I began writing poems in my late teens, though most of those have long since been lost to time, mercifully perhaps. A number of poems written in my early to late twenties were published in magazines, The Guardian and other papers and journals, but my 'published-poet' period didn't last long. I ended it myself, the summer of 1975, on receiving a letter from the editor of one of the two poetry magazines that had printed a lengthy poem of mine about a ruined house in the Orkneys, asking if I would read it at a poetry festival he was organising. I gulped in horror at the thought of stammering all those quietly-produced lines before a visible audience, made my excuses, and never again submitted a poem anywhere, for fear of other such requests. However, I continued to write poems for my eyes alone until the impulse (or ability) began to fade in the late 1990s and deserted me entirely shortly after the turn of the century - until the Coronavirus pandemic hit us, whereupon I reached for pencils and scraps of paper and wrote eighty or so poems in the two years that followed, after which I dried up again. The covers above represent my two privately-printed collections of poems. The poems shown below are from these two.
To hear readings of some of them click ML READINGS.
IN FLAT COUNTRY
(One of my earliest published poems.)
My passport, curled at the edges,
Lies in a drawer seven years out of date
Bearing a picture of me with different eyes.
From the window the sky
Is an enormous barrel of wasting apples –
Tip over the barrel and cider rains.
From the door the high corn in August
Bows before the great green harvester.
From the loft you hear the steady scrape
Of a tired man's feet on hard earth,
His throaty cough in the twilight.
Some nights I hear my name called,
But this is such flat country.
In flat country echoes run riot.
Mornings I listen to the news
And count the people on my plate.
_________________________
HARKING BACK
On certain Sundays at the hotel in Odéon, 1965,
around the time that Winston Churchill died,
you would kick me out of that big hard bed
to make coffee in bowls, to sip between
bleary sighs and grumbles about the lack of this,
the loss of that, the temperature of the room.
The window stood grey through February.
Ice along the ledge.
Just an ordinary winter window in the long days,
but at night a crutch to dream upon
while picking out the windows of other
exiles anonymous forging future nostalgias
in freezing green garrets just like mine.
There I would sit, snowbound, youthbound,
numb in mind and body, adrift in my world
of quaint tomorrows, longing in secret
for the comforts of friends' homes:
eggs and bacon, central heating, unstained sheets.
And when my imaginary lover
shifted in her sleep, I took my place beneath
the 8-watt bulb, stub of martyr's pencil poised,
thinking that in the afternoon I might loiter outside
Shakespeare and Company in the Rue de la Bûcherie
running through my Young Hemingway impressions,
and later lounge behind the broad plate glass
of the Dôme or the Rotonde, feeling just a bit
like Jimmy Joyce. But soon I'd get caught up
in my labours and forget about you, the window,
the dead, and the wealthy Parisienne
from a week ago who sniffed at me suspiciously
and said: 'You're the first real writer I've met.'
_________________________
AFTER THE SIX-DAY WAR (1967)
There were thirty of us in the old work truck
Out to sightsee the captured Golan.
Avraham, our guide,
Expressed his pride in half a dozen languages,
Driving one-handed, microphone in the other,
Pointing out sites of historical interest,
Scenes of particular carnage, while we
Tourist-workers, packed in back, all shook up,
Took in the abandoned ephemera of battle lost:
Used shells, dud green hand grenades,
Sandbags, command huts, latrines,
Overturned trucks, an immobilised tank's
Once thrusting eager barrel
As impotent now as a spent erection,
Stained torn army fatigues,
Hats with funny pulldown earflaps,
And shoes, dozens of shoes, hundreds,
Lodged in the parched earth like
Drained limbs seeking rebirth.
The bodies had long been handed over
To relatives for ritual mourning, old snapshots
Set to become well-thumbed icons of
My brother, my son, my lover, my pal,
He died for his people, he was brave.
At ancient, now silent Quneitra
We pulled in to a grove of mellow cypresses
To eat our cold packed tourist lunches
From plastic containers, pleased with ourselves
As though we had personally conquered here,
Singing and joking together to prove our camaraderie;
And later, in an incongruously modern theatre,
Little John tossed his hat into the stalls
And urinated from the stage, to cheers.
Every building stood empty.
Every house on every street.
All doors flung back, or kicked in.
In the gloom, dusty spirals of afterlight,
Tables displaying the remnants
Of prematurely ended meals, half empty cups
Accumulating mould, bugs in stone-dry bread,
Pottery shards on cold floors, beds left unmade.
All the treasured keepsakes, all the families gone,
Bundled into cars and carts and lorries
As the town disgorged its heart on the black road
Between the blue Syrian hills.
When the soldiers came they met no resistance,
Met no one at all; went away again triumphant.
Only the dogs remained. The dogs and the rats,
Picking over the bones of dead houses.
As our truck bumped back towards
Green Galilee through the humid afternoon
Our earlier exuberance was no more.
The air was uneasy with dark possibilities.
Could it be, our silence seemed to say,
That next time it might be our shoes
Planted in the dust, our photographs passed
From hand to grieving hand,
Our trenches overrun, homes abandoned,
Our families trailing mile on mile
Along a thin black road;
And in our wake the multi-lingual patriotism
Of another guide, another Avraham,
Who next time might not be a Jew?
_________________________
PERSONAL MYTHOLOGIES
(A version of this was published twice in the early 1970s
in magazines whose titles I've long forgotten, since when
it's been reworked more times than I've thought to count
in the vain attempt to get it as right as I possibly can.)
In the year I was born naked people stood in line,
queuing for their gas oven deaths;
another world to us in our big house by the English river,
where war was never mentioned and the smart
uniforms that came and went were novelties,
like the uncles and fathers inside them.
My grandfather managed the paper mill
– the house came with the job –
and while the world outside tore itself apart, my mother,
my aunt, my brother, my sister, my cousin and I
shared rooms, facilities and meals in reasonable harmony.
It was all so perfectly enclosed, with a treelined drive,
walls and fences on three sides, the river on the fourth.
We had a gardener called Mr Day, and chickens,
and a snow white goat called Flo, and a rope hammock
slung between an apple tree and a pear, all the fruit
and veg that we could grow, and at Christmas
a fir tree was cut down and brought indoors,
and when the river burst its banks, flooding the grounds,
the village, the town, we went shopping in boats,
and through everything, all the comings and goings,
those small events, the worries and fears that I
knew nothing of, my ever-aproned gran made chutney,
cakes and jam, and jollied everyone along.
Growing, I gazed out from my bedroom window
at the lily-covered river, the shallow punts drifting by,
and up, up, up at the endless sky, no idea,
no conception, of what the world had been about
through this small clutch of cloistered years,
or of anything that was to come. When the war ended,
boxes, trunks and furniture were loaded into vans,
trains taken in different directions as a family divided,
future in-fighting to be conducted by letter or by phone.
Within a decade my itinerant musician father would be
tumbling downstairs the worse for drink while my mother
screamed at him, at us, at life. Four or five years more
and my older brother, aged 24, would meet his own
gas-oven end, by choice, in our semi-detached
council house kitchen. And later still, after marriage,
fatherhood, divorce, I would become a stranger to most
of my surviving family, and begin to write about loss,
not least the loss of that small patch of childhood
where truth was suppressed or held in abeyance,
to which I return from time to time, lean on the old stone
wall of the graveyard that divides the house
from the village, just another nosy parker looking in.
There's a strip light in an upstairs window now.
An extension's been added in ill-matching brick.
The bulk of the ivy's been hacked away, the shutters
have been removed. They say the Irishwoman with the
Alsatians has been deserted by her husband. The police
hint that she's lost her marbles: 'Wait a year or two,
you'll probably pick the place up for next to nothing.'
Pick up what's gone for next to nothing?
Bring back my innocence, the multitudes of conveyor-belt
nudes and victims from the ovens and open graves?
I don't say as much, but memory's the best
I can manage, these personal mythologies of mine:
apple blossom on clipped bright lawns,
snow on my grandfather's hands,
willows trailing in a running river,
moorhens in the morning, laughter in the night.
This side of the wall the stones are well spaced out.
They have names on them,
and dates half hidden in the moss.
_________________________
SHUFFLE
The odd minute here and there,
the occasional quiet moment
when the mind dances
between sunlit shafts of memory,
barely aware that you're
in someone else's world.
But then a throat is cleared,
a bird flaps by outside,
a door slams distantly,
and the here-and-now returns,
and a sigh is suppressed,
a hand turns a page,
and the minute and the moment
join all the rest,
shuffling for space.
100 poems, 1967-2001
30 song lyrics, 1975-2012
67 poems & 25 drawings
2020-21
POEMS
SMALL DAYS
28th May 2020
SMALL DAYS
28th May 2020
To pinpoint the time in which this
is written, there are two main themes
occupying the commentators of the day.
One concerns the worldwide pandemic
from which few are entirely immune;
the other the bizarre antics and garblings
of the thin-skinned, orange-hued bully
who struts around under the banner
'Most Powerful Man in the World'.
But as these are being covered
internationally by countless pens and
voices, I'll just say that the sky is blue
today, and cloudless, and birds flap
from tree to tree, and I'm off to take
his breakfast to the nameless cat
that lives in the outhouse that until
two years ago was the make-do studio
in which I made abstract paintings.
But Nameless isn't there. Not there
and could be anywhere. He'll stroll back
later, no doubt, to munch his kibbles
and lap from his bowl of fresh water
before strolling off again, and I too
will go quietly about the day's business,
whatever it might turn out to be.
There. That's better.
Small things, small days.
So much sweeter than adding
further wordage to bigger,
more worrying subjects.
_________________________
LAMBING SHEDS
Early March, the farm next door.
We watched a ewe drop her firstborn
on the ground. The little one lay confused,
eyes closed, as if wondering what
was going on. The mother began to lick
her infant with her brisk black tongue,
all over, every part. Little one's eyes
began to open. In a minute, still licked,
he tried to stand, and failed. He tried
again, and again, leg by leg, falling
each time, until he was up at last,
if shaky, still being licked all over, bullied
a little. Then he was taken away, roughly
stretched, this way, that, while a symbol
was painted on him. Mark of ownership.
There were many pens, many sheep, new
lambs. In one, a ewe without a lamb made
a racket that sounded much like grief –
'Hers was stillborn; she'll be culled now.'
Culled. Killed. For failing to deliver a life.
I could no longer enjoy the new lambs
finding their feet, stretching their legs,
bleating. Could only hear the heartfelt
wails of the unsuccessful ewe.
The one doomed for not delivering.
By the following day she was no more.
Only the memory remains.
And these lines, which feel so empty.
_________________________
ON THE JETTY (2020)
Directly out from the jetty, between ten o'clock
and two, you'll find clear ground, or so it says
here. My memory is less specific. For me,
from this sitpoint, the grey stone jetty is all windy
nights and dark surrounds, wind-buffeted,
rain-specked. The small fishing craft, well secured
on the stoniest part of the beach, the sky,
cloud-rich, sneaking sly hints of other worlds than
ours as the wind ruffles coats and hair, and we
wince and laugh and shiver. Too soon by far to
think ahead, imagine, dread. Too early to not-plan,
too out-of-phase for negative speculation.
All seems possible yet nothing is foreseen.
The cruelty of one, which will force undreamt-of
transitions, in the course of which, inside of which,
anything might happen, is not so much as hinted at.
The wind, the night wind, whips around us,
cuts into us, jostles the beach-boats, but gives
nothing away. Nothing beyond unease punctuated
by the bright pin-holes of those other worlds.
Unimagined worlds, on the jetty.
_________________________
MORNING AT SASA (1967)
You're in a dream.
A dream of running feet and rapping knuckles
and Dan at the door with his 'Time to get up!'
That's no dream.
You rub your eyes, you scratch yourself, then:
legs over the side, into workpants that look like sacks,
socks on, lace up your dirty boots, stick your head
in a sweater, slap on your woolly hat. Outside,
shivering, faceful of liquid ice from the standpipe
on the veranda as others emerge, guilty with night –
Dale in her tight pants and flyaway hair,
Martin with his cracked specs and academic hands,
Sally Goldstein with her Berlei breasts.
Now down to the canteen for stale bread
and runny jam, leafy black tea to swill it all around,
and to the revving trucks that never wait
– forty people coughing like asthma cases on
free cigarettes that taste like dried dung.
Walled in, ballsed up, moving out, bouncing down
the rutted track to the orchards of dewy September
apples and Canadian Joe's rowdy decrees
as we disperse amidst the trees in grumbling groups,
canvas baskets round our necks, an alloy ladder apiece,
to snap apples away at the stem.
Cold apples.
Cold grass.
Cold sun rising.
So this is five a.m.
Hard to believe there was a war here so recently.
Some of the apple pickers fought in it.
Some died in it.
By October these acres of perfectly-placed trees
will be as stark and clean as a military graveyard.
Ghosts here will have stems and cores
and shine when you rub them.
Make me an apple.
Shine me a real sun.
Sun on a stem, turning in the space of a hand.
It's 1967. It's morning at Sasa.
_________________________
COWS
The smell of cows hung over this parkland
Throughout the fifties and beyond,
Vying for attention with roses. Side by side,
Just there, two cowsheds stood, a pair
Of gloomy brick-built caves for secret-mission
Saturdays while the cows were down by the
Railway lines conferring with signalmen.
In one of these caves two unexploded bombs sat,
Long defused and rusting, great iron steeds
For straddling and slapping and yelling upon
As if at some Saturday-matinee rodeo:
Sole survivors of a war we were too young
To remember, cold mementoes for cows
To huddle round on evenings at home.
It's decades now since those bombs
Were carted off for scrap, the cowsheds
Supplanted by neat flowerbeds, the wild
Meadow grass by careful lawns that sweep
Down to tracks where few trains run these days,
To one side of which houses played in
When under construction stand collecting
The random scars of time on their pebbledash,
Their long gardens cultivated reminders of days
When land was far less precious.
The park is a real park now,
A riot of colour in spring and through each
Summer, a bit exotic for a London suburb,
A burden on the rates to some, a few acres of
Solace in the rush of the town to others.
No cows low in fields here today.
The countryside has fallen back, a retreating
Front line. Beef is sent in from other fields,
Like certain bombs in battle, as dead hulks,
Instead of big moving beasts, with deep voices.
_________________________
BEACHED
Bad coffee at the ramshackle shack
of a beach café that smells of crabs
and seaweed, distant sound of kids' voices,
white ribbon of foam hemming the tide
for miles. I sigh and close my paperback.
Work calls.
Heading back up the beach I turn
for a last sight of the sun-spattered sea –
and see her, barefooting my tracks
one after the other, head bent to watch
her progress in them, so bronzed, so fair,
so perfect in her dazzling white bikini
that I stop, rooted to the sand.
Her head comes up, our eyes meet,
any moment we'll be face to face –
but then: out of the dunes behind her
leaps a medallioned Neanderthal,
adjusting his baggy shorts.
Mouth like a porpoise, voice like a dog,
he drapes himself about her (like a tarpaulin),
walks her past me, past me.
Now she's making footprints of her own,
beside his. But just before
she disappears she glances back,
one bronze glance, that's all,
just enough to tell me that she felt it too.
Still I can't move, not yet, though I know
there could never have been anything in it,
me with my Penguin Modern Classic,
she her Neanderthal.
CASUAL TABLES
Poems by Michael Lawrence www.casualtables.com
