Little Song by Deborah Tyler-Bennett

For Lydia Dwight (Daughter of John Dwight, 
Founder of the Fulham Pottery)
Died 1674,  Aged Six

Dead, Lydia Dwight, Fulham’s salt daughter -
Shining in Stoneware, blitzed bells are pealing,
toll her hands’ herbal, milky glaze sealing
her cosseted form.  All but breezed laughter
is captured, cerements, cooling water.

Dead, Lydia Dwight, child beyond feeling,
domed Snow White, rippled light’s stealing
over baby fists, dappling blooms brought her,
careful carved, hand held for posterity –

Anemones wilt, Tulips, Ox-eyes,
Rosemary, Lilies, bleached Love-lies-bleeding.
Lydia’s laced-tight, calm austerity
makes stilled clappers of city bells rise:

Hymning:  ‘Dead!  Fulham’s daughter’. 
Tongues pleading.


from her most recent collection, Revudeville, (King's England Press, 2011, £7.95)

Like Clockwork by Steve Rudd

The only things that matter in life

Are time, and suffering, says my friend Maisie,

Herself a philospoher, with two degrees,

One in philosophy, so she should know.

And time is fascinating, she says; odd choice of word,

Personally, I used to have no time for time,

It passed me by like a river flowing round a stone,

Until I got my new clock; new to me, that is

Though half a century of time has uncoiled

From its mainspring, up til now.

What is this stuff, time? No-one knows, says Maisie,

And true, I do know little of clocks, time’s messengers,

Though I know lots on suffering,

Having made copious notes,

Sometimes referred to as “poems”.

Suffering always goes hand-in-hand with clocks;

Sometimes, time ekes it out in gobbets,

And other times, clusters of sufferings.

My new clock ticks them off, one by one,

Within its wooden walls, its cheery face meanwhile

Round and rubicund, like an old friend.

Its chimes cathedral me through the day

And through the long canonical hours of night

Prime, terce, compline, it’s my own Abbey,

Ding-donging its echoes of gothic arches,

Stained glass, stone cloisters, mechanical

Heraldic quarter-boys, Jack Blandifers,

And the Garden of Wiccamical Prebends

(“Keep Off The Grass!”)

Part-astrolabe, part-orrery, its moving parts inside

Its polished case regulate my every task,

Hands quarter off my days, cogs circulating

Like planets in a system, a universe

Of wheels with teeth, and chains,

A lever-arm, a rack, even a snail

Are caught up in mechanical suffering.

And so I let it count my seconds, tick each day away:

In truth, I have no option – tradesmen call,

Or couriers with deliveries, “before twelve”, it marks them all,

Opticians due at three, I’m marking time,

I’m killing time, or time is killing me, and suffering runs on

Like the brown Ganges round a rock, and every tick

While the church clock stands at ten to three

While there’s honey still for tea, each seven seconds,

A baby dies in India, like clockwork.

Do hands sweep over faces to catch hot tears,

Or is that time’s pursuit, not suffering? Or both?

There’s one born every minute, so they say,

But maybe God needs winding up a bit,

On his bad days, when he says “suffer, little children”,

And really means it.

Time will bring suffering to an end,

Or vice versa, therefore do not seek to send

For whom the clock chimes: it chimes for me.

A Walney Island Skylark by Steve Rudd

Exulting in the high miles of sun

Stacked above the dunes, upward, upward

“All aboard, all aboard”, it twitters,

While, on the sea, the bright sun glitters,

Plunge, swash, backwash, of its longshore drift:

Even the wind turbines

On the horizon haze-line

Have an improbable Mediterranean feel

Like painted scenery against the sky

In a Venetian opera.

Finished for now, song-exhausted

It flutters back to ground

Somewhere among the waving grass

Ruffled by the wind like a green sea,

Alongside the blue sea,

Where the whoosh of the wind

beats the myriad seed heads to a shimmer of silver,

Or momentary flash of burnished brass.

It drops to the cool embrace of earth;

Somewhere among the scrubland, in the sand

In the cool green gloom of gorse and grundsel

Lies its fragile offering, a plaited plate of grass

Containing precious eggs, dull speckled jewels,

Or polished cloudy pebbles, each encasing next summer’s song

Of sun, within the yellow essence of their yolks.

A Dog's Life by Steve Rudd

A DOG’S LIFE

I. M. Tiggy, 1996-2011

My forebear, Thomas Thornhill, shepherd, would have known,

Sitting up alone at night is better with a dog

To keep you company: Victoria wore the crown

When he sat in his hut, out on the Wolds,

Dark blanketing the woods, in winter fog,

At lambing-time, there to protect the folds.

Or with the winter moon, bright as a florin

Showing behind the tracery of the trees

Frosting the grass with silver:

And, as I always told my dog,

Whenever she would listen, not often, I admit,

Her less-domesticated cousins, wolves

Would always seek the opportunists’ entrance:

The gate left careless open.

My thoughts themselves are wolves, out there tonight,

Out in the dark, with wild eyes gleaming bright;

My sheep are purely theoretical, and now

Alas, so is my dog: alas, at last.

I feel her loss, keen as a wolf-moon-howl!

Ah, nevermore she’ll frolic on sands, flat,

At Kildonan, or on Kilbrannan’s shore!

The miles she travelled with us, hills she climbed,

The sticks and frisbees fetched,

The seas she crossed, and now the last shore left

And in the moonlit sky, the dog-star twinkling.

Ironically, she was scared of sheep,

Their bleating spooked her,

Stupid mutt: I loved her, and that’s that;

No poem will bring her back, and any monument’s

Inadequate: so now we learn to sleep

Without her weight upon the bed

Without her twitching, dreaming, now, her

Memories are the pictures that we keep.

Tom Thornhill’s voice comes echoing down the years:

‘Get another one, lad! can’t work without a dog!’

Is all his rough, no-nonsense speech, says - wool, warp, weft,

I sort of know his meaning – it’s not ill, but …

Spring might come,

Silvering the grass with frost,

And it will find me lone, and lonely, still,

On this bare mountain outcrop in my head, bereft,

Still wishing I could stroke behind her ears

Once more;

Still waiting for another dog,

To come and rescue me.

Limestone Landscape, Littondale, by J. D. Taylor

This is a landscape where the walls have taken over, or so it seems.
Down here is a wall farm. They grow best in the light, whitening
like the bones of those who made them. Some chequered penance.
In hard winters, in false springs, lambs are fed to the walls.
Men come flat-capped and scowl at their own wool hardness.
Nothing to a wall their ancestors made for the keeping in of.
What is kept in? The years. The bouldering losses, friable crags
for yet more walls. Put in a gate and eventually it falls.
Like a bronze age brooch to pin a cloak the gate goes down.
Sheep repeat themselves without progression within walls.
The walls hold down pasture the weather would tear off.
Strung out buddhas on a crumbling cosmos, their weight is their weight,
the undeflected gestures, carrion stare of stone.
Barrack-squared, the occupation is efficient. Time runs on time.
Authority is earthed. What is above ground is wired.
It may not look live but it presides. The walls were made,
had themselves compiled painstakingly, a lexis of restraint,
a dialect of the tribe who nipped fingers and calloused
hands that once loved wives. Walls used backs to vault up scarps,
backs long since asleep after all the sheep are counted in.
Yet men come to hang fresh gates and whistle lithe dogs through arcs.
Sheep are bowled along tuning up in piecemeal union.
New bad weather arrives breathless with intelligence in its gauntlet.
The walls were not always here. Tell them it will not always be this way
- if you dare. You can't even rest against one in comfort.
And they leak the wind. When it rains they sweat and dewdrop.
They have not changed since they were rushed up and stiled.
A crag can sing, a wire keen, but a wall cannot mutter.
They expressed a purpose for a while. They were a kind of dress.
We walk through them, warm and confused in our integral cells,
where the quick light blazes and the blood glows, skin deep.
We are still here, ready and able to serve man, woman, sheep or stone.
Yes, able to descend even to the servitude of broken rock.
A wall cannot give. It just is: tool, passage, solution, endeavour.
Very satisfying it is to push one over, but we mustn't.

Welcome

Welcome to Bard Mousse, the official poetry blog of The King's England Press, featuring work by Deborah Tyler-Bennett, Steve Rudd, J. D. Taylor, and maybe others ...