Each week I'll be adding one of my personal poems for your delectation or  
distraction. Tell me if you like them (or don't like them!) by emailing me at  
poems@freelancers.co.uk - when you are inspired enough by what you read.  

Poem of the week from freelancers.co.uk. Copyright © William Critchley 1998. 

Week ending 17th October 1998  

The poems have not been updated for ages. Just as well probably! It's now August 99 and there's too much work to do to bother about poetry. 

This week's poems: Delphi, a poet's speculation on fate; Blue Flags and Madder Pinks, a summer's day by the sea remembered; Inscription, a piece also about the inevitability of fate - life and death; and Solar Moves, the end of summer, autumn, and the approach of winter but conscious of the New Year "in the wings". 

Last week's poems: the first, Even Without God, a lyrical little piece; followed by Lines written in Crystal Palace Park, a whimsical number about two lovers as one; then a somewhat old-fashioned piece written some years ago, Song of Canute; on to Factor X which is about the wonder of genes ('base pairs' and 'recombinant' are terms associated with genes), and finally The Valley of Love, another lyrical paean to summer love. 
 

Delphi 

The soul's dream beyond exorcism 
Ride of a thousand horses 
Black mists in blue kingdoms 
With Darius, Alexander or Xenophon. 
But you are here 
Among buried druid dreams 
The folk memories of Arthur 
Excalibur torn from stone 
To what end? 
I know not whether I shall come 
To Thermopylae with Leonidas 
Or to Hespera, for my desserts. 

Blue Flags and Madder Pinks 

Blue flags and madder pinks 
Hard by the ridged summer town as I watch 
Day beats down on the pebble-struck bay 
Beyond countrywide where the waves sweep 
Combing the calm sea-black hair 
Of mermaid girls and white shells 
Smashed by a gull's yellow beak. 
Look! the shored sun is sliding down the sky, 
People stood there once on that great height
Where the shimmering sea swam in 
Among the shivered coves; crabs would scuttle 
And big grey-green Atlantic rollers 
Poured in from the oceans of the world. 

Inscription 

She will write, that great and arch inscriber 
Legends glimpsed on tombstone scrolls. 
That life, the she who has you still enthralled
With roses, wine, air, women, song and sunrise hope, 
Present laughter, so that you a sinner 
Almost believe you believe. 

And God is a stone Apollo with sunlit lips 
That somehow articulate Jesu's name, though 
Dimly through the pearly seas a sea-rose weeps. 

Fathom the unfathomable used to be Poseidon's cry 
Your heart curled over his waves gladly 
Crest-riding higher, the trident victorious. 

But whose hand is this that even sand erases? 
There are no marks yet, Halcyon on his nest in his 
Right and proper season. 

Yet she will write, that great and arch inscriber. 

Solar Moves 

Do not think you take me unawares 
Do not suppose you catch the shadowed light 
Beyond the bar where the western isles tip 
Seawards in a slant of gold and leave me 
With the cool of night slipping the noose of dark 
Before the tide has run and birds quite flown 
To warmer skies. Do not suppose I lack 
Eyes to watch the imperceptible moves 
You make between the chessboard clouds, or skin 
To feel your warmth declining like lovers 
Who ease apart with the stealth of thieves torn 
By conscience and desire to stay the hour 
Or take reluctant leave and bid for home. 

Do not suppose you catch me unawares 
In this October field where the brambles 
Wear sweet-berried crowns that I pluck with ponies 
On this salt marsh lick where an estuary 
Glides in a sea of mud, here, bells are mulled 
On the wind brought from the priory town. 
Now can I lie on this heathery hump 
Sunstroked by the chant of a long farewell 
And my back feels hot like the sunrubbed sand 
Where children dig for crabs in the ragworm pools 
And throw stones at gulls, as the curlew cries 
The long-hauled evening in her net of tides 
Is beached dry like the ribbed shell of a boat 
Lain up to die. 

We will cast our nets in vain for the sun 
Begins her journey home. Do not think then 
You take us unawares. Cut short these days,
For do not suppose we will not know you 
When you come back, and the New year has turned. 
  

Even without God 

Science reveals truth by ways unknown 
To our great religious masters. 
Show me a blue sky on a spring day, 
Some celestial blue you think, veil of heaven? 
No, it's the scattering of sunlight on air molecules. 
Then what about the western baths of evening - 
Golden glares of a setting sun? 
It's absorption by water vapour, a little prosaic 
You think, for a biblical sunset? 
And what of this girl who kneels beside me, 
A refugee from heaven? 
She is beautiful too. 
Even without God I am awestruck, 
I know not which is the greatest wonder. 
 

Lines Written in Crystal Palace Park 

Lovers protect 
Arm in arm walking 
In step 
Even their hips  
Swing as one 
Between them nothing 
Except each other 
A kiss - 
A seal under deed 
Each thought their own 
All hopes 
Theirs. 
 

Song of Canute 

No man can equal the king 
Who dared proclaim his will upon the sea 
With more buffoonery or less hope: 
His voice only echoes our own desires. 
How mad of life to bring the mortal man 
To the crest of waves on a ship of hope; 
By intellect design the bold ideas 
That shape immortal craft to sail the seas 
Beyond the reach of man, his hands in prayer 
Supplicate Neptune in his lair for faith 
To swim the boundless space between the stars 
Or dream that some divine inspired breath 
From the gates of heaven shall fill the canvas 
Till his billowed heart is cruising with love 
By interstellar reefs and coralled bays 
A furrowed course in safe and easy trim 
And through this channel broad and steep shall steer 
Man the sailor on such a narrow path 
Beyond the galaxies where he shall find 
In good repair his resurrection there 
Hallowed havens watered by drowned martyrs 
Sailing there like ghosts raised up from the deep 
Into the arms of love; the port of God. 

O poor man! This crust we have named the earth 
Can raise the crest, but hope's deferred by fate 
Then betrayed at last to make good the debt; 
Reveals to us the trough in thin disguise. 
God is then for man a straw in a sea of trees 
Dashed by long despair, smashed by pebbled stones 
We are flung in useless bits along the shore. 
 

Factor X 

Did she kiss my lord and take his blood 
Letting her womb ride phallus-free 
     From the delivering seed? 

Was she made to serve the will of god 
Surrender in beatific submission 
     For our souls' discharge? 

Did my lady ransom her virginity to god? 

How many base pairs make the perfect man 
A part stolen from each Adam 
     For this emanation of the supreme being? 

Can you leave to chance the outcome 
Of genetic roulette and throw a cosmic prince? 
     Were they recombinant genes 
     Out of the wholeness of his seed? 

Tell me where did they assemble the man? 
God and his spirit conspire to breed a son 
     Tell me how did they assemble the man? 

It is not that modern prophets have lost their voices. 
Out there in the wilderness of our bodies 
     Genes are shouting, are shouting, 
     Are shouting in the wilderness. 
 

The Valley of Love 
 

     'Twould be good 
To lie with my loved one 
In the warm, the summer fair 
On the hill-hummocked downs 
Shook by western winds 
O Zephyrus as once I knew him, 
Where the rivers of wheat and barley 
Go riding down 
To the pebble-stacked sea. 

With my neck on her cool clean thighs 
And to feel her womanliness 
Moulding itself around the contours 
Of the earth 
And my manhood flush and heavily turning 
O purple-bright rooter of love 
Unhooded, so lately proud, 
Finding his river 
And the reddened moist gash 
Waiting like the sun 
To lie molten, 
And sweetly take her 
Down to my pearl-rivered seas. 
 

[Note: last week's poems held over for a day or so before being recycled.] 

Poems delayed by two days this week. The first, a poem about a longing for fulfilment; the second about the coming of spring. I know it's autumn now but poets are funny people! 

Prayer for a Harvest, However Scant 
 

I tell you he saw in the hazel dusk,  
Soft vows of an early thaw 
Bleak bulrushes in brittle pools 
Sentinel-proud above constricting ice. 
And over him loudly 
Skies of the slow promise began to sing 
And the whirled whiteness stormed 
And baulked at snowdrops. 

Dawn when bats hide - 
I tell you he saw in the aspen dawn 
Tender streams from the sun 
Stiff on its pole of light. 
O what flight! 
Icarus of the golden mean 
Whose seasons strip boughs 
Melt warm tides. 

A spring thaw - 
The living seed waits, dormant lie. 
He who thinks life sleeps, 
At the well the water gives and gives; 
The admonishers of time should know 
In dead fireflies on frozen hills 
Dance electrons still. 

The cosmic pas de deux comprehends - 
This reason with organic life waits 
Bound with dreams and spells, 
The huge husks smoulder. 
Why does he smile? 
In what dry stoneless deserts to worship 
When he knows why he sings 
Only of Becoming? 
 

She's Here at Vernal Last 
 

Earth's chemistry is about to transmute 
And says out of my mouth's seed 
Clamour the new births. 
Out of the fragrant white and pink whorled ventricles 
Of Syringa vulgaris I will blood horizons. 
The geodesic span axles round, 
A loud sea-hailing torrent of power, 
As big as a ship in a bay 
   (As a girl in love is consciously keen 
     as her breasts are as full 
     as the sails are as filled 
     with unconscious pride.) 
Galleon treasure from the New World 
Furled silver, solid gold, tall risen masts 
Prepotent with sap 
Shimmering out of harbour haze 
Surprising us all. 

As startled as the natives of the Sandwich Islands 
Saw Cook and took fright 
At this intemperate disturbance, 
Clubbing him back into the waves 
From whence he came. 

The first season for us comes as softly 
Unaware we watch the flowers swim back 
Through the dead orchard time 
And bloomed irises stalk 
In surprise of our feet. 
So I wonder 
To what whirling vortex love will come 
With this summer's drowning. 
 

Note: Syringa vulgaris is the lilac. 
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