Planting my foot down firmly
to peer down
at the spent sentry heads of precariously
colonizing strawberry clover,
wind shunting wave-rush
to sputtering blusters
over the quilled cliff edge,
wordless voices chunnering*
at the fraying limits
of a little, blistering human recognition,
all the coarse-grained and knotted turmoils
that heavy my flesh
and agonize my conversations,
if it were possible,
I would cast down to splatter
with driftwood of beams and boxes
prodigally launched from profiting ships,
but let the elements weather them,
dark comedy of wind-paws sculpt them,
that a persistent seed blown down may root to bloom
precariously there,
fructified by adventurous bees
on a fair day.
.................................
*Dead Man's Hill lies along the cliffs between Sherringham and Weybourne on the Norfolk coast, UK. We are roughly at the site of the first poem in my collection 'Under The Wings' - 'The Wide World'.
*'chunnering' is a dialect form of chuntering as in 'chuntering on' - talking rapidly and familiarly without considering the capabilties of the listener.
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.
