|
|
|
|
Gordon Simms: Poetry
Read and listen to award winning poetry
Ten years ago I resumed writing poetry after a gap of some years, and was encouraged by seeing over seventy of my poems appear in print in a variety of publications. I was also fortunate to win a number of competitions and to be placed in many others.
That is one reason why Jocelyn and I launched the Segora Open Poetry Competition, to offer some reward to poets who inevitably work in isolation and may receive little or no recognition. The competition will be annual and in 2010 we shall publish the first Segora anthology of winning entries.
Here is a selection of ten of my poems which collectively were commended in the 2006 New Writer competition. Several of these poems had already won prizes elsewhere. I called the collection “What’s in the Bones” (a line taken from one of them). I feel that much poetry is an amalgam of craft, insight, intuition and often some inexplicable spirit which somehow melds those elements together. To introduce each poem I have recounted some of the influences that forged them.
Use the listing below to go to the poem of your choice, and then click on the the title of the poem to hear the author's reading
Home to the May King; Still Life; Stick; The Dark Side; Why there are Tunnels; Inanna to the Babylonians; Searching for Signs; In the Walled Garden; Embarking from Port Ellen; Putting Back the Clock
|
|
WHAT’S IN THE BONES
A striking example of this “otherness” occurred in the first poem in the collection. I heard the repeated phrase “I watch you” in a dream, and, as it seemed to have happened just before waking, for once I at least remembered the phrase. The poem virtually wrote itself. I cannot say from where it came, though now I realise I was probably writing about the Green Man. I have always admired Robert Graves, and perhaps he was at work once more . . .
I watch you
planting a hedge of hawthorn.
A year from now, the may flower
spreads a cloak
magical as summer snow.
I watch you
planting your elbows on the windowsill,
your smile cross-hatched by rotting lace,
lived-in cobwebs, a miracle of tendrils.
I watch you
planting your idea of indoors,
trailing hangers-on of ivy,
goose-grass skirting the architrave,
knots and nail-holes, bolts and thorns.
Soft, hard. Leaf, stem.
I watch you
planting your feet
under the table.
The apples diminish daily, so it seems.
I admit to eating one of them, but only one.
Someone’s bitten from another, turned it
so the damage is concealed. It sits
lower in the bowl but no-one else
has noticed, or maybe thought it slipped.
I know the slice of teeth, the juice-
lipped crater’s edge, but I’m not saying.
And yet it’s more than those deletions: it’s true
the bloom has gone, the lustre. You could blame
the day’s blue-greyness, the hazy sunshine
that tells us autumn’s round the corner.
Or something about pectin, fructose.
There is the earthen bowl, its roseate harvest,
the strip of green on which it stands. But look,
look at the window, its filtered light,
the shadow of the branch on which the apples
grew; where leaves rustle, gathering wings.
I wrote this in response to an exercise on the theme of Harvest that Jocelyn developed for the IWB. My grandfather was not a farmer, though he bought a former farm and rented out a stable. He is nonetheless the model for this cussed, die-hard traditionalist.
Takes his favourite stick (it was his father’s)
along his chosen route, the milking shed, the falling barn,
to the bottom rung of the gate he helped to hang:
tilts the hat he always wears to shield him from the sun
and squints below the brim.
His eyes catch fire as the dew dries. His nostrils flare.
His fingers are brown horns that briefly charge
him to clamber, pivot, vault: but he’s too frail for that.
He’ll use the post to hang his hat.
The gate creaks behind him. The stick makes a narrow
swathe for him to follow, yielding his years in shadows
that orchestrate his shuffle. His shadow bounds,
plunges, leaps, stretches back so far
with binding strides, then quivers like a hound beside
him when he pauses. A breeze ripples the ears around
him, his shock of hair weaves with the wind-waves
that flow across the field. If ripeness makes a sound
then this is it. He’d better frown, look this way and that,
purse his lips, shake his head a bit. Spit.
He taps his stick again against the ground.
Can’t make it seem too easy, what’s in the
bones.
“
Searching for Signs”
is a collection I wrote in response to the lunar calendar (for 1999). This is
the second poem in that collection
(Snow Moon in the English pagan tradition).The voice is that of one of many moon goddesses.
You are the bruiser, brutal and liverish in the streetlight.
The shadows of the naked rowan lend you warpaint.
You crouch above the blanket-stains, your feet
tangled in underwear, strung out for the kill.
Whispers you ignore, but curse at whimpers, muffle
cries with your forearm, whose infidel muscle
shakes the galleon sails against the sheets.
Then you throw on your clothes, the casual look,
and drag the carcass for the lads to sniff around
the stamping grounds, the chippy and the pub,
cheering each round with its head of steam,
jeering the stripper who takes catcalls as bouquets.
I would send a blessing of snow from my dark side
to yours, covering tracks, deadening the bootfall,
but those wounds do not soften, nor the throbbing ease.
And what, anyway, would you do to snow
if you got your hands on it? When, at three
in the morning, in blue moonlight, you stop
the taxi, lower its window, drop your trousers,
and skim into the frost a piss-hot stream,
yellow as bruises?
I wrote this poem after the murder of Jamie Bulger, though I did not wish to attract attention to this case by naming him in a sub-title. The poem considers the growing malaise of random violence. The imagery relates both to the scene of the crime and to Blands Farm (in North Yorkshire), where a friend showed me underground tunnels for which the rationale is subject to speculation.
Theories concern quartz,
silica, flint, coal:
whatever was needed.
There were surface indicators,
and hearsay promised,
whispering maybe.
Before the first prop or lintel,
the earth barely scuffed,
one could imagine other wants –
possession, sanctuary, concealment. Burial,
the echo of stone and tomb.
Or curiosity. An idle
afternoon, fruit unripe, corn still wet.
The random violence
of a casual stone-throw,
challenge, target, score.
And a rock too heavy for retaliation.
The game is to dare, to best,
obsessional scrape and tear
at the shadow on the leaden face,
sense pounded from the embankment.
Time on their hands.
No other reason.
This is the opening poem of ‘ Searching for Signs.’ (Moon of the Long Night). The goddess is robbed of her daughter.
I was the first victim
held against the wall
made to swallow berries from the mistletoe.
I, who am not her mother,
watched from the balcony as she was carried off.
I, who was silent, gagging
as she was abducted.
She received no embrace, no nicety of wooing,
nor the civil blessings of a promised marriage,
no discovery of love.
Each year is harder than the last.
I lie low for three nights, distraught,
and travel only under cover in my garb
of mourning: the wraps of cloak and veil
snagged by hedgerows where I sleep,
torn and stained as my dress
when the blades ripped at my silence.
I take a lonely path to high places.
Do not speak to me of any birth.
Do not pray to me for resurrection.
There is for you no immortality. Survival
that is its own end has no joy.
When the wick has burnt to a memory
the wax must be cast again, the light rekindled.
Oh, Inanna will rise, if you want her to,
her juice squeezed out from the grapefruit sky.
Prise the crab from its shell. Tease the butterfly
from her winter chrysalis, pin her against the cold marble.
Let her watch her daughter in the long night,
hear her through the night of long knives.
BACK TO LIST OF AUDIO POEMS
This poem is the title poem from the collection. I’ve kept to a straightforward narrative style – the events speak for themselves. I mean this poem as a tribute to the indomitable human spirit that survives, as well as to those who attempt to help and heal the oppressed. .. . .
Christian says, "You talk to them."
They huddle by a crumpled wall.
"They will speak to a woman."
Their arms loop round each
other, like thongs of ivy.
The men fan out, searching for signs,
wary where death has visited.
The oldest woman stumbles forward,
supported by the others. Her face
is creased and dry; there are no tears
to irrigate this landscape.
She points to a small mound. Somehow
they have buried some remains.
Christian directs the clearing of the well,
hauling out carcasses, animal and human.
The leader stutters into speech. Her village
dialect scratches her palate, scales
her arid tongue. I cannot follow her.
I resort to mime and guttural gesture.
The events, I expect, will be familiar.
Slowly, I note the details: a night attack,
the menfolk butchered, the women raped,
abducted; children marched off
for soldiering or sex. Some leapt away,
she says, like gazelles into the scrub.
Others may escape later, who can tell?
But worst of all the deities have gone,
taking the spirits of the elders.
She looks, silent now, towards
the smouldering field. Desertion.
"When?" She shakes her head, shrugs
under the sun. "Who? Bandits?
Guerillas? Did they wear uniforms?"
Some. "Where did they go?" Her eyes
pick out the flat plain to the north.
Their cousins, from a village such as this,
who share their ancestors. Which is why
the gods have fled.
The men have finished the burials.
I mimic the presence of marauders in the bush.
The women flinch from my machete swing,
from the imagined club. Quickly I intimate
a kind of freedom, showing them sleep, food,
some comfort. Christian opens the door,
stands back, indicating wooden benches,
luggage racks, the extra spare.
The crone regards the track
by which we came. We wait.
Now she speaks fluently, as if rain
has cleaned the gully and soothed
the cracked earth into song.
After the moon has set, she says,
just before the dawn, she will hear
the laugh of the hyena, a deliberate
snapping of a twig, the careful rustle
of the brush where there is no wind.
She will see the moving shadow, low
to the ground, furtive and lithe. The shape
will glide between their hunched bodies,
settle into their arms. They will hum
the healing lullaby, and it will sleep.
It will live, and thrive. Then
the gods will return.
The others nod. "How soon?" I ask.
Christian directs construction of a shelter
from the ruins. We improvise a stove.
They refuse our few utensils, a little
flour, some sweet potatoes. We leave
a canister of drinking water. It is all
they will accept.
BACK TO LIST OF AUDIO POEMS
This poem comes from “The Sounds of Islay.” I had the feeling that I wanted to write a kind of psalm, and an isolated ruin near the cliffs of the Atlantic coast became the spur. Bleak yet intimate, the chapel said so much about a former way of life. The sibilance of the vocabulary brings back to me the constant surge of the waves, the wind, the drip of the rain – and the determination of the islanders to celebrate, through worship. The alliterative outbursts recall their defiance in the face of hardship..
a reflection on the many chapels of Islay
So many stones eroded, granules of bitten grit
sheered off. The wind takes care of everything,
furnishing the moss with sharp sand, smothering
indecipherable legends in the grass. Here lieth,
there lieth . . . we guess, painful and slow,
doing our best to estimate the rest in a shadow-play
of hands, a breadth of anonymity scoured from the west.
Grains sweep in from Kilchiaran, Kilchoman
and Kilnenain, from the nameless cilla
of forgotten saints slung along the cedilla
of the Rhinns: gathering in the lap of Islay
between Gruinart and the beaches of Indaal.
Faith grows in this cradle, buffeted by superstition,
staked to the call of exile that would choke the land.
Here the gale is parried with simple deflections,
the collection of particles, painful and slow –
a putting down of roots, a kind of pioneering,
turning the past like a spit of peat,
working hidden names into a fertile tilth.
May the dead build their walls to nurture the living.
Let the living rejoice that the dead take care of themselves.
This poem also comes from “The Sounds of Islay.” I was struck by the idea of tourism set against the harder former life, where there was insufficient work, not enough food, and from which there was an eventual exodus. Boats link these contrasting lifestyles, carrying mundane necessities as well as being vessels of hope, desperation and imagination. It gave me great pleasure that this poem was chosen by a young couple, not known to me, to be read at their engagement party and, indeed, at their wedding. (They were as brave, surely, as any emigrants). . . .
Consider the shape, the curving harbour wall
that thickens to the landing stage, diminishing
again to almost meet itself. There’s a rocky
stretch that threatens against the open sea.
Here’s something receives, encompasses,
delivers: transacts fulfillment, hope
and not a little love.
Not that you’d connect it in the ordinary way -
the flush of tourists, containers full of sundries,
a trailer of boxed, scared cattle.
The Hebridean Isles takes it all for granted, we
in our stride, and the girl with the camera, smiling
by the gangway. The wake’s cord detaches,
swings north. We are dispatched.
Now it’s two-way trafficking in whatever makes us tick.
So much has emptied here in homespun ways
that make no real difference to the scheme of things. Yet
every crossing slips from one life to another, each
one a single star, bright in the western sky where someone
starts and others follow. It’s not easy to equate the wheel
of hours and tides with our concerns, and too glib
to speak of bustle and commercial hubs. But there’s
some magnetic force works on us all, iron filings
on a sheet of paper, flocks of geese flying in to winter.
And what of those who leave and don’t return, who
scull against the current? They’d see themselves
as powerless to do other: learn the fall of waves,
and how, once there were strange alignments in the skies,
would scan for landfall, sniff the wind for vegetation,
wet earth, fresh water. It’s all they’d need.
Well, they’ve pulled away the magnet, the mat beneath
their feet, and put it in a box and hidden it, or thrown
it overboard. They’d take a balanced stance, maybe
promising themselves that one day they’d be back,
or cursing a good riddance and half-believing it.
They’re beyond our reach now, most of them. I guess
they’d all claim more or less the same: We went
with a different drift and, yes, we made a go of it.
Late afternoon, the last before the yachts
slot under pan-tiled roofs or dock in yards
where weathered boatmen will take stock
for winter restoration: this last afternoon
October glows as summer. From the shore
we list the litany of names and numbers
of the passing hulls, the semaphore of sail
and crew as each lays figures on the Broad
or heads off down the Fleet. The sailors’
calls mingle with the grebes’ shrill bark,
a descant to our solemn, muted voices.
Today we tack from autumn’s cooler reaches
as amber sunlight filters through the trees.
Leaves drop, welcoming an easy touch-down
on a breeze that fingers ripples to our feet.
There’s no deception here, despite the trickery
of water, air and light, only a reluctance to admit
our wish, like children, that there’d be no end to this.
A boat is greater than the parts that need preserving.
The same is true of men, and of their hearts.
For a fragile hour or two we cheat a little, tacitly
agree to setting back the clock before we should.
We’d set it back much further if we could.
Let’s drink, commemorating something incomplete,
a task unfinished. For though the grass is cut,
logs stacked, blackberries picked and apples
pressed, we’re thwarted of our place before
the winter fire. Like willow fronds we whisper
of what moves us, and speak determinedly
of that which moves us on as our shadows
lengthen on the lawn. We know we share
this fondness now: we may not share again.
Tomorrow the wind will freshen, there’ll be rain.
Thanks to Adrian Simmonds
(79150 St. Sauveur, France) for the use of his recording studio and expertise
with the recording
