Only the blood of deer,
cheek branded by its smear,
awakens this boy
to manhood, a manhood
defined by fear conquered.
Kindness is the province
of the feared and despised
woman, who strips the men
of the carapace
of fearless assertion.
He must become one
with the wilderness,
with the dry bones
of ancestors long gone
from their bitter struggles.
One with the entrails
of lead-shot bucks
and grizzled bears blasted
from their homelands
by the blank hearts of hungry men.
My garden is, I believe, uneducated –
it has read the wrong books and doesn’t understand the weather.
I leave Monty on the telly, hoping
the herbaceous borders might learn something
and that the lawn would know to fade away,
allowing the wild flowers to spread some joy.
But no, weeds plough on, oblivious to the layers
of mulch and scatterings of blood and bone.
The grass loves the yellow rattle and grows lush –
two fingers to those smarmy experts who claim
its roots would be weakened. No birds visit the pond –
no one made them wash their wings before meals?
Sometimes a pretty flower, brought up in nursery
and hothouse, mollie coddled through infancy,
finds its way into the border, is mystified
by the need to work for its living as it dies
amongst the chickweed and dandelions.
My garden hates those entitled pretty boys,
and yet, as the frost paints the faces of wild things,
it thinks “if I’d learnt things, I might have fed
someone and charmed the sad and lonely.”
How strange that it doesn’t know it is on message,
sustainable, insect filled and inhaling carbon dioxide.
From now, I must be living on borrowed time,
three score and ten being long gone.
Certainly, it is the fall of my life
as a bruised ankle will readily testify
so I feel the danger of a muddy slope and an exposed rock.
But nothing can be done and the truth is
innocence clings to me just as the day I was born,
innocence that is a kind of ignorance
protecting me from the grief and horror of a world
that stumbles under this innocence of men.
I know there is much to be grateful for,
the Indian summer, smiling warmly
on the woodland’s year end celebration –
the satisfied snuffle of hungry beasts
as they fatten for the cold months ahead –
But the truth is I belong with the dead.
‘Ragwort” condemns me to the hand me downs
of clothing deprived of exuberance,
and I am ‘stinking Willie’, ‘stammerwort’,
‘mare’s fart’, sitting in the dying grasslands,
waiting for my own death to seep poison
into The livers of grazing livestock.
Senecio squalidus, my cousin,
was a traveller, plucked from Mount Etna
and cherished beneath the dreaming spires,
watched by earnest students, then blown around the walls
to catch trains round Wales and Worcestershire.
I lack the glamour, my golden yellow
wins no prizes and must be swept away
to burn to ashes in a cleansing fire.
No snow lies unscarred in the Winter light.
The sun is lost behind mists
that suck the colour from the trees
leaving them as enduring ghosts.
The russet carpet has mulched to slime
whilst rain taps its toes on the canopy.
There is no sign of the cold crisp starlight,
the clean sparkle of frost, the twinkling of bitter nights.
Now there is just the still grey of waiting,
and the drip of cold rain down the collar.
There will be music in our dying home,
we will sing of new birth, of harmony,
there will be the sound of bells, chiming
beneath the shining moon and the starlight.
I watched the sheep stumble from the mountain,
pushed from behind by the keen watching eyes
in their wizened caves, and pinned to the trod
by eager dogs, tongues hanging, tails wagging,
singing their sharp chorus within the shouts
of instruction. Surely they have no sense
of destination. Enough to have eyes
for the crippling rock and the stifling mud.
Do they see the mountain tops, the sheltered
dales and waters glittering in the sun?
They have no care for the erotic scents
of the spiced east, nor for the salt filled winds
blowing tales of adventure and treasure.
they are content for the unknown to stay
unknown. The land beneath them is enough.
This is a soft land
cushioned in the hollows
and curves of sandstone,
loving its partnership with water.
It feeds the trees that repel
the sun’s harsh interrogation;
its surface is moisturised
by the westerly winds.
They tried to find the bitter edge
of lucre by drilling
underground passages
but the land would not have it.
It stands wounded and scarred
but the badgers still tread the night
and birds chorus in the morning.
It sleeps through the wars
and keeps conflict domestic.
Happy new year from the Staffordshire tongue!!!
Sidelined by forgotten forces
off the road that now flies past
to more urgent destinations,
the pool lies in its own entrails.
Trees huddle round, parasites
sucking their lives from its depths,
their tangled growth keeping the sun’s
inquisition from its oily surface.
It has no name.
None know from where it draws its waters
which the earth refuses to swallow.
Reached through a field of stubble,
knees stung by nettles and bramble,
the path passes with hurried step,
fearful of rusty wire and the stench of decay,
to breathe more freely
in the open field and wide skies
that look down on an empty valley.
This was the king’s forest
where poachers staked their lives
but left no mark on the land.
So the pool, with no history, stands
alive only with midge and maggot
and maybe an occasional badger
patrolling in the moonlight.
After the first bite
into the crisp taste of disobedience
when naked flesh cuts through the thicket,
we discover ignorance.
”Who told thee thou wast naked?”
No idea, beyond an excuse!
The stars, innumerable,
the seas unfathomable,
obscurity wherever we look.
Time ticks inexplicably by
and the owl lands on our shoulders
and burdens us,
head spinning.
A burst of light
a scattergun of new noises
a flood of scents
a collage of textures
and everywhere, difference
distinctions, boundaries,
urgent hungers, greed
and defecations.
Big data awaits
as curtains before
an infinite universe.
So we are programmed
to ignore
in our world, wrapped in sleep,
to select
only what we need.
The tree of knowledge
is an egotistic myth,
for the serpent’s true gift
was to shelter us
under the spreading branches
of ignorance
so glimpses of knowledge
can peep through like sunlight.
mindfoxblog 