Collected Poems by Alan; Sillitoe

the silence
    Of a so-far buried life, looking over four guns
    Ready to suck all spirits up like fishes to a net.
    Cherish the distance between them and me
    But get inside the theatre of what goes on,
    Or open the door and tumble into space –
    No one would know I’d gone or where, destroying
    The homely panorama and my body.
    Death would not burn the spirit but I’d be off
    And out of the map, shoes, tunic and cap looted
    By gravity: Hello! as I spin, so glad to know you
    But I never will. There, I don’t belong,
    My place forever looking down and in.
    Alone, far back, to face the vanishing horizon squarely on.
    Dim as it is, don’t go, corrupted by haze
    Loving what I cannot reach. The theatre’s anatomy
    And madness missed, don’t care about a full cast waiting
    To come in order of appearance and perform their dreams,
    Ambition’s engine, curtains holding back
    Till the planet Lancaster divides the space
    And I return over empty bombracks to get born again.

SHYLOCK THE WRITER
    Humanity is good to bait fish with,
    Salt fish that dries in the throat
    And needs vodka to turn it down.
    Such human quality pressed
    A jackboot onto his vocation.
    A mob was set on him whose rage
    Needed no stoking.
    A writer has eyes, hands, a heart
    A pen that sometimes scratches
    Like a rose-thorn at a gardener’s vein.
    He borrows words
    And lends them out at interest,
    Turns from each season and
    With no humility or ignorance
    Tells a story to keep the world quiet.

DELACROIX’S ‘LIBERTY GUIDING THE PEOPLE’
    For the first few hundred yards
    They knew her as a shirtmaker
    Urging them over smoky corpses,
    And when they said enough was enough
    She climbed the lip of the barricade
    To lead them over.
    The world
    Was impossible to open with a bayonet
    That could not stop a cannon-ball in flight:
    Nor could her red flag light them
    Through a more than human darkness.
    Then, whoever she was, she became LIBERTY .
    No one knew when, by wonderful inspiration
    She stripped off her shirt
    And showed her bosom as a reminder
    Of what brought them out of darkness.
    Liberty, clothe your breasts
    With that red flag –
    I’ll love you then.
    Or let it guide the broken locomotive
    Not the mob.
    The boy with a pistol –
    A cannon-ball took off his leg.
    Your breasts gave liberty
    But cured his worship.
    Now he sells cheap pictures by the Louvre
    Of Mona Lisa and The Wreck of the Medusa .

THE ITALIAN WOMAN
    An Italian woman talking to her lover
    On some far-off ocean
    Mellifluously
    From a villa in Liguria:
    When are you coming back?
    Shortwave static gruffed his voice.
    I thought it would be soon, she said,
    The scent of shrubs around her.
    I love you, he said, but Neptune rules.
    A sad laugh in her throat:
    Yes, I understand,
    So goodbye my handsome man,
    I love you too.
    The click of a telephone put down,
    Sea noise rushing back.
    Ah, love, I haven’t lost you yet.
    I love the sad laugh in her throat,
    Face and body never to be seen
    Nor flowers surrounding her.
    I congratulate my rival,
    And swing the needle onto other voices.

THE LIBERTY TREE
    First of all
    The brambles had to be pulled out
    By the roots.
    With thick gardening gloves
    Against the spikes
    I burrowed around the tree bole
    And clasped them tight
    And tugged their stomachs
    Out of cosy soil.
    It wasn’t enough.
    I had to walk away
    Dragging the whole entanglement
    From topmost branches,
    Evergreen needles snowing me
    As claws protested.
    I got them down.
    And yanked them loose
    But it was slow work
    Then cut away the ivy
    Broke each brittle snake-branch
    From sucker tracks
    Halfway up and round the trunk,
    Some fingers
    More tenacious than an arm.
    Next it was the nettles’ turn
    Them I grasped low down;
    The taller they were
    The easier they came,
    Bunches of stings
    Cast out to die.
    Every parasite has its protection
    Stings or prickles
    Growing in alliance,
    Making it difficult to start.
    At last it’s done:
    The