Infamy
Stems
From believing pride to be
One’s possession, which sets you to
Retaliate against the weals of fate.
God has no pride. Lucifer’s mistake
In thinking so was responsible for the
Vanquishing of
Entire
Nations.
THE LAST
When God said
Let there be Man
He also said
Let there be Lucifer.
Lucifer became
And in becoming
Was the only threat to God.
Lucifer is part of God
And part of Man:
Unity is limitless
Small and indivisible.
Lucifer thought
God ruled through Lucifer
But God rules alone.
Man rules, if and when,
Through Lucifer.
Lucifer walks in circles,
With God forever present
And forever silent.
GOODBYE LUCIFER
Goodbye, Lucifer, goodbye:
I say goodbye to everything;
When the end arrives and knocks its time
My body won’t dictate the tune
Nor my soul sing dead.
Goodbye, Utopia
Whose minute never came.
Goodbye –
In case I cannot say it then
Or death’s too slow for me to care.
Goodbye, Lucifer, goodbye
People music language maps
Goodbye to love
And rivers alluvially curving.
Goodbye the sky.
Goodbye, Lucifer and all reflections,
Farewell to bodies and machinery
Goodbye the spirit of the universe
Goodbye.
from Sun Before Departure, 1974–1982
HORSE ON WENLOCK EDGE
A tired horse treads
The moonpocked face
Of a ploughed field
Cuts furrows blindly
Through drifting rain
On chestnut trees, soaked hedges
Energy sucked out with evening;
Seven nails in each steel shoe
Are empty scars of twenty-eight nights
When the white horse dreams
Of galloping through star-clouds,
A moon of nails flying from its path.
NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
Clouds play with their water
Distort shekels between grass
Enriched by the city that flattens
Surrounding land with rubbish;
Binoculars ring the distance like a gun:
From a sea of shining slate
Churches lift and chimneys lurch,
Modern blocks block visions,
The Robin Hood Rifles drilled in fours
Practised azimuths on far-off points,
Eyes watering at southern hills
A half-day’s march away:
‘They’ll have to swim the Trent, thou knows,
God-damn their goldfish eyes!’
Musket balls rush, break glass,
Make rammel. The Nottingham Lambs
Smashed more than a foreign army,
Came through twitchells to spark the rafters
Paint pillars with the soot of anarchy.
The Trent flowed in its scarlet coat
Too far off to deal with fire:
The council got our Castle in the end
Protected by Captain Albert Ball VC
Who thrust into a cloud-heap above Loos
Hoping for his forty-second kill.
In school they said: ‘You’re born
For Captain Albert Ball
To be remembered. Otherwise he’d die!’
A private soldier, he became Icarus:
‘Dearest Folks, I’m back again
In my old hut. My garden’s fine.
This morning I went up, attacked five Huns
Above the Line. Got one, and forced two down
But had to run, my ammunition gone.
Came back OK. Two hits on my machine.’
Fate mixed him to a concrete man
An angel overlooking
On the lawn of Nottingham’s squat fort.
My memory on the terrace
Remembers barges on the Leen
Each sail a slice of paper, writing
Packed in script of tunic-red.
For eighteen years I blocked the view
No push to send me flying.
Another brain shot down in sleep:
Rich Master Robin Hood outside the walls
Where he belongs robs me of time
And does not give it to the poor.
The whimsical statue stood
With hat and Sherwood weapons
Till a Nottingham Lamb removed the arrow
Someone later nicked the bow
Then they stole the man himself
And rolled his statue down the hill
One football Saturday
And splashed it in the Trent:
If you see it moving, take it:
If it doesn’t move, steal it bit by bit
But do not let it rest till Death’s sonic boom
Blows the sun through every Castle room.
OXNEY
Smoke all evening, too thin to move
Stubble aflame
Up a hillside when I drove
Across the flat half-mile between
Iden and the Isle of Oxney. A line
Of white, lipped in red set a corner
Of the battlefield on fire,
And cloud like a grey cloak was pulled along
By some heart-broken mourner going home.
NORTH STAR ROCKET
At the North Pole everywhere is south.
Turn where you will
Polaris in eternal zenith
Studs the world’s roof.
Under that ceiling
A grey rocket crosses
A continent of ice,
Evading Earth by flirting with it.
Who will know what planet he escaped from?
A cone of cosmic ash pursued its course
On automatic pilot set to earth
Bringing Death — or a new direction
To be fed into my brain
Before collision.
FIFTH AVENUE