Higher Tier Unseen Poems 1998-2005

1998Hurricane

Under low black cloudsthe wind was allspeedy feet, all horns and breath,all bangs, howls, rattles, in every hen house,church hall and school.

Roaring, screaming, returning,it made forced entry, shoved walls,made rifts, brought roofs down,hitting rooms to sticks apart.

It wrung soft banana trees,broke tough trunks of palms.It pounded vines of yams,left fields battered up.

Invisible with such ecstasy – with no intervention of sun or man – everywhere kept changing branches.

Zinc sheets are kites.Leaves are panic swarms.Fowls are fixed with feathers turned.Goats, dogs, pigs,all are people together.

Then growling it slunk awayfrom muddy, mossy trail and boatsin hedges: and cows, ratbats, trees,fish, all dead in the road.

James Berry

1999The Richest Poor Man in the Valley

On the outsidehe seemed older than he was.His face was like a weather mapfull of bad weatherwhile insidehis heart was fat with sun.

With his two dogshe cleared a thin silver pathacross the Black Mountain. And when winterkicked inthey brought his sheepdown from the toplike sulky clouds.

Harry didn’t care for thingsthat other people prizelike money, houses, bank accountsand lies.He was living in a caravanuntil the day he died.

But at his funeralhis friends’ tearsfell like a thousanddiamonds.

Lindsay Macrae

2000The River’s Story

I remember when life was good.I shilly-shallied across meadows,Tumbled down mountains,I laughed and gurgled through woods,Stretched and yawned in a myriad of floods.Insects, weightless as sunbeams,Settled upon my skin to drink.I wore lily-pads like medals.Fish, lazy and battle-scarred, Gossiped beneath them.The damselflies were my ballerinas,The pike my ambassadors.Kingfishers, disguised as rainbows,Were my secret agents.It was a sweet time, a gone-time,A time before factories grew,Brick by greedy brick,And left me coweringIn monstrous shadows.Like drunken giantsThey vomited their poisons into me.Tonight a scattering of vagrant bluebells,Dwarfed by those same poisons,Toll my ending.

Children, come and find me if you wish,I am your inheritance.Behind the derelict housing estatesYou will discover my remnants.Clogged with garbage and junkTo open sewer I’ve shrunk.

I, who have flowed through history,Who have seen hamlets become villages,Villages become towns, towns become cities,Am reduced to a trickle of filthBeneath the still, burning stars.

Brian Patten

2001Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel*faces down frost; green thrives: the crops don’t fail,sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;elect an honest man; decide they careenough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not goamiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrowthat seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

Sheenagh Pugh

*a grape from which a type of white wine is made

2002Nothing

I take a jewel from a junk-shop trayAnd wish I had a love to buy it for.Nothing I choose will make you turn my way.Nothing I give will make you love me more.

I know that I’ve embarrassed you too longAnd I’m ashamed to linger at your door.Whatever I embark on will be wrong.Nothing I do will make you love me more.

I cannot work. I cannot read or write.How can I frame a letter to implore*.Eloquence is a lie. The truth is trite*.Nothing I say will make you love me more.

So I replace the jewel in the trayAnd laughingly pretend I’m far too poor.Nothing I give, nothing I do or say,Nothing I am will make you love me more.

James Fenton

* implore = beg trite = lacking originality; commonplace; ordinary

2003Another Small Incident

November evening, rain outside and darkBeyond the building’s honeycomb of warmth.The old man stands there, waiting to be noticed.He wears *propitiation like a coat.The girl looks up at him. ‘Yes? Can I help you?’‘This card you sent like, that’s the problem, see.It says I’ve got your book, but that’s not right.I mean, I had it but I brought it back.That’s what I do, I read one, bring it back.I never keep them, see.’

He stands, condemnedYet quivering for justice. ‘All right, sir.’She smiles at him. ‘We get mistakes like that.Just leave the card with me.’ He stares at her,Seventy, with spotted hands, afraid,And someone smiles at him and calls him sir.Lighting at the contact, like a bulb,He warms to her. ‘That’s what I do, you see.I take the one, I read it, bring it back.I thought, you know, it might be on the shelves.I mean, if no one’s had it since like, see.’Another girl comes by. ‘We’re closing, Sue.You coming?’ Sue looks up and rolls her eyes.The old man catches it. He understands.He turns and shuffles out into the night.

David Sutton

* propitiation – a desire to reduce blame or anger.

2004

The time is now

Never saw a sky so blue,so keen a light, all summer long.The time is now:this month, this week, to walk amongthe burning trees, till they snuff out.

In the great park there stands an elm,yellower than sun in its chain-mailof shivering flame.The choir-school boys are playing ball,team-kitted, shrill-voiced, making fun

behind Sir’s back, or watching wherea girl swings past. The note of redrings in her hair;in rowan leaves; in the splashed bloodof berries; in the smouldering west.

The gates will shut before too long.Late in the day; late in the year.They look so young,the girl with her bright fall of hair,the boys in yellow, like the trees.

Sheenagh Pugh

2005

Three or so

Is that child in the snapshot me?That little girl in the woollen dressBy a broken door in a tiny yardShe’s shy and laughing and ready to runAnd shielding he eyes from the morning sunI’ve forgotten the dress, and the colour of itI’ve forgotten who took the photographI’ve forgotten the little girl, three or so,She’s someone else now, to be wondered at,With my mother’s eyes and my own child’s hairAnd my brother’s smile: but the child who’s there – The real soul of her – fled long agoTo the alley-way where she mustn’t goThrough the broken door that I never forgot

Rough men on motorbikes, not to be looked atScrawny cats scratching, not to be touchedDown to the railway-line, never to go thereOr up to the road where the traffic rushedStay close in the yard with the sun in your eyesCome and be still for your photograph.

I can hear now the drone of those bikesAnd the loud dark voices of the menAnd the howl of the tomcats on their prowlI can hear the scream and shush of the trainAnd the whooshing of traffic on the roadBut the summer buzz in that tiny yardAnd the child who laughed with her best dress onAnd the voice that told her to stand in the sunAnd the click that pressed the shutter downHave goneAs if they had never been.

Berlie Doherty

2006

In the poem, a prisoner describes life in a prison.

In The Can

Every second is a fishbone that sticksIn the throat. Every hour another slowStep towards freedom. We’re geriatricsWaiting for release, bribing time to go.I’ve given up trying to make anythingDifferent happen. Mornings: tabloids, page three.Afternoons: videos or Stephen King,Answering letters from relatives who bore me.We’re told not to count, but the days mount hereLike thousands of identical stitchesResentfully sewn in to a sampler,*Or a cricket bat made out of matches.Nights find me scoring walls like a madman,Totting up runs: one more day in the can.

ROSIE JACKSON

*a type of embroidered picture

2007ShopkeeperWhat a quiet time of yearhe told me, for it was Februaryand the trees were bare.Storms had blown even beech leavesfrom hedges not a week beforeand trees were down at the forest eaves.What he meant by quiet was a lackof visitors coming and going on the forest roadstopping to buy in his shop full of tack.He said it with his foot just inchesfrom patches of snowdrops blooming between daffodil shootsand yards from the bird-table flurry of tits and finches.In the distance the mountains glittered with snow.His van was in neutral, its engine revving

with gathering speed. I watched him go.I thought yes, how quiet it seems.The sun glistened a dew-wet web in the hedgeand hushed the cold rush of the roaring streams.GREG HILL

2008A London Thoroughfare* Two A.M.They have watered the street,It shines in the glare of lamps,Cold, white lamps,And liesLike a slow-moving river,Barred with silver and black.Cabs go down it,One,And then another.Between them I hear the shuffling of feet,Tramps doze on the window-ledges,Night walkers pass along the sidewalks.The city is squalid and sinister,With the silver-barred street in the midst,Slow moving,A river leading nowhere.Opposite my window,The moon cuts,Clear and round,Through the plum-coloured nightShe cannot light the city;It is too bright.It has white lamps,And glitters coldly.I stand in the window and watch the moon.She is thin and lustreless,But I love her.I know the moon,And this is an alien city.AMY LOWELL* a main road(153

2009Winter SwansThe clouds had given their all -two days of rain and then a breakin which we walked,the waterlogged earthgulping for breath at our feetas we skirted the lake, silent and apart,until the swans came and stopped uswith a show of tipping in unison.As if rolling weights down their bodies to their headsthey halved themselves in the dark water,icebergs of white feather, paused before returning againlike boats righting in rough weather.‘They mate for life’ you said as they left,porcelain* over the stilling water. I didn’t replybut as we moved on through the afternoon light,slow stepping in the lake’s shingle and sand,I noticed our hands, that had, somehow,swum the distance between usand folded, one after the other,like a pair of wings settling after flight.OWEN SHEERS(153-03)

*porcelain - a type of fine white china, often used for ornaments