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Poems
COVID MASS
(Commissioned by the JAM on the Marsh music festival in 2020 to accompany a performance of Faure's Requiem
in St Leonard's Church, Hythe, Kent, to
commemorate the losses of the Covid pandemic)
These stones were set by what you
cannot see:
by faith and fear,
abstractions now that move no
masonry.
Only music now can fill this space,
belief’s long-widowed bride,
the slowly-fading shade of certainty.
In the hard acoustic of agnosticism,
we attune to the eternal’s elegy,
epiphenomenon, not epiphany,
attentive still, though in absentia,
as God may be.
*
After the play, the ghost light on
the stage.
The scent of faith’s pressed flower
on the page.
A sun-bleached poster for a vanished
show. The yellow grass after the travellers
go.
The forest shower when the rain moves
on.
The signs still point the way. The
place is gone.
But in the night that has no
mariner’s mark, a dead star’s light is better than
the dark.
*
They tell you it gets easier with
time.
The tired trick of teleology
still promises completeness up ahead,
as though you somehow learn the more
of life
the closer that it brings you to the
dead.
But this is a pilgrimage to poverty,
life leaves you one day poorer every
night
and further off from wisdom every
day,
and all you learn is that no answers
come,
though that might count as wisdom, in
a way.
This is the end of searching, when
you know
that revelation has no
rendezvous
and, standing in God’s presence as
they do,
before the only answer they should
need,
even the angels have their questions
too.
*
In the end it is the flesh that
fails, not you.
Though pain may try to tell you
otherwise.
You could have loved more - true.
So could we all.
But you loved as much as you are suffering now.
The books will balance
finely:
loss for love,
remorse for your omissions.
You
have paid.
*
What a letting go this Lent has been.
The appetite is not deferred but dead;
the knife not sharpened to a
sheen
but snapped instead.
I am glad of it.
To know I am not
needed
is a fugitive's amnesty,
and it feels a lot like absolution
to accept absurdity.
Never to be missed
and not to mind
is a
mirror shattered
that always showed too much
and was not kind. I do not know if this is wrong.
I
know it to be true.
I might have called it failure;
it could be
freedom too.
*
There will be a time for them:
a Sunday, perhaps.
No tasks.
No visitors.
No calls to make.
It will be neither summer nor autumn,
winter nor spring.
And there will be all the time,
all the time in the world,
to go to them again,
those places that you left unwillingly,
vowing you would return,
time to meet again the ones you loved,
and missed the moment that their story closed.
So many years you want to live again.
So many things that time has put away.
There will be time for them
one Sabbath day.
*
This emptiness has no reproach for
you.
What you withheld does not diminish it;
it grows no greater because of what you gave.
The terms it gives are unconditional.
For
mercy, any measure is enough,
So set your shortcomings as surety,
and failure as fulfilment
and make the one transaction of
your trust:
the debt of living is redeemed with dust.
Cromer
Pier
The crowds
are out today. The carpark full,
queues at the chipshops, throngs along the rail
outside the Hotel de Paris to watch
the waiters' race, the runners spilling beer.
The winner gets a six-pack and a kiss
from young Miss Cromer, in her princess frock,
pulling her sash straight for the camera.
Behind them, on the pier, the fishers fish,
the walkers walk, the ice-cream vendors vend.
And all is as it should be, and has been
a century and more since engineers
pitched out this frail, gratuitous promontary,
this bridge to nowhere between sea and sky.
Down at the eastward end, a silver dome,
a theatre held at arm's length from the shore
as though to prove a point - that shows go on,
perhaps, that songs are stronger than the storm,
that art can stand against an angry sea.
The kind of strutting, wanton showmanship
that builds a monastery on a mountaintop
and dares both hell and heaven to come and see.
Next to the theatre, another hall,
the lifeboat station, whose proscenium arch
is open to the weather and the waves,
the shifting stage whose audience is the air.
The lifeboat, balanced on the slipway, waits,
like one of those collection box displays;
the single penny of a stranger's soul,
will send it, calm, where God would fear to go.
A summer Sunday. On the promenade,
the old recall their childhood holidays,
and find the town grown smaller with the years.
The young, whose only scale is sea and sand,
think nothing ever changes. In the fair,
the carousel's stiff, painted cavalry
revolve to music never heard elsewhere,
and pennies rattle in the dark arcade.
The nearness to the edge, the nothingness
that makes all things that live seem more alive,
perhaps that's why we come. Perhaps that's why
we set this cast-iron causeway in the sea,
as far as we can get from solid ground,
to hold the stage and slipway side by side,
as close to the horizon as can be.
Piano
Solo.
She took my
hopes away in plastic bags,
not even bothering to wrap them first.
All my ambitions too she packed away
in cardboard boxes, none too carefully.
My pride, she left it out for passers-by
to ponder on the pavement in the rain.
And all my thoughts, each phrase and syllable,
in notebooks, theses, marginalia,
she took, until the house that we had shared
was cleansed of every crumb of sustenance
as though, at Pesach, of all leavened bread.
Only the upright piano stayed behind;
too heavy, with its solid iron frame,
to carry out,and not at concert pitch,
beyond all tuning, sticky in the keys,
its varnish scratched with now-grown children's names.
I play it, and the sound is sharper now
than when soft furnishings would deaden it.
It's clearer than before: the empty rooms
are, to these solo tunes, hospitable.
I play it badly, but I always did;
there never was a time I played it well.
These days I'm learning, not proficiency,
but not to mind if sometimes notes are wrong.
The playing is the purpose, and for that
better to have a broken instrument.
And silence is a better audience,
and solitude is better company,
and emptiness, I find, is all I need:
the dusty stripped-wood floorboards resonant,
sun through uncurtained windows on the keys.
The Mountains.
Your silence
angered me,
meeting my questions with a stony face,
remaining impassive before my pain.
The emptiness of the sky,
the coolness of the wind across the moor,
the indiscriminate heather scents,
and, like an angry son, I cursed your stark indifference.
Now, when I come to you,
carrying my cares to the high country like sacrifices,
my breath shorter,
the path more rocky,
it is your very silence that I seek:
the quiet counsels of the mist among the ferns,
the wordless empathy of the earth's touch,
and I appreciate, now, the wise restraint
that keeps its silence before man's complaint.
Grau
Grau ist
alles, was dauert
Am Ende des Tags, die Wolken im Tal.
Sie bleiben, wie die Zeit auch erschauert.
Die Flut vom Hafen
ummauert
Die Flechte, die am Felsen nagt
ihr Mahl.
Grau ist alles, was dauert:
Die Dämmerung
in die Straßen gekauert
Der Regen malt die
festen Schiefer fahl.
Sie bleiben, wie die
Zeit auch erschauert.
Im Regen die Reviere,
versauert
Und die Asche der
Öfen von Flammen kahl.
Grau ist alles, was
dauert:
Das Meer, in dem
die Flotte zaudert
Die Möwe flegelnd
über dem Kanal.
Das bleibt, wie die
Zeit auch schaudert.
Dies Haus aus Stahl,
darin ein Quader trauert
Gehaun aus Schwärze
und weißem Strahl.
Grau ist alles, was
dauert.
Das bleibt, wenn auch
die Zeit erschauert.
(Translated from
the Welsh by Volker Braun)
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