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An ecologist Comments
Thursday, 4 August 2022 at 10:45
AN ECOLOGIST COMMENTS
That original, Adam-and-Eve of a tree, two lovers united as a single birch, an eternal clasp of thigh and knee, should defy the hardest cold and preserve a perfect human state. Too far north for such degree of bliss. Listen as frost wrinkles in the bark and hear them, inevitably, crack apart.
1971
I presented this in one of the workshops run by Kevin Crossley-Holland at Leeds University under the title “A Marxist Comments” and speedily changed the title before it was collected in “Four Poetry and Audience Poets” edited by Alan Ram. There’s a story, which I read as a nine-year old, by the psychic novelist, Joan Grant, purporting to be from a native North American legend of two forbidden lovers who changed into a single birch tree. I was reading a lot of Robert Graves when I wrote this poem.
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Relapse
Wednesday, 3 August 2022 at 17:29
RELAPSE
You, silhouetted outside the window in my cell, were so tranquil, head bent, hands folded in your lap, that I was calm for once and showed a marked improvement.
“My ideal” I claimed, so was allowed to leave and learn from you a sight of sun and moon I knew only second-hand.
I was disappointed when you did not see me and stared inside the darkness I had brought as if you envied what I’d left behind.
We were discovered in a state of total silence, were locked away together with curtains drawn across the window.
1969
This was published in Universities Poetry 9 edited by Edwin Morgan and either Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney. I managed to spread a single sentence over each stanza and make each line mean something by itself, an element of poetic craft I’m quite fanatical about.
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1968 Poem
Tuesday, 2 August 2022 at 10:14
IMMIGRANT
Came off mountains with memories of woodsmoke and sharp thunder into city smog which hurt my lungs. You laughed, dubbing me bizarre and kept me as a wonder.
Arrived one early morning to present a honeycomb with bees still buzzing in my words; imagined you would not resent stinging with the sweetness. You asserted I was mad and called the janitor to throw me out.
Should realise the city hands out nothing I could want. But you hold the promise of fresh rain, cool umber of the mountains in your eyes. Expect me at eight in evening dress bearing a box of chocolates.
1968
Ronnie Sullivan told me it had the quality of a telegram, I suppose because of the pronoun drop characteristic of early Auden. Yes, of course, I accept that my vision of the immigrant being truer to the natural world is sentimental.
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A poem for every year I've written 1
Monday, 1 August 2022 at 14:35
HARMATTAN
I am a dry wind, conceived in the womb of the Red Sea, blowing from burning libraries at Alexandria, searching for knowledge lost at my birth. Men call me arid, but I purify my desert drying any pools of polluted feeling. And in that pebbled, heated land where no men live their forgotten temples lie buried in my sands of thought.
I cannot move forever. My impetus dies in the humid lands, a southern end of my existence. Instead of purifying I become defiled. From a Mediterranean birth to an Atlantic death, a dying breeze off the Accra shore and I weep.
1967
My first poem anyone thought fit to print. Ronnie Sullivan, the editor of Poetry and Audience told me he thought of it as a metaphor for history. In terms of meteorology it’s a bit of a stretch to have the wind beginning in the Red Sea and blowing across the Sahara to West Africa, but poetic licence was given to me by this poem.
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