Thursday 16 April 2015

Over head

Our local leisure centre has developed further!  The new car park is now open, a new extensive children's playground has magically sprung up and the space under the remains trees has been set with new tables and chairs.
          I was the first to sit in this new space with my customary cup of tea and it was during the time it takes for a cup of tea to be drunk that I made the notes that informed the following poem.
          There is not real shade under the trees at the moment because the leaves have not yet grown to their full size so you can appreciate the structure of what will soon me lost as the leaves develop.
           It was seeing the almost ecclesiastical church-like pillars and fan vaulting that encouraged the central image in the poem.
           It is also undeniable that I do feel a sort of ownership of the trees as I have been writing about them since last autumn and I make that explicit in the first stanza of the poem.
          It is difficult to know how much of what I write on such a limited subject matter is self-indulgence, but as soon as I started to make my notes in my notebook I felt a sort of excitement about the development of the ideas that I had.  I only hope that some of that feeling is contained in the poem.


Over head




It’s only fitting that I am the first
to sit (new tables, chairs) under
the captive trees which rise from
earth-island-circles set symmetrically
in cement seas. 
                       My words have claimed them,
through three seasons, as my own. 
My metaphors manured their growth!

The roof’s a work in hand,
that spreads from ruins of the past,
as fissured pillar-trunks show they retain
the memory of what they might become.

Mosaics of the sky fall through the
broken tracery of branches’ spread
that, fanning out, Rococo ribs
vault space that lacks the summer’s leaf
to smooth the edifice to a convincing build.

I sit under potentiality,
appreciating and imagining

as new worlds show.


I sense a sort of arrogance in the line, My metaphors manured their growth! when I am talking about the way that I have used the subject matter of these particular trees in my past poems - but, in my defence, I would point out that there is an exclamation mark at the end of the line and I think also that the absurdity of the reality of the line is also obvious!  Which is not to say that I do feel that I have created a version of the trees which only exists in what I have written.




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