Long, yearling, leaved stems of privet,
this side of the solstice, resiliently persist
in subtle foil-play with the winds they evince
yet with whom they twirl, so attuning their movements
that the hedge makes the breeze seen,
merging knowledge with imagination,
while teasing out sensual margins;
though in violent gusts they confirm separate identities: -
demonstrative the coil and side-slip swipe away.
But as late November daylight drains
behind houses, behind lowering cloud,
they seem, curiously, poignantly choreographed,
to be on a bleak set, shivering isolate;
and the dimming grey is puddling distinction now
at the ballet's end. Ruffles of dusk.
Recurrent phantoms of apprehensions
seep and develop in our dark-room trance.
Will we wake up and renew our dance?
Or will fey mind games move us as pawns -
expendable hazards of dark-humoured struggle
whose webbing emotion distorts our expression?
Yeats know those (though few have fathomed him)
who thinking to ride to the other-world rout
were mere beasts of burden for ancient berserkers:
anguished laments and angry cries
pierce violent winds. Who looks through your eyes?
I thought I was elsewhere, in other company.
Hungry ghosts and bruised children
need more sweets from a puppet market -
a profit in trancing for pushers of habit
whose light fingers flit over patterns of buttons
to run the repeats on a programmed attrition;
but that the root's not money others have guessed.
Can't we leave well alone -
the whisper at the window, the script in the dream -
do we need others only to know what we mean?
The moon turns over. It is cold
Old cat's lost wail demands compassion:
I peer down deep unconscious alleys,
remembering seagulls gliding over backyards
sparrows paper-darting over a sky
grained and grinning as joke money,
the civilized pigeons by broken windows
of deserted small windows alighting
to grace our dereliction of needful concerns.
Tomorrow's desert roads, half-constructed,
will again dislodge from broken pavements
the tired and unwilling who leak into school
their dreams forgetting. What interior escapes
our terrible training in unconviction?
A bitching damp settles chill,
relentless as winter's hard-bitten front.
Future-pinched in this town, the strong and the frail
wear the same bleak scars of betrayal.
......................................
Written in 1982 in the depth of (Wicked Witch of the West) Margaret Thatcher's depression, when the unemployment figures (massaged down by a million in 14 changes to the way they were taken) were over 3 Million in the UK - supposedly 13.8 of the workforce.
YOU ARE READING
Tapestries
PoetryPoems from 1978 onwards. These poems are in a different style from the later MajorSeventh, the earlier ones often with more of an Eastern-influenced cadence. Later, they vary a lot in form and style.
