The pilot banked his hundred wingspan south:
How much magnetic, how much true, how much compass –
Work the variation through,
Two hundred miles an hour and a following wind,
Harder to get home again over lace of roads and lanes
Plus or minus deviation for a course to steer
Red and black on spread map at the navigator’s table,
A smell for life of petrol, peardrops and rexine.
Run a pencil down from A to B –
Now on the fortieth anniversary I reinvigorate
The game which formed my life’s dead reckoning
Impossible to fathom as in that bomber I assumed I could –
Everything mechanical and easy to work,
Map in top-left pocket, crawling the long coffin
Between bombracks and centre section
No view of the world for forty feet,
Parachute forgotten but who goes back
At seventeen? Who thinks the air is not for him,
Merlin engines all his own, strip map beckoning
Through Death’s cathedral for a dwarf?
Everything is there to open: the rear gunner’s turret
For a technicolor backward view
A track made good of woods and the botch of Leicester
Railways of Rugby, the sandstone of Oxford
The peace of Abingdon and first view of the Thames,
Canals and rivers of new reality, calico tablecloth
Hiding all in me, unseen from my chosen seat.
Better not to know how I reached the far-back turret
Of downdraught and upcurrents, eyes on the past’s
Wide fan shaping my destination.
A button put me side-on to the slipstream,
An east-west variation of the view. People ignored
The buzzing of our passage, engines hiding the silence
Of a so-far buried life, looking over four guns
Ready to suck all spirits up like fishes to a net.
Cherish the distance between them and me
But get inside the theatre of what goes on,
Or open the door and tumble into space –
No one would know I’d gone or where, destroying
The homely panorama and my body.
Death would not burn the spirit but I’d be off
And out of the map, shoes, tunic and cap looted
By gravity: Hello! as I spin, so glad to know you
But I never will. There, I don’t belong,
My place forever looking down and in.
Alone, far back, to face the vanishing horizon squarely on.
Dim as it is, don’t go, corrupted by haze
Loving what I cannot reach. The theatre’s anatomy
And madness missed, don’t care about a full cast waiting
To come in order of appearance and perform their dreams,
Ambition’s engine, curtains holding back
Till the planet Lancaster divides the space
And I return over empty bombracks to get born again.
SHYLOCK THE WRITER
Humanity is good to bait fish with,
Salt fish that dries in the throat
And needs vodka to turn it down.
Such human quality pressed
A jackboot onto his vocation.
A mob was set on him whose rage
Needed no stoking.
A writer has eyes, hands, a heart
A pen that sometimes scratches
Like a rose-thorn at a gardener’s vein.
He borrows words
And lends them out at interest,
Turns from each season and
With no humility or ignorance
Tells a story to keep the world quiet.
DELACROIX’S ‘LIBERTY GUIDING THE PEOPLE’
For the first few hundred yards
They knew her as a shirtmaker
Urging them over smoky corpses,
And when they said enough was enough
She climbed the lip of the barricade
To lead them over.
The world
Was impossible to open with a bayonet
That could not stop a cannon-ball in flight:
Nor could her red flag light them
Through a more than human darkness.
Then, whoever she was, she became LIBERTY.
No one knew when, by wonderful inspiration
She stripped off her shirt
And showed her bosom as a reminder
Of what brought them out of darkness.
Liberty, clothe your breasts
With that red flag –
I’ll love you then.
Or let it guide the broken locomotive
Not the mob.
The boy with a pistol –
A cannon-ball took off his leg.
Your breasts gave liberty
But cured his worship.
Now he sells cheap pictures by the Louvre
Of Mona Lisa and The Wreck of the Medusa.
THE ITALIAN WOMAN
An Italian woman talking to her lover
On some far-off ocean
Mellifluously
From a villa in Liguria:
When are you coming back?
Shortwave static gruffed his voice.
I thought it would be soon, she said,
The scent of shrubs around her.
I love you, he said, but Neptune rules.
A sad laugh in her throat:
Yes, I understand,
So goodbye my handsome man,
I love you too.
The click of a telephone put down,
Sea noise rushing back.
Ah, love, I haven’t lost you yet.
I love the sad laugh in her throat,
Face and body never to be seen
Nor flowers surrounding her.
I congratulate my rival,
And swing the needle onto other voices.
THE LIBERTY TREE
First of all
The brambles had to be pulled out
By the roots.
With thick gardening gloves
Against the spikes
I burrowed around the tree bole
And clasped them tight
And tugged their stomachs
Out of cosy soil.
It wasn’t enough.
I had to walk away
Dragging the whole entanglement
From topmost branches,
Evergreen needles snowing me
As claws protested.
I got them down.
And yanked them loose
But it was slow work
Then cut away the ivy
Broke each brittle snake-branch
From sucker tracks
Halfway up and round the trunk,
Some fingers
More tenacious than an arm.
Next it was the nettles’ turn
Them I grasped low down;
The taller they were
The easier they came,
Bunches of stings
Cast out to die.