No brick upon another. While the boy’s
Mother scraped at rubbish
He played at tapping stone with stone
Cracked lips moving at the sky
Waiting for her to find food,
And idly placing one brick on another.
SOMME
A trench map from the Battle of the Somme:
Doesn’t matter where it came from
Has a dead fly stuck
At the lefthand corner
By a place called Longueval,
Rusty from blood sucked
Out of British or German soldiers
Long since gone over the top
Where many went to in those olden days.
Whoever it was sat on an upturned
Tin and smoked a pipe.
Summer was finished beyond the parapet
And winter not yet willing
To let him through the mist
Of that long valley he was told to cross,
While the earth shook from gnat-bites of gunfire
As if to shrug all men from its shoulders.
A fly dropped on the opened map
Feet of fur and bloated with soot
Crawled over villages he hoped to see.
Bemused he followed it
Curious to know at which point it would stop
And finally take off from,
For that might be
Where death would fall on him.
Scorning the gamble
He squashed the stolid fly
Whose blood now decorates the map
Pinned on my wall after fifty years gone by.
Night came, he counted men into the trench
And crouching on the last day of June
In the earthen slit that stank
Of soil and Woodbines, cordite and shit
Held the wick close to his exhausted eyes,
Shut the dim glow into its case
And ceased to think.
ALCHEMIST
Lead melts. If I saw lead, I melted it
Poured it into sand and made shapes.
I melted all my soldiers,
Watched that rifle wilt
In an old tin can on a gas flame
Like a straw going down
From an invisible spark of summer.
He stood to attention in the tin
Rim gripped by fanatic pliers
From the old man’s toolkit,
Looked on by beady scientific eyes
That vandalize a dapper grenadier.
The head sagged, sweating under a greater
Heat than Waterloo or Alma.
He leaned against the side
And lost an arm where no black grapeshot came.
His tired feet gave way,
A spreading pool to once proud groin,
Waist and busby falling in, as sentry-go
At such an India became too hard,
And he lay without pillow or blanket
Never to get up and see home again.
Another one, two more, I threw them in:
These went quicker, an elegant patrol
Dissolved in that infernal pit.
Eyes watering from fumes of painted
Soldiers melting under their own smoke,
The fire with me, hands hard at the plier grip
At soldiers rendered to peaceful lead
At the bottom of a tin.
Swords into ploughshares:
With the gas turned off I wondered
What to do with so much marvellous dead lead
That hardened like the surface of a pond.
VIEW FROM MISK HILL NEAR NOTTINGHAM
Armies have already met and gone.
When the best has happened
The worst is on its way.
Beware of its return in summer.
When fields are grey and should be green
Rub scars with ash and sulphur.
Full moon clears the land for its own view,
Whose fangs would bereave this field
Of hayrick and sheep.
In the quiet evening birds fly
Where armies are not fighting yet.
He looks a long way on at where he’ll walk:
A cratered highway with all hedges gone.
Green land dips and smells of fire.
Topography is wide down there.
The moon waxes and then emaciates.
Birds fatten on fields before migration:
Smoke in summer hangs between earth and sky,
On ground where armies have not fought
But lay their ambush to dispute his passing.
from Snow on the North Side of Lucifer, 1979
LUCIFER’S ASTRONOMY LESSON
When Lucifer confessed his pride
His plans and turbulence
It was explained to him: the sun
Is fixed in its relation to the stars.
The stars are placed in their position
To each other. The planets with no heat or light
Get sufficient dazzle from the sun.
Satellites enlace the planets.
The earth, with its one moon
Revolves and in so doing
Takes a year to go lefthanded
In a lone ellipse around the fire of Heaven.
And now, a few celestial definitions:
The words came fast, like nadir
Zenith, equinox and solstice,
But when threatened with meridian
And (especially) declination
Lucifer shouted: Stop!
I’ve known this text from birth.
The Guardian of Sidereal Time
Is tired of the Party Line.
Navigators get their fix on me —
And so did God.
Right through my heart
The recognition-vectors
Set to split-infinities of Time
Came all too plain yet none too simple,
Each emotion a position-line
Pegged like witch-pins in the victim’s spleen.
Sextant-eye and timepiece heart
The brain set out in astronomic tables
Plot the way to harbour mouths
Where all life but Lucifer’s is understood.
His geologic heart reversed
By extra-galactic longing
Was sensed by God.
Rays leapt from Lucifer’s missiled sight:
A magnetic four-way flow
Confused the inner constant,
And mysterious refractions
Made him violent and obstinate,
Shifty and uncouth.
Habits lovable yet also vile
Were ludicrous in minor deities,
Holding mirrors to their chaos.
Handsome though he was, God kicked him out.
Lucifer keened in misery
But in the kernel of his fall
A final sentence frayed his lips:
‘God wills everyone to love like him.
In his own image must we love,
Or be stripped bare of everything but space.’