HOME FROM WAR – a poem
This sonnet is in my last book, Guerrilla Country (published by Flight of the Dragonfly, 2024). It was also published in Shot Glass Journal in May 2023.
Home from war
In landscapes where trees used to talk with trees
through filaments beneath leaf-littered ground,
the paths I knew no longer welcome me
and oaks that once cast shade, cast shadows now—
and conjure armed and anxious pickets, guarding
men with axes, heard but never seen:
their echoes turning forest into farms;
their harvest forming dams across our streams.
War came here while I was away at war—
whole swathes reduced to bramble, briar and stumps
criss-crossed by giants felled as if by storms
while coppice stems stand bare in summer sun.
Though beech still talk with beech, in their own tongue,
they’re fearful—fewer, quieter than before.
Map reading, a poem.
This poem was published in the Irish poetry magazine Abridged last year.
Map reading
What, then, is time? If no-one asks me, I know;
if I wish to explain it to he who asks, I do not know.
- St. Augustine, The Confessions
Nighttime. A taxi’s at the kerb,
vibrating with a low-slung diesel purr
after dropping you here (or is it there?)
Or maybe it’s come to take you… where?
No matter: it’s morning, the following day –
or the day before; you’re walking past
a line of poplars, through the broken gate,
and then along the river path.
You stop, look back. The river’s gone. No way
to know what lies beyond that wooded hill.
The trees in leaf declare it’s May;
the skeletons of dying trees say ‘now; until…’
Your map knows where and what, and when and who,
but you can’t decipher the legend, can’t
distinguish north from future, east from past;
determine where today has landed you.
Outside, the street-lamp’s orange cone
picks out the rain, and deepens the dark
between the unlit, waiting homes.
The taxi door is opening. Already? At last.
Applied Mathematics 2
Another poem from my collection Guerrilla Country. The initial idea came from Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1808 statement that in war, three-quarters of an army’s strength turns on moral factors, and only a quarter on its manpower, materiel, etc. (À la guerre les trois quarts sont des affaires morales ; la balance des forces réelles n’est que pour un autre quart.) Meanwhile a lot of commentators on the war in Ukraine were repeating the maxim that attackers need three times the strength of defenders, to prevail.
Applied mathematics 2
I. Success
For every 100 kilometres we advance
across this 100 kilometre front
we gain 10,000 kilometres squared
we must supply, control, administer, defend
from outside and from in;
look back towards.
We’re simply winning,
until we start to lose.
II. Under siege
The roads are closed
and foraging for water, food and fuel’s unsafe.
But there’s a way.
Each day we’ll halve
the rations that remain,
use half, and store what’s left.
Then in the morning,
halve again.
III. Probability
There must be traitors in a war.
If you don’t know their names
arrest the ones from where
betrayal would, most likely, occur:
women and men whose mothers and fathers
we likely arrested before.
IV. Rectilinear
On straight and narrow roads
through forest,
marsh or mud
the target zone’s
as wide as
the convoy’s long
and when the road is blocked,
the convoy’s speed
is none.
V. Threes
A rifle,
a magazine, three spares,
in the hands of a soldier knowing only what they’re for
are worth
the same times three
in the hands of a soldier knowing why he’s there;
and in defence,
compared with attack,
worth three times more.
So what’s the worth—
compared with silence, drumbeat and
the calculus of harm—
of a voice,
a call for peace
and the courage of those who stand apart?
‘In the corridor’, a poem
This poem was first published in Flights.
In the corridor
I’ve never felt a greater urge
to hug someone than when,
in response to ‘how is he today?’
she stopped, quite still
under fluorescent light:
‘Our Mum’s been told
we need to say goodbye.’
She stood, uncertain,
held in place by the air
that flowed around her, eyes
as deep and dark and wide
as eyes have been, above
the stitches picked out, perfect white,
on the mask we had to wear.
But I couldn’t respond. She
breathed again, and carried
the weight of her losing away.
And I returned to sit and relate
the news of the world outside—
football, family, politics—
to your unopened, unstill eyes.
Map reading, a poem
This poem was first published in the wonderful Irish magazine Abridged
Map reading
What, then, is time? If no-one asks me, I know;
if I wish to explain it to he who asks, I do not know.
- St. Augustine, The Confessions
Nighttime. A taxi’s at the kerb,
vibrating with a low-slung diesel purr
after dropping you here (or is it there?)
Or maybe it’s come to take you… where?
No matter: it’s morning, the following day –
or the day before; you’re walking past
a line of poplars, through the broken gate,
and then along the river path.
You stop, look back. The river’s gone. No way
to know what lies beyond that wooded hill.
The trees in leaf declare it’s May;
the skeletons of dying trees say ‘now; until…’
Your map knows where and what, and when and who,
but you can’t decipher the legend, can’t
distinguish north from future, east from past;
determine where today has landed you.
Outside, the street-lamp’s orange cone
picks out the rain, and deepens the dark
between the unlit, waiting homes.
The taxi door is opening. Already? At last.
Perhaps
This poem was first published in The Madrid Review.
Perhaps
Last time I walked this path, where jackdaws skip
and tchack companionably, and search for seeds,
this stubble field was chestnut trees; that pasture,
hops in hanging garlands, dense and green.
I was with you. We stopped to explore the barn,
now gone, that smelled of nettles, absence, damp –
asbestos fragments littering the floor –
then found the floods had blocked the way we’d planned.
We climbed a fence and shuffled awkwardly
across the flooded fields, watching the swollen
river rush the debris on its way.
Did we see jackdaws on that stolen day?
We never made it to those distant hills.
Perhaps the river stopped us, after all.
Spring terror
This poem was included in my first poetry collection, Poetry After Auschwitz. Snowdrops are starting to emerge again in our garden, so this seemed a suitable time to dust it off.
Spring terror
Snowdrops revert to merely green
when snow subverts their herald’s role,
but thaw restores their callous poise
and sets in train an ebbing tide
which gathers speed like pressured steam
as each successive flower unfolds
and every longer day destroys
more of the darkness where we hide.
It quietly starts, and then it swells,
this growing distance from the shore –
and as my toes lose contact with
dissolving sand and broken shells,
I want to ask, beneath the roar,
has winter no more cold to give?
Child
This poem is included in my book Watching the Moon Landing.
Child
You notice things, it's true:
the wren that hasn't built
a nest to welcome spring,
the trees blown into trees
aslant, across the hill;
our lowered words of war.
You sense our fear, and ask
why we can only see
and hear through misted glass.
You notice things, it's true:
we may not be at war,
but through that clouded glass
we hear the silence in
an unfamiliar key
and - as you quietly say -
the sky's a restless blue.
Message in a bottle
Message in a bottle
When inner voices claim they’ve glimpsed a seam
his psyche would prefer were not exposed,
he tells them “Fuck you Freud, hands off my dreams:
a tree is just a tree, a rose, a rose.”
But one can almost know a thing for years
(and meanwhile know it too, of course) and so
he leaves himself small clues he catches here
and there – joins up the dots – until he knows:
describing every day as “wet” or “dry”,
a traveller passed out in a park, from “stress”,
champagne for breakfast by the riverside,
sipped whisky standing for reflectiveness,
the journalist whose soul’s too numb to mourn,
Judas and Jesus drinking through the night,
the drunken farmers dancing in a storm,
self-portraits with a glass just out of sight,
long games of poker in the airport bar
then incoherent flights through jagged time
and waking unsure where or who you are
to scratch away the null with wine, with wine, with wine…
---
This poem appeared in Watching The Moon Landing.
It might be simpler than you think
Another poem from my 2024 book, Guerrilla Country, poems about peace and conflict.
It might be simpler than you think
You're asking what would make
things closer to OK.
It might be simpler than you think.
To live again in space
once wrenched away, and sing
again: the songs we wish to sing.
Phil Vernon 