Indian Summer

      
        
       

          Clouds harrowed each day 
          as  the weeks rained down, 
          all summer contained by cold 

          to this turn of the year

a bonfire marks.

Ripe leaves die hard

when their gold is not yet dry.

I light the slow fire

          to burst their green veins.

The swans’ wide wing-beats

alert me and I hear the splash

of weight on water, your call gone.

My sly cat purrs,

her head a nudging wedge of need

beneath my elbow,

a rainbow on every hair

down her used, barred back

where the evening light has clung.

Shafts of a burnt sun

awaken the tones

of the Afghan rug you loved,

swell the haul of their warmth

as they brighten, then season

the full, mauled air.

 

Double

I signal compound, my leaves fingered,

splayed to the brown of Autumn’s droop

fumbling down to crowns

two inches under.

I am green till blooming, crimson cup

busted by feathering reds, gold heart

shambled as bees shuffle

beneath the rags.

I am perfume, faint on a drag of summer

down to the time of rains and greys

rilling along the gutter,

glitter slopped,

none of your blowsy drugging here.

I am core-fat by winter, rootlets twitching

for nitrates locked below

their usual stock.

I am green and splayed, locked and shambled,

core-fat and cup-busted, red and fumbled

where I am guttered and fingered,

where I twitch.

The First One

I’m sure all poets get extremely sick

of other poets’ struggles with their rhymes,

but let me learn. I’d like mine to be slick;

at present, they get punished for my crimes.

I‘ve looked at Spenser’s poems. He wrote well,

but mine? A joke! Where did he learn his craft?

I contemplated curtals - couldn’t spell

its name. And as for Petrarch! No! I laughed.

My writing’s jinxed. No thoughts, I’m in a fix.

Hmmm, do I write this poem, do I not?

Can’t stand it when my mind starts playing tricks

and ends up asking, “Is this all you’ve got?”

Today, my Muse is flaming mad at me.

This sonnet’s off, she hissed - and so is she.

The Part of Olives

Pass the divided moon

tonight, before Friday,

Shabbat. Break it over

our bowl of green crop.

Bite bitter blacks,

fruit of the wood

whose gnarl and twist

pruning wrought for years.

There was not a time

when you, unheavy,

could clatter

the glut to market,

nor I, back

in the grove, heave

mine to the press,

unstumbling;

part them, squeeze

them in cloth,

so down it drops,

viscid,

to their pool

of first blood.

Work Songs

For me, they are poems as well as songs. I love them for three reasons; their rhythmic certainty, their often original verses and their working-class origins. Nearly always they were meant to be sung or chanted while a particular piece of group work was undertaken, the rhythm being taken from the muscular exertion expended in the regular sweep of a tool, or echoing the sound of a piece of machinery, or of an animal roped, also, to an industrial activity. Often, they are the only on-the-spot records we have of a particular job within an industry, some long gone. Alive with sadness, boredom, fear or determination to get the job finished, they pinpoint the voices of real people in real, often cruel and slave-like conditions and what they needed to do as a group to survive dull, repetitive and exploitative work during long work hours. History can live again through their songs and verses.

They cover many industries, from the domestic to the large-scale industrial or agricultural. “Sarasbunda” is a nonsense Dutch spinning song, sung by women working their own spinning-wheels at home; its counterpart is “Poverty Knocks” sung in the C19th Lancashire cotton mills, with all their deafening clack and clamour. “Fourpence a Day,” probably from the Durham or Newcastle area, gives an insight into lead-mining and ore-washing during the C19th, with even young children having to be woken by the village “Knocker-up” while it was still dark, then tramp to the mines with cold, wet, underpaid work in prospect. Often the songs were the only form of subversion the workers had before unionisation took effect in late Victorian times. The earlier “Wauking Songs” from Scotland, sung while a group of women pounded and passed a length of woven woollen cloth or tweed from hand to hand around a table come from the tradition of small home industries. Scottish fisherwomen, too, had their own song in “Buy My Caller Herrin’.” Even children’s games echoed their parents’ occupations; “The Thread Follows the Needle” from the South of England is one such from the time that clothes were made and repaired at home.

Agriculture was well represented. “The Churning Song” from the American Northwest with its telling line of “Aching back and weary arm/Quite rob churning of its charm,” indicates that women worked as hard as the men out in the fields. There are reaping songs and not just of wheat; “Green Grow the Rushes, O” was sung while cutting reeds for weaving. Milling is represented by the song from the Northeast, “Hey, With a Gay and Grinding, O.” Full of sexual references, its rhythm is taken from the speed of the windmill’s turning sails and the grinding of the machinery in the mill building below. Even riding to the local fair had its own song in “Widecombe Fair,” the rhythm echoing a gallop. Hunting had its own quota; “The Dusky Night Rides Down the Sky,” “D’ye Ken John Peel” are two well-known examples. Poachers, too, were represented in “The Lincolnshire Poacher,” though I doubt that one was sung while actually at work!

America is rich in work songs from the days of railway-building, herd-driving by cowboys, sail-shipping and whaling. But the most telling are the slave songs, or field hollers from the American cotton plantations: “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen,” is the painful wail of a desolated spirit under slavery; by contrast, “Jimmy Crack Corn” contains an act of defiance because the slave-master is away for a while. Later, there were songs to be sung on the run along the underground railway, those escape routes for slaves to travel to the north of the country.   

The work songs I’m drawn to most often are sea shanties. Most jobs on the decks of the long-gone sailing ships had their own particular chant or shanty when working the windlass, the pumps, the capstan and the various types of sails. Their rhythms and metres differed according to which job was being done. In addition, there were those for hauling in fishing nets and others for swilling the decks and bilges. Usually, a ship’s crew would appoint a shantyman from among their number; he would call or sing the verse of the shanty while the crew joined in with the refrain. “Way, Haul Away” was sung in 2/2 time while hauling on the bowlines to hoist the mainsails; it is a short-haul shanty. “Blow the Man Down” was sung to a 4/4 rhythm while hauling the halyards to hoist the topsail; it’s from the group of long-drag shanties. “Boney Was a Warrior” is unusual; it’s a four-line short-haul chant with a refrain after every two lines in 3/4 time; its reference to Bonaparte dates it to the early C19th. “We’re Bound for South Australia” is a pumping shanty, sung when pumping out the holds. “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor” was for capstan-turning, its dactylic metre used to alleviate the boredom of a seemingly endless task; with sails, you could at least see the result of hauling. I'm aware that the early, simple sea-chants can hardly be classed as poetry, but they led to better things later on in the C19th.

There are thousands of work songs and chants from across the world, all of them representing the output, poetic and musical, of working people doing ordinary, but heavy work in difficult conditions. While some, such as Malcolm Arnold's “Three Shanties,” written for a woodwind quintet, have been incorporated into mainstream music, generally, they haven’t been accorded the same respect by poets, let alone be adopted into whatever mainstream poetic canon applies at any particular historical point. It’s beyond time for that situation to be redressed. Hence, in shanty style, the poem below, "Lick and Wash."

Lick and wash

She’s grinding full stretch at the rivets today,

      ratchet a notch, ratchet a notch

but she’s scarce in commission; her refit’s away.

       ratchet a notch, hurray!

We’re hurrying eastwards, there’ll be no delay,

for the bait has been laid and our cats’ll dismay

the mouse trapped in his rigging – they’re dying to play.

       ratchet a notch, hurray!

This bucket’s gone bust, so we’ll truss her up fast

      ratchet a notch, ratchet a notch

in her slap through the straits; this run’s not her last.

      ratchet a notch, hurray!

Mouse down, there’s a neighbouring rat to be cast

out from the bilges; the vermin’s outclassed

by our felines’ white fury – they’re on a blast

      ratchet a notch, hurray!

Before our bold scuttle-bus topples a-lee,

      ratchet a notch, ratchet a notch

We’ll do for that plague in the far eastern sea.

      ratchet a notch, hurray!

We’ll unmuzzle our beasts: they’ll collar the flea

In mid-hop; it’s time we ignored its plea.

We’re wanting our tea in our homeland quay.

      ratchet a notch, hurray!

 

Cockle Gatherer

 

I will not be a sea wife,
nor wait with my back

to the land for the tide

to turn you round to the quay,

but, tide after tide,

I will drag my rake

through these wet sands

where the hiss of shells,

their blow of flesh

on the tide’s creep,

trails me up from
the shore to the house.

Politrix

As I lay me down to sleep 
I find it difficult to keep

my thoughts in order, want to weep,

but know I’m in it far too deep

to warrant standing on straight land.

Yes, it’s by my own conniving,

cadging votes while always striving

after contacts, bent on thriving

where the high-ups go on driving

home the point of each one’s brand.

I cast aside the things that matter,

turn to daily in-house chatter,

rattle out the worst of patter

to heap the Party’s utter splatter

on those whose benefits got canned.

Neat as nous my skirt and jacket

when my turn comes round to smack it

hard to bench-flops, so I whack it

ever onwards. Balls! They track it,

note my script runs like the sand.

Undeterred, I dribble forwards,

stuffing time crop-full with more words

till the Speaker claws me floorwards;

snatched back from my soaring core words,

please don’t think that I’ve been panned.

I know why I’m tossing sleepless;

dread those thoughts that wander keepless

down my brain. I would weep less

if they hadn’t sunk so deep.”Less,”

they groan, “O, less, she’s out of hand.”

Caricature of Theresa May by Christopher Sharrock ©