Poetry

 

DSC_7291In the “White Goddess” Robert Graves wrote that  poetry  – “Once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born….it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in science, philosophy and industry, and brought ruin upon himself and his family.” (From The call of the wild: Paul Kingsnorth The Guardian Essay Saturday 23rd July 2016).

Time takes time

 

There is no measure

For the correct time

To heal and recover.

 

So now healing

Is by measure

To heal and recover.

 

There is a quick fix

A couple of weeks

To heal and recover?

 

There is no measure

For the correct time

To heal and recover.

 

The soul ah the soul

The time to heal

The time to recover.

 

We talk of the mind

No talk of the soul

And the time to recover

 

There is no measure

For the correct time

To heal and recover.

 

We talk of the mind

No talk of the spirit

And the time to recover.

 

Wounds not visible

Wounds not measurable

Wounds not vocalised.

 

Wounds.

Time takes time

In its own time.

 

Young

Young

 

I’m old

By others standards

Experience

And a life lived

Apparently

 

I dispute my years

I don’t fit the new

My gauge isn’t set the same

How you feel

Is what really matters

 

I see adverts for new

and young poets

I am now silenced

In what I write

Apparently

 

But through my life

I have done great things

Helped heal a child

So many children

Over the years

 

Spoken to the soul

Of another

And another

Urged a smile

And reinstalled hope

In so many

 

 

I have never been silent

I live with my eyes

Wide open

Listening.

 

RAC.

Tribute to a poet in a mining town

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There was a whispering in my hearth,
A sigh of the coal.
Grown wistful of a former earth
It might recall.

I listened for a tale of leaves
And smothered ferns,
Frond-forests; and the low, sly lives
Before the fawns.

My fire might show steam-phantoms simmer
From Time’s old cauldron,
Before the birds made nests in summer,
Or men had children.

But the coals were murmuring of their mine,
And moans down there
Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men
Writhing for air.

And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard,
Bones without number.
For many hearts with coal are charred,
And few remember.

I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed.

Comforted years will sit soft-chaired
In rooms of amber;
The years will stretch their hands, well-cheered
By our lifes’ ember.

The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned.
But they will not dream of us poor lads
Left in the ground.