The Envoi Competition Winner: THE EAST YORKSHIRE CREMATORIUM (for G.R.)

(The poem derived from attendance at a friend's funeral. He was a confirmed atheist and the service at the crematorium reflected this. The opening of the poem does, though, play with the idea of the Fates who spun, measured and cut each person's thread of life - many at the funeral said GR was an atheist but then spoke of the sad fate which had befallen him. During the service I was intrigued by the activities of the crows outside in the poplar trees. Crows were considered to be able to move between this world and the next and to foretell the future. The onomatopeic call "Cras!" is, I think, Latin for tomorrow and contributed in the ancient world to the sense of crows as messengers from beyond. In engineering a clack valve is a one-way valve. The poem is here presented as a single verse. For the Envoi competition it was submitted as four quatrains)



No God brought you to this place. The weave
unraveled: spun, measured and cut. Now each
standing at the lectern thumbs a thin thread
teasing for meaning back to the entwining knot.
Outside, the west wind pipes up the escarpment,
the shielding poplar line shivers; a silver
leaf mantilla drapes the black comb of trunks.
Eloquently, a calliope wheezing an old-time hymn,
the trees lament their bending. Through stained glass
I watch a crow court squawking sky secrets;
lifting from twisted thorn nests, woven tight
to the tree scaffold, they hang, between earth and cloud,
wings stiff, waiting on a wish to be made. Cras! Cras!
They clack their hollow hope. There is no future
beyond this building; a one-way valve, the heat
plume shimmering high into empty, weightless air.

The View From The Hotel Il Nido

(This is one of my favourite poems. Some years ago not long after the death of my mother, I went to Sorrento and stayed in the hotel Il Nido - the nest - which was high above Sorrento looking across the bay to Naples. When we got there I rushed out to the balcony to photograph the view. I realised that part of the taking of images was to show my mother on my return as she had not travelled much. Of course she was no longer there and though I was at the hotel for a week I never could get the image I wanted because there was no-one who would see it. The picture above is of Vesuvius and Naples from the Hotel Il Nido taken at dawn.
This poem was published by the Blackmail Press in New Zealand along with a few others - www.blackmailpress.com/Index18.html.)

Looking from Sorrento, the bay
Flattens into a double-bladed axe
Astride my sight line to Naples;
Twin edges honed bright, shining in
The break of wave against distant beach.

Each morning the city emerges from the mist,
A grisaille: bleached and monotonous,
It is a model city;
Faking perspective and depth,
Cheating the taking and holding of a view,

Later in the sun shimmer,
An impressionist landscape,
it offers slabs of colour and shadow,
Stacked and angled defiantly against each other.
A new city appears for the day,
Teases, obscure and unknowable, before
Returning to the darkness spreading up the mountain.

And out of this art history my mother’s face suggests,
A shifting emulsion, rainbow oils on the water;
Five years dead she comes to me
In the makings of a face
Believers might con from cloud pattern to be comforted

At home I display photographs of her in rictus poses,
Suspicious, only the record of a moment in a landscape or room.
Held stiff, as if a lapse in concentration might discover her;
The picture and the person immiscible.

Each morning from the balcony
I have raised the camera and sought focus
I cannot fix these images.

New Anthology

A new anthology of poems from northern writers - entitled Northen Types - is coming out in the Spring. Around 50 contributors including me - I'll post the poems when it is published. If anyone wants copies let me know and I'll post details of how to get them.