leap fast to the bone
Take wailing bayonets from the ice of wound.
Emblaze your handrails. Men fall to arms.
Men purred to fight – each other. So can we foresee
Death. Set each life against time. Jagged bitterns:
Gradgrinds all. – Now we ruined in life, bound
For detention in field, again build on lime
And rubble. To what age can this be compared?
Men slave, spit and spade. Glean life pure.
Accelerate oxidised roads. Drill new hearts and hearths.
Impale the money-goaders’ palisade. And you
Of acetated minds, workers with xantheine
Faces, revolutionise your land; holding
The simple measures of life in your hand,
Remembering navies and peacocks never sail
Together in the aftermaths of disaster.
Into euclidian cubes grid air is planed.
Propellers scudding up grit and kerosene, braid
Hulls waled 5 miles hollow, spidering each man stark
On steelweb, hammering in rivets ambuscade
Interrupted by sirens screaming tirade.
With machine-strength wearing blinkers and mask,
Will of iron moulding surface to brain chained:
While below in well shafts soldiers squat and cark,
Shell and peel pods and spuds: girders craned;
Into euclidian cubes tempered air is planed.
The brown paper parcels of sappers who ask,
Shelling and peeling: ‘
How’s Jane to-day?
’ Barricade
Against blast and red-hot ingots; clatch
Of ricocheting wheels – hell’s dim decade
Interrupted by sirens, screaming tirade.
Where each day ingrained is a chained task,
A clatter of clogs, winding of nerves: Fatigues
Thinning into vocal farms, war-limed grey,
Stately as battleships heeled to cove: there forced
Into euclidian cubes carol air is planed.
When daily the water trudge with battering can,
Striding out of snail from sprockets of kale;
Where tractors, carts like nasturiums crack
The windowpane; to rattle of boiling buckets,
Sleeve of plane rippling over hedge:
To each striped tidy plot aproned women work,
Spadeing clay and coal dust into ‘pele’ jet. To them
To iron bedsteads; kitchens farms cut open
With grates. To calico; village scintillating
Like mothball white on a hill: cresting cascades
And red rock, throwing out a shower of birds,
Woodcutters, and harrowing of gulls. Where
Women titans are weathervanes who fetch
In the cows who wander the valley prints
Greening the squares of their eyes. To men
Ploughing strig and stubble: near geese full of
White ‘airs’ crisping out their quills, whose
Eyes and ears surrounded with orange cord
Detect and hear the running pads of spiders;
Or better round the slow-slipping dairy-roof
Where rabbits hang punched on the door. To chink
Of ceramic jugs glazed with the lead of years,
Brass and blue glister under paraffin pools
By which everything rubied glows, baize and lace
Curtained to night; intrinsic to seal light
Crouched black on summer sills. Until the watersky
Of dawn flickers a sail-wash shimmering aquamarine
Into TB and disinhumed rooms; where past
Is not dead but comes uphot suddenly sharp as
Drakestone. To them soldiers return; offer chickweed
Love; others scribble the same formula home –
All this cover with blue dome of glass
And engrave the village Llanybri ’42:
For OK saltates the cymric hearth and
BBC blares from Bermondsey tongue.
Fine gentle ways fill time’s Grave stone
From Stonehenge Blue to Granite’s sharp Black.
Old women die folded in skirts, their culture
Entombed: upstarts mock at what was gracious before:
Work out their crudeness on to change and cloth.
Out of whalebone huts gunners drone: ‘You,
With the gypsy slit on your ears Vaughan
What do you make of my lover’ (!) No answer.
‘Who’s there in the Chapel Yard who bends?’
Prophets warm in the shade sign black signatures
In the Red Book of Hergest and cross their toes
To confuse the Principality. ‘What’s that withered
Field?’ ‘England.’ ‘Ah.’ ‘What’s that purple pool
Of pansies lingering in so memorial
A town?’ ‘Culture of
Take wailing bayonets from the ice of wound.
Emblaze your handrails. Men fall to arms.
Men purred to fight – each other. So can we foresee
Death. Set each life against time. Jagged bitterns:
Gradgrinds all. – Now we ruined in life, bound
For detention in field, again build on lime
And rubble. To what age can this be compared?
Men slave, spit and spade. Glean life pure.
Accelerate oxidised roads. Drill new hearts and hearths.
Impale the money-goaders’ palisade. And you
Of acetated minds, workers with xantheine
Faces, revolutionise your land; holding
The simple measures of life in your hand,
Remembering navies and peacocks never sail
Together in the aftermaths of disaster.
Into euclidian cubes grid air is planed.
Propellers scudding up grit and kerosene, braid
Hulls waled 5 miles hollow, spidering each man stark
On steelweb, hammering in rivets ambuscade
Interrupted by sirens screaming tirade.
With machine-strength wearing blinkers and mask,
Will of iron moulding surface to brain chained:
While below in well shafts soldiers squat and cark,
Shell and peel pods and spuds: girders craned;
Into euclidian cubes tempered air is planed.
The brown paper parcels of sappers who ask,
Shelling and peeling: ‘
How’s Jane to-day?
’ Barricade
Against blast and red-hot ingots; clatch
Of ricocheting wheels – hell’s dim decade
Interrupted by sirens, screaming tirade.
Where each day ingrained is a chained task,
A clatter of clogs, winding of nerves: Fatigues
Thinning into vocal farms, war-limed grey,
Stately as battleships heeled to cove: there forced
Into euclidian cubes carol air is planed.
When daily the water trudge with battering can,
Striding out of snail from sprockets of kale;
Where tractors, carts like nasturiums crack
The windowpane; to rattle of boiling buckets,
Sleeve of plane rippling over hedge:
To each striped tidy plot aproned women work,
Spadeing clay and coal dust into ‘pele’ jet. To them
To iron bedsteads; kitchens farms cut open
With grates. To calico; village scintillating
Like mothball white on a hill: cresting cascades
And red rock, throwing out a shower of birds,
Woodcutters, and harrowing of gulls. Where
Women titans are weathervanes who fetch
In the cows who wander the valley prints
Greening the squares of their eyes. To men
Ploughing strig and stubble: near geese full of
White ‘airs’ crisping out their quills, whose
Eyes and ears surrounded with orange cord
Detect and hear the running pads of spiders;
Or better round the slow-slipping dairy-roof
Where rabbits hang punched on the door. To chink
Of ceramic jugs glazed with the lead of years,
Brass and blue glister under paraffin pools
By which everything rubied glows, baize and lace
Curtained to night; intrinsic to seal light
Crouched black on summer sills. Until the watersky
Of dawn flickers a sail-wash shimmering aquamarine
Into TB and disinhumed rooms; where past
Is not dead but comes uphot suddenly sharp as
Drakestone. To them soldiers return; offer chickweed
Love; others scribble the same formula home –
All this cover with blue dome of glass
And engrave the village Llanybri ’42:
For OK saltates the cymric hearth and
BBC blares from Bermondsey tongue.
Fine gentle ways fill time’s Grave stone
From Stonehenge Blue to Granite’s sharp Black.
Old women die folded in skirts, their culture
Entombed: upstarts mock at what was gracious before:
Work out their crudeness on to change and cloth.
Out of whalebone huts gunners drone: ‘You,
With the gypsy slit on your ears Vaughan
What do you make of my lover’ (!) No answer.
‘Who’s there in the Chapel Yard who bends?’
Prophets warm in the shade sign black signatures
In the Red Book of Hergest and cross their toes
To confuse the Principality. ‘What’s that withered
Field?’ ‘England.’ ‘Ah.’ ‘What’s that purple pool
Of pansies lingering in so memorial
A town?’ ‘Culture of
Similar Books
