Hometown by Steve Rudd

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT-OhRyonXc

Sentry Duty by Steve Rudd

Halt! who goes there?

Maybe it’s just the darkness coming up the garden

Between and through the trees

Like Birnam wood, en route to Dunsinane.

I’ll take first watch, I thought,

And here I am again, the lone sentry,

Just me and my little bayonet,

Holding back the dark

By staring into it, defiantly.

These nights, this time of year,

A feeble glimmer around

About four-thirty heralds dawn;

I must not sleep on guard, on duty,

But once the light washes greyly up the sky

Behind the branches

I can sleep then, relieved at last.

Until then, I issue peremptory challenges,

And hope to deter; doors all bolted, locked,

But still the dark seeps in, and  

My enemies, my responsibilities

Sit heavy on my head as a steel helmet

Scarred by life’s shrapnel.

This dark trench I find myself confined in

Through a waste of mud that used to sustain life

Leads all the way to the ocean,

And escape means only barbs that tear

Or tears that barb, desertion, or disgrace.

Stand to, up on the firestep! Here flies

Yet more shit your way!

Hush, here comes a whizzbang!

And it’s heading straight for you -

Fix bayonets, five rounds rapid,

Then pull through.  

Somehow, pull through.

My Dad would have understood all this

In his sojourn under the summer orchard trees

Listening for the Luftwaffe’s engines

Rerr-rerring their way across the Channel

Bearing destruction, bearing fire, and

Shrapnel that hummed like hot hornets;

My Grandad, looking through his periscope

Into no-man’s land, would have known

My coiled and tangled wire,

My weariness of body, and of heart.

And, these days, I feel more and more like them

Now I, too, am become sepia and faded,

Slightly out of focus, and tattered at the edges;

Like them, I never volunteered for this;

Oh no, despite my frequent objections of conscience,

And the fact that I am scared shitless,

I too was conscripted, enlisted, just like them,

by the grim recruiting sergeant, Death

NEW POETRY TITLE FROM THE KING'S ENGLAND PRESS

HAUNTINGS: Poems and Stories by Steve Rudd
(August 2014) ISBN 978 1 909548 37 4
9" x 6", 152pp, paperback £7.95

Skiddaw, Easter Sunday

http://youtu.be/PJ_knVdjruY

To An Old Ex, On Her Birthday

Why do I do this, why torture myself
With these visions of summer hedgerows
Laden heavy with fragrant blossoms;
And Chichester harbour, the masts of yachts
At the bottom of opulent lawned gardens,
Roman palaces once found underneath;
Mosaics we once paid a pound to see?

Why do I do this, why do I even allow
You in my dreams and musings?
Even though I know you’re now
Fifty-six years old, wherever you are.

Uncharitable, but true. So,
Why do I do this; why does my mind’s gunsight always zero in
On 1986? Now, in my cold monastic cell, my wizened hovel?
How did I ever once go, down those green lanes
Leading to sea; pull up outside your flat
In a spray of gravel, twenty-seven years ago?

And here’s this damaged Polaroid, its
emulsion gaudy and dateless as a memorial window,
Of you tending the barbie – Oh, summer days,
Down at that railway carriage in the sands
That served as changing room and chalet. Surely

Somewhere, it must always be that seaside summer;
Witterings Beach, with ‘Uptown Girl’ on the stereo,
While the sun was always warm and westering
And we in our brown skins were both blessed with salt.

Anyway, I’m sorry.

I seem to say that, more and more, these days,
To a range of disappointed girls, some historical,
Some even dead: the rest are photographs.
And some days, hot remorse
Courses through my veins like mercury
I’ve not done very well; it must be said.

I hope you’re still OK, and doing fine;
Much as I miss your face, your hair, the candleight, the wine,
Perhaps you’re better off a haunting dream -
I wouldn’t wish you shared this shrivelled life of mine.

Two New Poems by Gez Walsh

I Am Pimp

I am pimp; I take your language and make it my own.

Your malleable words become mine to do as I wish.

What is your pleasure? What would you like me to supply you with?

I have a lovely pair of double entendres for you to look at!

Or maybe you prefer your expletives neat, and want full frontal titillation?

Do you want your words to disturb the mind and colour the soul?

What about something young and in your face?

I never judge; I like a bit of puerile myself from time to time.

Let my words play with your ears and wet your mind,

I can twist them, bend them, strip them, dress them,

 pay me your money and I shall supply them anyway you like them.

I am Pimp, I am pomp, I am poem, I am poet! 

Ten More Minutes, Please!

I feel your cold presence here in this room

See a fleshless vision through the gloom

I know it’s my time to walk with you,

But in my mind a few things I must do,

Grant me ten more minutes, please!

So I may again walk upon a golden sand

With the one I love hand in hand

Underneath the warm Mediterranean sun

With my legs once more enabled to run

Just ten more minutes, please!

So I may hold my children to my heart

And kiss their lips before we must part

Then sing out loud my favourite song

Amongst my friends where I belong

Then dance the steps of a thousand dances,

Relive the glares of envied glances,

To fight the fights I should have fought,

And teach the lessons I should have taught

I shall remember friends that have walked with you

These are things I need to do,

To swim with dolphins in a crystal blue sea

To meditate beneath a willow tree,

Just ten more minutes, please!

So before you bring down your razor scythe,

Let me drink my last gulp of life

Then reaper I shall willingly walk with you

Hand in hand to pastures new,

But grant me just ten more minutes please!

Glen Sannox by Steve Rudd

Which came first, mist or mountain?

No-one knows, no man alive, nor in the tombed enclosure

By the old Baryite mines: not even the dotted sheep, generations

Grazing on tumbled cairns, stone circles, chambered tombs

Or huts now dents in fields. No-one knows if one day

The mists thickened, or parted like veils

To reveal a maiden’s breast, or a jagged comb;

Or if one day, the granite in the clouds, always nascent,

Simply solidified, into a massive unconformity.

Arête, col, moraine, corrie; these are all words I learned in school

Much later. Words we use to describe something that is wordless,

Elemental, too old to have words of its own, or if it had,

They are now incomprehensible

As marks of cups and rings

Once carved in weathered stone

By hands that long since blessed the sky in prayer.

Such crags, clints and grykes, drumlins and eskers

Were lodged early in the glacier of my schooling,

These words we give to mountains too big for words;

Hoping to appease their Gods,

But surely something this dramatic

Cannot just have been ground out over years by ice

Oozing in the long groan of its melting; surely

These mountains are mere scenery!

Created right now, conjured by the art of wizards, druids,

Using the ochres of rowan, slate, heather and blaeberry, somehow,

And when the mist comes down again,

They will rumble away, on some hidden mechanism

Changing my island fantasy, its acts and characters, once more.  

Life is made of mist and mountains,

But how to tell which is which, ah, that’s the question:

How to tell which came first, and what my face was like

Before the mountains were made of mist, or mist of mountains, 

Before the nameless people flint-scored their marks on cromlechs:

First there is a mist, and then there is a mountain,

Then there is no mountain, then there is.