Tuesday 13 October 2015

Riposte

It is sometimes a fact that unremarkable material can, as you dismiss it, leave a nagging stain on your consciousness that you have to write out to get rid of it.

Yet again, it was a Barcelona English Speaking Poetry Group evening that laid the foundations for the following poem.  Sitting here, in front of my computer, I cannot actually remember the stimulus for the evening's writing,  but I know that I emerged from the session with a picture of post-nuclear destruction firmly in my mind.  This did not link with my view of early autumn trees, no matter how hard I try and make these pieces of vegetation particularly my own!  However, the two ideas did intertwine, though I have to admit that was only after quite disparate note making.

I am constantly amazed by how trees take on the appearance of death and then magically come back to life.  I feel this, while knowing that deciduous trees do that as part of their life cycle, but I still find it miraculous when buds appear and everything goes on just at it did the year before.  I can only guess at the horror that greeted the seasons before people had the scientific knowledge to know that things would reappear.

Now, of course, our scientific knowledge indicates that we are working our way towards the non-appearance of leaves, as we destroy the natural sequence of the seasons with the way that we pollute the world.

All of the above were going through my mind as I was writing the following poem.

This poem is not as long as I thought it was going to be, and it is not as graphic as I imagined that it was going to be.  But that 'restraint' is part of the decision which made the poem in the form that you see it here.

There are some parts of this poems which I do not fully understand, though I knew that I wanted to write them.  If that makes sense.

This is the sort of poem to which I will have to return.  But I think that it says something that I truly believe if you look behind the images!




Riposte


As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream.
The Pilgrim’s Progress John Bunyan 1678.


Trees begin,
again,
            to fake their deaths.

Each fallen leaf prods pens to gather up
the season’s debris into words.

It is a race between the cleaners
and the lookers-on. 

Who now, will make the most
of transience?

And long before the vegetation has had time
to smear its nourishment
on unappreciative cement
(which islands trees
in the domestic scene)
with chair and tea and time
I watch and nod and drowse.

And then they stop. 

The trees. 
           
            The leaves rise up and
                        re-attach, as every green
veined face is turned in
bland rejection of what was,
and watch,
            impassively,

as humans’ tissue strips away

like leaves

(so tissue-thin it hardens as it drifts)

to brittle-scrape the pavement’s stone.

The second and succeeding suns
flay scuttling people of the world.

Flesh falls.

And gleaming muscle moistens
in the blood-rain air,
as tendons snap the light,
and ligaments suck bone to whiteness
in a gaunt and raw display of
what was once beneath.

And history is only in the ice.

Each band retains the story
that
soft-fleshed betrayers
lost

while luscious leaves rub
fullness in the breeze.


I would appreciate any response which respond to the linking of the title, quotation and poem.  Or indeed any responses about any part of this poem!