84 Years

Poem

2009-04-08T07:37:00.001-07:00

Trappings

In the kitchen
below the old Yorkshire range
the silver fish flashed through the cracks
in the damp flagged floor and vanished
under the threadbare carpet
into the crevices where the beetles lived.

In the one other room behind the shop
which meagrely fed us now
were the few remaining trappings
of that other Twenties life into
which you married ;
the oak canteen of silver given
on your wedding day, the cut glass vases
and the ornate walnut sideboard in which
I’ve found, after your death, hidden away
your certificate of divorce.

And other faded fragments
of the life you lived in that
affluent northern suburb between the wars;
a photograph or two; the fox fur round
your neck and you, caught smiling, leaning
against the 1920’s Daimler and a man,
his back turned to the camera who would
I imagine have been my father.

Caught in the web of the universe the planet spins
towards oblivion , transporting
all the trivia of all the yesterdays;
the Dead Sea Scrolls, the remnants of a cross,
the carefully restored Raphael, the
Michael Angelo, and texts of Aristotle,
Plato and all the prophets; and from
A long abandoned cemetery
A weathered lump of stone that once
was a sculptured woman,
weeping.

2009-04-08T07:34:00.001-07:00

MAM

Carved on the adamantine surface
Of a small brown marble block
In this quiet, abandoned
Welsh churchyard, a life is
Encapsulated in this solitary word.

Sweeping in from Portmadoc
The wind stirs the long grass
And leaves of the overgrown
Shrubs to which
Love has surrendered . It seems
There are no living
To claim these dead.

Yet this one sculptured word
Reaches out from the past
And explodes in the face
Of our tawdry present, reminding us
That nothing lasts like marble.

2009-04-08T05:48:00.000-07:00

AILSA CRAIG 1942

Coming on deck that morning
The sun shining on Ailsa Craig and the green Scottish hills,
And the grey death of the North Atlantic behind us,
I felt a kind of resurrection,
A promise of a sanctuary of green
In which grey would be banished forever.

And the years ahead seemed in that brief instant
To be alive with the timeless expectancy
That can illumine that first step ashore
In a new land; as if we were come at last
To our final destination, the rough sea fever over,
The journey done.

More than half a century later I ache for the grey seas of yesterday,
For the never since known camaraderie of the long dead
And for the hope that Stevenson said we should travel with
To a place we could never define.

Featherstone

2009-04-07T05:56:00.000-07:00

FEATHERSTONE

The dead walk these streets, over the pit fields, past
Old slag heaps to where the pit bank was , and where
A century on not even the headstock which saw
The soldiers open fire remains. Two men were killed
In 1897 who simply watched, laughing no doubt
As women egged on the miners who were wearying
In a dispute in which little was won.

Old altercations echo in the silences
Where dissonance once reigned, and
In the aging soot-darkened houses where
The sulphorous stink of the slag heaps permeated
The bedrooms on warm summer nights I see
The bodies of then living men and women clasped
In the half removed pit dirt of a mid-week consummation
Out of which my generation grew.

Our adolescence grasped desperately the last years of peace
As groping sexuality found somewhere to do it
In the public shelters designed to protect us from bombs,
But from their pet fouled interiors other casualties came;
Unwanted pregnancies, followed as night follows day
By shot-gun marriages; morality of a passing age and
Progenitors of an age to come.

Scars of an earlier war coughed life away from gas-riddled
Lungs as old young Flanders men helpless on doorsteps,
Stripped of the means to describe the indescribable
Watched their sons embrace the coming of that old Messiah
War, stoking the furnaces of full employment and
Filling the cupolas with the bright flowing liquid of hope,
To pour into the mould they imaged as The Promised Land.

The years between then and now have littered this
Sad landscape with the trivia of progress, the early warning
Signs of a new age and the satellite dishes waiting to take in
The message, not suspecting that the great new message of the age
Is that there is no message, no great design, only a
Vague and inarticulate desire for something better than
A shabbily conceived housing estate, an ill-used social centre,
Strip shows Sunday mornings in the club for those
Who have never had it so good.

“They are vulgarising the working class”, said Nye Bevan
Before he died, his last sad judgment as a gloss descended
On the land where war weary politicians had striven to create
Some suburb of Jerusalem.

So here is the world we fought and voted for,
The hands of fallen comrades guiding ours as we put our cross
Where their cross would have been had they not inherited
Another. Do they not watch us now as once again the wheel turns, as
The living beg for a vision? Do they not say to us,
“Our lives were waste.”

john@johnfinch.com