Terry, and Will Sharpe and the bicentenary of the birth of Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869)
All day till it grows dark I sit and stare
over Herefordshire hills and into Wales.
Reflections of red coals thrown on the air
blossom to brightness as the daylight fails.
An uncharred cherry flaunts a May of flames.
Like chaffinches and robins tongues of fire
flit with the burden of Creation’s names
but find no new apostles to inspire.
Bar a farmhouse TV aerial or two,
the odd red bus, the red Post Office van,
this must have been exactly Roget’s view,
good Dr Roget, the
Thesaurus
man.
Roget died here, but 90 when he died
of natural causes, twice as old as me.
Of his six synonyms for suicide
I set myself alight with safe suttee.
4. Killing Time
Among death-protected creatures in a case,
‘The Earth’s Endangered Species’ on display
at a jam-packed terminal at JFK,
killing time again, I see my face
with Hawksbill Turtle, scrimshawed spermwhale bone,
the Margay of the family
Felidae
,
that, being threatened, cost the earth to buy.
And now with scientists about to clone
the long-haired mammoth back from Soviet frost,
my reflection’s on the species the World’s lost,
or will be losing in a little while,
which, as they near extinction, grow in worth,
the leopard, here a bag and matching purse,
the dancing shoes that were Nile crocodile,
the last
Felis Pardalis
left on Earth,
the poet preserved beneath deep permaverse.
5. Dark Times
That the
Peppered Moth
was white and now is dark ’s
a lesson in survival for Mankind.
Around the time Charles Darwin had declined
the dedication of
Das Kapital
by Marx
its predators could spot it on the soot,
but Industrial Revolution and Evolution taught
the moth to black its wings and not get caught
where all of Nature perished, or all but.
When lichens lighten some old smoke-grimed trees
and such as Yorkshire’s millstacks now don’t burn
and fish nose waters stagnant centuries,
can
Biston Carbonaria
relearn,
if Man’s awakened consciousness succeeds
in turning all these tides of blackness back
and diminishing the need for looking black,
to flutter white again above new Leeds?
6. t’Ark
Silence and poetry have their own reserves.
The numbered creatures flourish less and less.
A language near extinction best preserves
the deepest grammar of our nothingness.
Not only dodo, oryx and great auk
waddled on their tod to t’monster ark,
but ‘leg’, ‘night’, ‘origin’ in crushed people’s talk,
tongues of fire last witnessed mouthing:
dark
!
Now when the future couldn’t be much darker,
there being fewer epithets for sun,
and Cornish and the Togoland
Restsprache
name both the animals and hunter’s gun,
celebrate before things go too far
Papua’s last reported manucode,
the pygmy hippo of the Côte d’Ivoire,
and Upper Guinea’s oviparous toad –
(or mourn in Latin their imminent death,
then translate these poems into
cynghanedd
.)
¶
Facing North
‘The North begins inside.’
(Louis MacNeice)
God knows why of all rooms I’d to choose
the dark one facing North for me to write,
liking as I do air, light and views,
though there’s air in the North Wind that rocks the light
I have to keep on, all year round, all day;
nor why, despite a climate I profess to hate,
and years spent overseas, I stay,
and, when I start to pack, procrastinate.
The North Wind’s part of it and when it blows
my shutters rattle and the front door slams
like memory shutting out half what it knows.
Here I poured huge passion into aerogrammes,
the lightest paper loaded with new hope
that made the old pain seem, on looking back,
seen through the wrong end of the telescope
making it so small I soon lost track.
The window’s open to the winter’s chill,
to air, to breezes and strong gusts that blow
my paper lantern nothing will keep still
and let me make things happen in its O.
When the circle, where my
All day till it grows dark I sit and stare
over Herefordshire hills and into Wales.
Reflections of red coals thrown on the air
blossom to brightness as the daylight fails.
An uncharred cherry flaunts a May of flames.
Like chaffinches and robins tongues of fire
flit with the burden of Creation’s names
but find no new apostles to inspire.
Bar a farmhouse TV aerial or two,
the odd red bus, the red Post Office van,
this must have been exactly Roget’s view,
good Dr Roget, the
Thesaurus
man.
Roget died here, but 90 when he died
of natural causes, twice as old as me.
Of his six synonyms for suicide
I set myself alight with safe suttee.
4. Killing Time
Among death-protected creatures in a case,
‘The Earth’s Endangered Species’ on display
at a jam-packed terminal at JFK,
killing time again, I see my face
with Hawksbill Turtle, scrimshawed spermwhale bone,
the Margay of the family
Felidae
,
that, being threatened, cost the earth to buy.
And now with scientists about to clone
the long-haired mammoth back from Soviet frost,
my reflection’s on the species the World’s lost,
or will be losing in a little while,
which, as they near extinction, grow in worth,
the leopard, here a bag and matching purse,
the dancing shoes that were Nile crocodile,
the last
Felis Pardalis
left on Earth,
the poet preserved beneath deep permaverse.
5. Dark Times
That the
Peppered Moth
was white and now is dark ’s
a lesson in survival for Mankind.
Around the time Charles Darwin had declined
the dedication of
Das Kapital
by Marx
its predators could spot it on the soot,
but Industrial Revolution and Evolution taught
the moth to black its wings and not get caught
where all of Nature perished, or all but.
When lichens lighten some old smoke-grimed trees
and such as Yorkshire’s millstacks now don’t burn
and fish nose waters stagnant centuries,
can
Biston Carbonaria
relearn,
if Man’s awakened consciousness succeeds
in turning all these tides of blackness back
and diminishing the need for looking black,
to flutter white again above new Leeds?
6. t’Ark
Silence and poetry have their own reserves.
The numbered creatures flourish less and less.
A language near extinction best preserves
the deepest grammar of our nothingness.
Not only dodo, oryx and great auk
waddled on their tod to t’monster ark,
but ‘leg’, ‘night’, ‘origin’ in crushed people’s talk,
tongues of fire last witnessed mouthing:
dark
!
Now when the future couldn’t be much darker,
there being fewer epithets for sun,
and Cornish and the Togoland
Restsprache
name both the animals and hunter’s gun,
celebrate before things go too far
Papua’s last reported manucode,
the pygmy hippo of the Côte d’Ivoire,
and Upper Guinea’s oviparous toad –
(or mourn in Latin their imminent death,
then translate these poems into
cynghanedd
.)
¶
Facing North
‘The North begins inside.’
(Louis MacNeice)
God knows why of all rooms I’d to choose
the dark one facing North for me to write,
liking as I do air, light and views,
though there’s air in the North Wind that rocks the light
I have to keep on, all year round, all day;
nor why, despite a climate I profess to hate,
and years spent overseas, I stay,
and, when I start to pack, procrastinate.
The North Wind’s part of it and when it blows
my shutters rattle and the front door slams
like memory shutting out half what it knows.
Here I poured huge passion into aerogrammes,
the lightest paper loaded with new hope
that made the old pain seem, on looking back,
seen through the wrong end of the telescope
making it so small I soon lost track.
The window’s open to the winter’s chill,
to air, to breezes and strong gusts that blow
my paper lantern nothing will keep still
and let me make things happen in its O.
When the circle, where my
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