Friends Reunited by Steve Rudd

Now that I’m pushing sixty, I spend time,

Much more time than I used to, looking back

Instead of forwards. Back, over my shoulder,

Down the hill of years, stand long-demolished pubs

Where we sank our first illicit pints, in streets, levelled now,

Where we had rare, exotic snogs at bus-stops,

Or, more often, disappointed, caught the last train home.

Was that even me, those years ago?

I’m not looking for my lost youth,

I know exactly where he is, he’s prisoner

Inside flat planes of photographs,

Black and white, I know him all too well

Awkward and gawky, John Lennon glasses,

Flares and tennis shoes, back in the days

Before they got called `trainers’.

Places like this don’t help: my past’s online

As if I was already history’s exhibit. Why am I here?

Because my old school friend (now lives in Wales!)

Sent me a “link” to click on, and up pops

This photo, taken 1967; both the message

And the medium of transmission, wireless through air,

Would have seemed witchcraft to us, way back then.

Boothferry Playing Fields, yeah, there we are,

Boys and girls both, fixed in our best blue uniforms,

Like specimens in a museum diorama;

Staring out into a future that became unravelled,

Lots of different lives, shorter for some than others,

Blank pages, still to be written, tangled skeins

Ravelling and unravelling again, blood in new veins,

New names to be grafted onto vacant branches

Of the budding family tree.

Their eyes ask what I want of them, especially the girls,

With their prim white kneesocks; that’s easy answered!

I want the same thing now I wanted then, but more so!

Though `now’ would be more difficult, for me, `now’ would involve

Me ironing out my wrinkles, standing up (a miracle!)

And shrugging off the rucksack of the decades

That I carry, back-bending baggage,

 – and for them, much harder still,

Changing back their names, forsaking kids and husbands,

Or rising from the pages of the dead,

Pulling on tight jeans, frizzing their hair, getting stoned again,

Wearing beads and headbands and

Coming through my screen, their virgin presence

Filling the room with the sudden scent of patchouli

- Filling my life with what might once have been.

Moonlit House by Deborah Tyler-Bennett

where a known ghost walks.  Barbara Villiers,
Merry Monarch’s mistress, pacing blue lit halls
Lamenting beauty drained to dropsy.
Bulking figure breaking night quiet,
lamenting her lustrous skin,
doll eyes snuggled in sourdough flesh
recalling face and hands
once gleamed softly as freshwater pearls,
crying her past, as Hawkers
cry wares.  Now looks exist
only anecdotally.
She’s spectre,
to amuse, or drag in tourists,
dropsied shadow, sobbing yesterday,
presence catching the throat.

Drunk Back-packer startled by floured
features at a window, by cheeks pocked as gibbous moons.
She fades, hears her whisper …’Lord, save us’.

Ghost pacing, drained, breaking her flesh and softly crying,
now only spectre, or shadow presence,
startled by us.

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

Red Kites over Loch Ken by Steve Rudd

Have they been wheeling and waiting for me, how long,
Over these bare February branches,
skeletons they will neither roost in
Nor pick at, wood-bones for which they have no use?

Waiting all the while the silver water slides as rustled silk
Right to left, under the old viaduct at Parton?
Driven by massive air
That I can only guess at, from Greenland, arctic, God knows where,
They circle now; the world is stilled, only the kites revolve
In their great arcs of prey-seeking.

What strange concatenation of events
Has brought me here to see them, how could they know
I would be brought within the ambit of their circling?
Did they know the tide was out at Carrick, and the wind
Too strong, too blustering, there, to launch?

When all of us could just as well be elsewhere, yet
They still achieve their stasis in the frame of my eyes;
Was I recovered from the clutch of darkness, from the pull
Of an even wilder, darker shore than Galloway’s, for this vision?
Just to see the red kites wheel in the glint of February sunlight
Burnishing the loch beneath them, the rippling surface
Silver out of grey, some alchemy of light unknown to me.

I have a sense this moment is important
But, like so many others in my life, no inkling why,
No sense of wide significance, except their dark magnificence
Up there means something I don’t know yet:
All I know is the moment when, above bare February branches,
Crisscrossing sky in black patterns like veins, the kites
Rose over shores, hovering, huge, majestic; here
Soar red kites in the cold sky.

And I am watching them, and watching water; maybe
Spring will come back after all – there have been other signs, now I think on it,
And here am I, today, watching the red kites over Loch Ken,
And, for once, not drowning, but waving.

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.