Two Poems: Mother in Pau and Consolations in a Minor Key

Note: The first poem was written when my mother was in hospital (in Pau, Southwest France) for spinal surgery. The second was written after visiting Quarr Abbey monastery, where I saw pears growing, just as I remember from years ago. On the same day I saw wild plums growing on Cowleaze Hill, between Shanklin and Bonchurch.

MOTHER IN PAU, 14th JULY
Pyrenees and grape-blossom hills of Jurançon
you see from a window in the Clinic Navarre.
Feed the grapes with your sorrowing eyes: they will reward
the night with a pale flow of gold, a blaze of blue shade;
on your suffering shedding its hurt, a new lease of life.
Mother I miss you, and Boris’s Britannia a boat on the waves
of infantile worship, stupidity and betrayal.
Today I bless the French Republic: home of Danton, Celan, and Samuel Beckett:
the red wine rains will cure a sky that suffers
and gives you back to us renewed for the journey.

CONSOLATIONS IN A MINOR KEY
At Quarr I see the ordered weave, a trellis woven with pears.
Old friend, from autumn’s bronze to fruits of summer flame.
The plum’s wild purple curves beside the road on Cowleaze Hill.
Adorning sadness with colour, things pass in shape and sound
even where friendship leaves no visible trace.
New lights in fire-forms burst the shattering gloom:
I have lived too long, if still I live at the age of thirty-one.
Consolations come, a fruitful minor key, a trellis woven with pears.

Excerpt from Wildflower Psalms

1. MEMORY OF QUARR ABBEY

Straying in grass and wild flowers
colour-calls of memory christen
the sun’s harsh rays

rhythms genuflect
and litanies name themselves

returning forms an angelus
in the grasshopper’s strum
in the glass shudder of flies’ wings

all in all: prep the knot

the matte of body under wind-shivered monstrance,
maize-heads gaunt and poised

the orchard of Quarr a decade ago
pear-bronze in its autumn nest

2. ISLAND ELEGY

Basilic bone braves the river
as utopia waters our dawn.
I have lived a lifeless shell
the wind forgetting to stay my course.
Yet the stones in Bayonne guide the wait
Pointing across the ditch.
Hands full of night
the mourning bray our light
the Gospel ruby in sockets bright.
A way has cleared another for freedom
utopia dissolves our dawn.
I have died in deathless wells
if only the words were mine.
And I have seen from Portsdown Hill
the island’s psalm surging white
the spine’s redeeming song so bright.
Basilica uncrowned
recalling fair sea-strewn oak
sands of quarried sisters buried
in cloisters warm with hope.
The island’s psalm surging white
The island’s song a sun-robed night.

3. TRACES OF THE REIGN

fog like incense on the fields this morning
maize heads rise like monstrances

traces of the Reign
in seed-dark beds

all is mission

traces of the rain
in moss-barbed thread

pilgrims lie in wait for thunder

traces of the reign
in sin-dark bread

pilgrims astride the waiting storm
to you a scent of jaundiced vine

faces of the Reign
in seed-dark beds

flowers of liberation in the soil of death

fog like incense on the fields this morning
maize heads rise like monstrances

(poems from Wildflower Psalms out now via Wild Goat Press)