Phil Vernon

The edge of town. A lantern lights the man

about to die. His comrades clasp their eyes.

He kneels: arms spread like sails aloft, he wills

defiance but it’s terror which obtains.

The friar murmurs blessings, swears and damns

the French. The waiting chorus moans and cries,

then ‘tirez!’, muskets fusillade; he spills

beside the corpses slumped among the stains.

Low fearful wails behind the victims’ hands,

the panicked mumbling of the priest who shrives

the doomed, the terse command, the gunshots – still

they resonate, among the faint remains

of ancient susurrus of surf on sand,

dead families’ and lovers’ truths and lies,

muezzin, birdsong, rain on rooftiles, peals

of laughter, angelus and lonesome trains.

Each wave, since noise and atmosphere began,

continuously pales but never dies:

each instant as it passes, pares and steals

a half, and then a half, and half again…

reducing history from the first big bang

towards a point it will not realise:

attenuated, yet its core prevails,

diminishing, but nowhere vanishing.

What’s past is present: faded cryptogram

of sound – no matter if we try to prise

a meaning out of or ignore it – fills

our ears with its abiding, quiet refrain:

the edge of town. A lantern lights the man

about to die. His comrades clasp their eyes.

He kneels: arms spread like sails aloft, he wills

defiance but it’s terror which obtains.

Published in the Kent & Sussex Folio, 2016

The widower

The mourners gone, he felt no need

to mark her passing with a stone:

her ashes swirled into the wind

to fly or fall where they’d be blown,

as fields and copses called her name

in silence louder than he’d known,

on hillsides permanently changed,

and paths he’d now patrol alone.

He stripped the house on to the lawn –

wallpaper, sofa, tables, phones,

chairs, carpets, clothes – and burned it all:

a perfect pyre of what they’d owned…

and turned his back upon the flames

to pick a single rose she’d grown

then sat and watched its slow decay

for days, within their hollow home.

Published in Acumen vol 88 Summer 2017

After the Romans subdued the insurrection led by Spartacus,

they crucified more than 6000 slaves along 130 miles

of the Via Appia. – Nineteenth century guide book.

‘A cold, dry wind blows hollow through the hearts

of travellers from Capua to Rome;

a cross set every thirty paces marks

their haunted progress northward and reminds

them uniformly, order outweighs stone.

Uncountable, the undrawn souls consigned

to void, unnamed in epitaph or song…

Conflict is human history’s constant bride;

her dowry underwrites a wedding feast

for which both invitation list and night are long.

With fewer wars today, by learning peace

we darkly learn ourselves: is it enough

we see the cruelty in war decrease

and yet sustain it, plainly hidden among

the dancing shadows of our winter hearth?

All hurt is felt and meted out by one

and every violence is intimate:

upon each cross a soldier nails a man.

Each night I shrink and tighten, and await

the terror of your voice, your breath, your hand.’

Shortlisted and published in the booklet of the 2017 music and poetry collaboration ‘Out of Place’ https://www.facebook.com/nicolaburnettsmith/

1955

i.m. Richard Langridge *

Magpies love a rabbit halfway dead –

to peck its weeping eyes, disdain the rest

then nonchalantly pause and lift their heads,

hop down and pick their way along the vale

of pain to blind and leave undead, the next.

Romans loved rabbits, too: their settlers sailed

with does and bucks, as well as laws and peace.

We love them less – we’ve placed them on a trail

where gun-green birds glint in the April sun,

imperious at their casual charnel feast.

We met the halfway dead, half hidden among

the dead, as we advanced towards Berlin.

I lift the stricken rabbits one by one,

take cover from their blank and aimless stare,

then break their necks and set them down within

the shadowed margins of the coppice, where

last autumn’s leaves lie cold and half decayed.

The magpies scatter but they reappear.

I’m tired of asking if this horror show

would have me save or kill, or kill to save,

and – as I watch myself deal every blow –

if Romans’ clearer view of dying made

them kinder. Perhaps the feasting magpies know.

* Lt. Langridge helped liberate Belsen concentration

camp in 1945. Mixomatosis was introduced to Britain

on his farm in Kent in 1953. Two years later,

he shot himself, by which time the number of rabbits

in the country had declined by 95%.

(This poem was shortlisted and commended in the Binsted Arts Festival 2016, and is on Binsted Arts Festival 2016 website).

Abominations

The plates are shifting. Tremors cause the curs

To raise their heads and bark: no sounds emerge.

Each day is hotter – farmers heap their carts

With what they can and drag them past

The rotting bodies of their wives and sons.

Dictators we thought gone, return, no more undone

By light, than those whose fleshy hands direct

The giant machines to fall upon and shake

And topple mountains.

Governments on which

We were accustomed to depend unleash

Regimes of scarcity, the hospice door

Is barred, and patients roam the roads or crawl

Into a ditch alone, their muttered groans

Subsiding one by one, cadavers overgrown

With weeds. Those soldiers who’ve returned tell tales

In monotone of thankless killing; trails

Confined by restless shadows; plains traversed

In fear and silence; days of endless thirst.

Meanwhile our chiefs prepare new wars against

Ambitious nations. Freshly-minted states

Assemble moral hordes to re-invade

Their neighbours, whole societies implode

And bands of zealots desecrate the land

To desert sliced across by silver strands.

Each vote returns the day to dark. Each time

A man gives shelter to a friend he finds

Her dead at dawn. Each dressing we apply

Infects the wound, and balsam multiplies

The pain. Our psalms and prayers and countless acts

Of minor good stack up to no impact

At all against this almanac of stained

Abominations stalking our domain.

We’ve exhausted every path we knew to please

The gods. We can’t know where this journey leads.

But we do. It takes us from the citadel

Out through the gates, unquestionably to hell.

Each verse and chapter must be told again

From the beginning, merely to defer the end.

Shortlisted and published in the booklet of the 2017 music and poetry collaboration ‘Out of Place’   https://www.facebook.com/nicolaburnettsmith/

For Tebo

I waken too early, on woodsman’s toes explore

a home that’s still, until our neighbour turns

the news up loud, and you begin to snore

to match the rhythm of the morning trains.

Again I discover as though surprised, the sounds

of dawn are sung by modern life not birds,

that we inhabit cul de sacs, not glades,

wear dressing gowns, not bark cloth capes or furs.

So coffee and toast, and a view of the low winter sky,

an hour or two at tasks brought home from work:

I read, respond, review, redraft, delay,

and listen out for when I hear you stir.

We make pastel love, and when we look outside

a quiet snow has fallen across the town.

The sun shines on the whitened roofs and road.

We smile and put the central heating on.

(Published on Ink Sweat & Tears )

For Goya

You painted duchesses and kings as who

they were – not whom they wished to be – and gave

them what they wanted nonetheless. You drew

the inner contours of their souls; engraved

in permanence their fleeting light and shade

to share a tincture of humanity

with who would see. With care you weighed and made

each mark in a seditious tracery

of progress. Chronicler and refugee

of war, your inner turmoil matched your times:

from deep within your silence you perceived

and stilled the moment, and with tints and lines

you offer us a glimpse through people’s eyes

of history as its brushstroke touched their lives.

(Published by Pennine Platform, 2016)

I see old friends desert their wives, and ask

‘Why not?’ Looked at from outside and from in

it seems improbable our love would last

this long – yet still we wear each other’s ring.

I often fret our mutual need to cling

to love or marriage is what joins our lives

from year to year – and when we come to sing

of love, it’s love, and not our love, we strive

for. Yet you dread death, but would not survive

my death, you say; and I, in foggy dreams

of widowed freedom, feel the future screw

of pain your absence turns, sharp as a scythe.

Our love is love, and so my heart redeems

a life as long as life allows, with you.

(Published in the Kent & Sussex Poetry Folio, 2015)

and then the government attacked

and fire leapt from roof to roof

and all the colours bled to black

for days the greatest rainstorm sluiced

the soot from stumps of home to stain

the soil I lost my wife to war

our girl to floods our boy to flames

I fled with only what I wore

I hid in fields in ditches – nights

I named the rose I bred for each

repeatedly and hugged them tight

I walked in circles weeks then reached

this pebbled shore at Dungeness

awaiting boats to France or death

(This is published on Ink Sweat & Tears)

You take me to task because a man has died.

I ask: do you think I can just forget?

Know this: to protect what’s left to protect

I won’t stop short of murder when required.

We won’t return to unreaped harvests, heads

bent over crippled stalks; the awkward shapes

in stiff repose; the thrice-abandoned space

bereft of you, the slaughterers, the dead.

Democracy will wait until I fear

no more the clattered landing of the crow

in silent farmland, nor that salt-sweet smell.

In quiet moments now, the sounds I hear

are not the cries of twenty years ago –

but their foretokened echoes, should I fail.

(Published by Pennine Platform, 2016)