Voting for Spring E-Book

Paul Mills

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 67

Beschreibung

Central to the title poem of Voting for Spring is the long human struggle for survival against ice and cold. The poem makes contact with our present climate crisis, as well as suggesting a dimension which is more personal.

Leseprobe

Voting for Spring

Paul Mills

In memory of Rene Mills 1910 - 2005

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgement is due to the editors of Smith's Knoll, The Slab, Magma, Poetry and Audience, The Word, Stand, The North, Not In So Many Words, where some of these poems first appeared. One group of poems came to be written in response to a number of short films from the Yorkshire Film Archive, and earlier versions of these poems were recorded as voice-overs to accompany edited footage. I wish to express my thanks to Sue Howard and her colleagues from the YFA for their time, patience and help. 'The Heat Age' was published in an anthology of poems commissioned by the Arts Council, Feeling The Pressure, on the subject of global warming. The title poem was influenced by Chris Stringer's book Homo Britannicus which tells the story of early human settlement in Britain. My thanks too to the editors and readers of the Ripon Gazette, where several poems in this collection first started life. The idea of writing poems regularly for a local newspaper was that a lot of people given the chance will be able to enjoy contemporary poetry.

Also by Paul Mills:

North Carriageway (Carcanet, 1976)Third Person (Carcanet, 1978)Half Moon Bay (Carcanet, 1993)Dinosaur Point (Smith/Doorstop, 2000)

Contents

DedicationAcknowledgementsContents

Brimham Rocks in JanuaryGeneral SwimWindy MarketWinter Comes NearerQuiet PleaseAngel FestivalSnow-ploughs pulled by horsesThe Egg HarvestA Garrison Town Sports Day, April 1916Women in a Munitions FactoryClearing Snow on the Moors Railway, 1947My ParentsFirst LightThe ViaductNorth and SouthTravellersEtcHigh Dependency WardBlue FootballAlgiersCaligula's Rules for GovernmentBackstage, King LearWoman with a JackdawDiana and ActaeonMonet in BradfordSaturday BellsRubbishBeachcomberThe Hackfall DragonThe Wild HuntWonderful LifeEducación21/2001Climbers at WinspitWhat We LoveLone Star RiderThe Heat AgeThe Fires of SpringVoting For SpringNatural HistoryThe Apple Press

Biography

Brimham Rocks in January

Three hundred million years, no Atlantic –

Scotland, America, one mountain coastline.

Britain began with this outcrop.

Silt washed down in deltas of rivers.

Then a hundred thousand years of ice age

whipping across the glacier that shut Nidderdale

storm-blasted the rocks into shapes we know.

Shark mouths, numb slabs,

the shock of cold still in them.

From tropic towards arctic, how far these rocks have travelled.

We walk past where a climber, topping out,

leaves his little trace of blood and skin.

Twigs shake in the almost freezing glaze.

Living up here's too bleak in any season.

We need to wrap ourselves in cities.

Some rocks have holes where the wind still tunnels.

Gaps between rocks

shape the sky that shapes them.

Each is a place where we can get a hold

on the speechless past,

be there and still come back.

General swim

Morning's first swimmers curl their toes

at the edge of a huge green cube, ice-still,

but getting in, it's lukewarm.

Voices are one molten shout, lasting

all day in the wriggling green-tiled water.

Floating grins, bubble-blowing lips, legs

with a sudden kick in them. A big pink starfish

hangs suspended in the shape of a child,

bobs up like a cork as far as the air. A tiny thing

called Harriet with luminous arm-bands

has drifted out of the shallow end.

On my back,

I watch the sliding plaster ceiling, texture

of cellulite or old custard, nothing to support it.

A scream, echo-prolonged, pierces my eyeball

with somebody's joy. Kids with fists like grenades

slam the surface. This is the crawl.

Shoulders grow heavier over the years.

Bodies of the young lengthen like shadows.

And now in mid afternoon, late August,

the sun finds a space between trees through a window,

shines direct on water, covers a wall with ripples

of dazzle, a high-speed light-storm of shimmering.

Outside, people enter a brightness,

a shivery feeling between clothes and skin.

There's a strange colour in the air,

in their gaze as they move, a damp glistening,

each an ounce or two lighter, a splash happier.

Windy Market

In the on-and-off storm sunlight,

torn-up clouds mean a coming blast,

of terrified wind over the fields

where low roofs brighten.

Exposed to a battering sky, this little square,

unprotected by its walls of shops and banks,

is full of metal shrieks today, falling tubes

of scaffolding, torn loose plastic and

canvas sails, as the whole market hangs

on its bungee straps, stall connected to stall.

The weather is useless to sellers of Chinese-style

handbags, fine bone china mugs, luxury

All-Season feather duvets,

a T-shirt with a flaming skull.

Here once street lamps glowed with sewer gas,

wives were sold at auction, convicts leaving for

Botany Bay felt their nervous bones rattle

in irons somewhere by the taxi stand;

somebody whispered a name he loves,

the brand-wound still hot.

Now, in the new century, in this wind

while the sky darkens, while things fall

steadily apart, I imagine the market,

in some strange hook-up with the weather,

nothing to hold it to the ground,

a diminishing, striped, trestle-tabled assemblage,

scattering knives, CDs, cassettes and flowers,

becoming now a single sail higher and higher in the air,

as it twists with a flap out of sight.

Winter Comes Nearer

On Hallowe'en, a young girl looks in a mirror.

Bite an apple, her friends tell her for a dare,

and behind your shoulder you'll see the face

of the love of your life. Or if it's nobody, a skull.

A few nights later, bonfires are lit.

Our whole town gathers

on a hill where a fiery dragon

blows sparks at stars and melts the moon.

Parents, grandparents, children, their friends,

as every Novermber for four hundred years

watch Guy Fawkes as a torrent

of flames pulls him slowly apart.

The sky fills up with roses, dazzling

blossoms, shrieking explosions.

Silver was never so silver or blue so blue.

Colour squirts through the air at the end of a stick.

We stare into scenes tracing

the flying curves of the Sydney Opera House in light,

in tropical-eyed peacock feathers,

as if the entire conspiracy

happened so that in starlight and mud

this firework would pour its demonic blue,

these go cannoning over the crowd,

this one's feelers of brilliance spiral orange.

Afterwards, when the barrage has stopped,

we catch our first glimpse of winter in the

gunpowder-grey forest of these wriggling away

smoke-trails, its branches thick as frost.

Quiet Please

Crime, Romance, Fiction, History,

Pets, Computers, Cookery, Religion,

Ghosts in Yorkshire. Listed, alphabetical.

Decency at the Helpdesk. Laughter

at Customer Information. Clicking of mice.

Tapping of keys. Folding and flattening

of newspapers. Unwrapping of illegal sweets.

The spider-lilies and monsteras are glossy,

the parlour palms watered. Items on loan,

checked in or late. The till rings. It's a fine

Through a window yesterday's slush freezes.

The old library at the bottom of the hill

is derelict now, exposed to damp and its stained doings,

shelves like useless scenery. In one room

a collection of burned-out candles, a place

to meet in secret. Maybe kids come here.

There's a smell of neglect. Slits of light

live with the long silence of nothing doing, no voices

only the street, frightening ordinary rain on a skylight, traffic.

We like places clean, cared for, part of everybody's day,

owned, and hate raw cold, decay, thick dust and slush

of broken glass, the outside coming in.

Angel Festival

You can make the body of an angel

with fifty light bulbs, chicken wire,

carrier bags, plastic bottles.

With a whole school's worth

of cut-out paper hands you can make wings.

An angel is holding a book which shows

the names of the children who made it.

If these fly, they're invisible,

pound the air like swans, then stand

wings folded, never seem out of breath.

As for the real angels,

you were just minding your sheep that night