Time Pieces:
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Steel
I felled a tree
with my bare hands.
I ran through a forest.
I sifted its branches for gold.
No border guard could hold me.
Soon, my country
you will be rich.
Your rivers run through my veins.
Your tides and mountains
swell in my chest.
Your birds of prey
are my arms and legs in flight.
I have fifteen hearts.
Inside this steel frame
the wheels of your valleys
turn again, spin
and catch the sun.
I am steel in flight,
unstoppable –
a dragon with fifteen hearts.
Soon, my country...
Nothing can stop me now.
Paul Henry
The poem will be available to read in book form in 2010 when Paul Henry's 'The Brittle Sea: New & Selected Poems' will be published by Seren.
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Steel:
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Paul Henry, poet
