Category Archives: The Green Crown

The Dinner Guest

Among the woodlands and green meadows
there are hints of paradise: the weave of roads
I walk upon, the rivers glinting in the sun,
the reeds whisper which way I should go
and flies sit high up in the trees and sing.

But sometimes I have work to do,
as when I’m hurried to a house
where an old man lies among the candles,
his puffy soul still closed inside his corpse,
like a mindless face floating on the dark.

They seat me at a laden table and bid me eat
dishes that reek of cost and opulence,
thick with the fatty gravies of the dead one’s sins:
I suck away layers of softest skin like masks,
I swallow the disguises of his soul.

When I’m tight with wickedness they shove me out,
as though any dog could take on sins unscathed.
But I walk the briars and wildways for a day,
until I find a scarecrow in some lonely field
and just beneath its raggy arse I shit

the plump and steaming coil of that man’s sins.
I watch sweet flies descend to lay their eggs,
knowing maggots soon will bathe and suckle there.
When I’m long gone those grubs will turn to flies
and sins will rise like prayers upon the winds.

With heaven in my eyes I walk these roads
and though I’m shunned none will do me harm,
for all must take the sacrament of death,
that sustains me like the soft preserving hand
of my Lord who is a voice among the reeds.
The Thorn Tree

I leave my lady down below,
as I climb the sacred tree to God.
Sharp thorns tear my skin,
dark birds claw my face and eyes.

At last above my head, the tree trunk branches
into three, each branch growing through
a window open in the House of God.
Stealthily, I climb and peep through one,
but there is nothing there, except a silence
that tries to touch the heart of everything.
It makes me feel the way I used to feel
when I was by my love and we were quiet;
her gentleness a lily bloom inside me.

Now I climb the second branch
and passing through the window see a dove
who sings a charm upon the world
that’s like a calling bell we do not hear,
yet would grieve for should it not be there.
Like the way my love below completed
what was missing in my world
and softened all the armours of my heart.

But where is God, the Lord of Hosts?
Through the third window then I poke my head
and tumble helpless through a frightening void,
until a strong hand snatches mine
and sets me back upon my branch.
The hand was like my lady’s hand:
both sail and anchor of my soul’s boat,
in all the calm deep waters of our love
and in the choppy shallows of my fear.

Now I hurry quickly down the trunk,
filled with shame at what I could not see
while chasing what I did not understand.
But on the ground I hear my lady,
lonely and with broken heart, went to cloister
years ago and sits in a cell of silence.
With heavy heart I go back up the tree,
but find the windows shuttered from within.

Now I sit on muddy earth and weep.
The house inside me that was filled with light,
holds darkness and a deepening cold.
Those tears I made my lady shed,
when I left her on her own,
were holy water, but I knew it not.
The Old Train

A chain of days puffs from the old smoke stack
of a train that barely makes it up the hill,
and love sits beside me in a third-class seat,
while dreams nod in a corner on their own,
and soul is working somewhere out of sight.
Then I think there's nowhere else I'd rather be,
than on a train that leaves from what I know,
through the undiscovered landscapes of a life,
to that place we all must go to down the line.

As the sun comes tumbling down towards the dark,
the carriages are a flock of golden lights,
and the last points chatter slow as we pull in
to the shadow-casting city in its rose.
The ancient wheels drum-roll us up the platform,
as the old train draws wheezing to a stop
and I hear the engine gasp and then grow quiet.
Then soul steps off to do the thing that souls do,
as we others spot you watching by the gate,
where you've waited all these years to take us home.

Grandpa’s House

We spent our childhood summers in Grandpa's house,
among the creaks and groans we knew were spooks,
and sometimes in the dark, when we'd been specially good,
he'd take us to a field to see the stars.

To begin we'd find the one the others circled round,
that could guide a ship to north all through the night,
then he'd point out Mars and Venus, and the Demon Star,
and show us where the constellations were.

Then bath and up to bed, and just one fairy-tale.
At first we were frightened of the noises in the night:
'It's just the ghosts who warm the water
dancing through the pipes,' he smiled,

then told us how our ancestors, five thousand years before,
when they went to seek their fortunes in the world,
carried fire from their mother's hearth,
to light and warm them through the forest ways

and passed it on unbroken down the centuries to him.
Then he took us to an ancient boiler underneath the stairs,
'The soul of that old mother's still burning deep in here,
she's the oldest tree in the forest, she's our guiding star.'

And he let us look inside it through a crystal glass,
and her blue and savage eye returned our gaze,
then as a chill wind shook the fabric of the house,
a host of shining figures rose up behind her back.

'Look at the spirits of the families of our dead!
Their souls are burning bright and hard as yours,
they sigh and tap the walls at night to tell you all is well,
though their bones sleep cold and still beneath the soil.'

Then he led us back to bed and tucked us in,
beneath a cloud of quilts like setting sun:
'Now get your sleep so you can take our fire
to those who wait in forests still to come.'
The Old Mirror

That senile mirror on the wall,
that seldom seems to reflect at all,
thinks it is a window or a lens,
a telescope that scans the hills.
When my children are playing near,
it hinges open like a door,
there are sweeties deep in there
and toys at play upon the floor.
And yet I like its hopeless ways
and leave it hanging on the wall,
it was great-aunt's mirror after all,
I still recall her large bright eye,
her smile that reached from ear to ear
she filled my life with love and cheer,
till they found her hanging on the wall.
The Carpenter’s House

I have dreamed these recent weeks
of Rostwich where my white-haired uncle lived:
the yellow house of lichen-crusted stone,
the ancient garden scaled with dappled gold,
the jumbled hills that ache with green.

There he shaped an image of Christ crucified,
from a fragile piece of the one true cross,
that was brought to him from the Holy Land.
He painted it with tints he ground himself
and set it on the wall above his lathe;
a thought-piece for an atheist carpenter.

We took it back to our house when he died
and kept it on the mantelpiece for luck.
Then one spring-cleaning when it fell and broke,
we found there was a seed inside its head,
which I planted in a sunny flowerpot
and now a skinny sapling’s budding there.

But I dream that in my uncle’s house,
there’s a hidden room where no one’s ever been,
where a giant mirror hangs upon a wall,
in a frame of wrinkled wood that sprouts with leaves
and does not reflect anything at all.

And the jumbled hills cry out with green,
the ancient garden seethes with golden light,
the house squats like a lump of mouldy cheese,
displeased that all its rooms are bare and dark,
till there’s the whisper of a gently opening door
and Christ walks down the stairs with wooden feet.
An Old Woman Weeds a Grave

An old woman weeds a grave,
beneath a hush of ancient trees,
her brown hands so gentle with this soil.

And she thinks of all the love that’s flown:
those proud dandelions of the sun,
turned to stooping worlds of grey,

then blown to ghosts upon the wind,
so love anew might grow again,
though far away, and not for her.

And in her heart she cries for love —
and Something hears, then someone comes:
he strides the graves on tall green stilts,

his hair a swirl of shining gold
and lifts her in his furry arms
up the stairs of a graveyard house.

He sings his song in a voice like cream,
as he climbs on past the roofs and hills,
heedless of the winds that roar,

that sway the stairs beyond the stars.
Then he comes at last to a fire-lit room
and howls with love and slams the door.
Birds of Paradise

One man sits in the street
and hooks his eyes on those who pass,
then whistles at them in the tongues
of not-quite-familiar birds.

Another wears black leather and a ten-gallon hat,
and shouts about the coming of the Lord
into the nightshade box hidden in his hand.
The smiling woman buying quiche and apples,

who’s kept herself in trim for Mr Right,
will go to bed tonight and slit her throat.
And I write poetry, and poetry
walks along the edge of all such things

and sometimes the temptation’s there
to step quickly over the line
into the path of what comes roaring out of the dark.
But for now I’ll start another poem,

shut behind my crimson door,
while up the street the man has found
a strange new bird of paradise,
and the Lord has come just a little closer

and a small black choir sings in the woman’s mouth,
like the sound of distant shorelines
endlessly reshaping
in the rage where land encounters the sea.
Room of Red

I went to bed with a wandering girl,
her dark hair shone with glints of moon
and we played at love in my room of red,
till midnight rang and the stars came down.
When we went to sleep I gladly dreamed
that we played at love in a room of green.

But in that dream I fell asleep
and dreamt we lay in a room of black,
then the black door opened and a man stood there:
It is my husband screamed the girl,
the one I've feared for seven years,
he's come to take my soul from me.

We woke at once in the room of green,
My soul has gone! she cried in fear,
then the green door opened and a man came in:
It is my husband shrieked the girl,
The one I've fled these seven years,
he's come to take my love from me.

And when we woke in the room of red,
she trembled as she clung to me:
O husband where's my lover gone?
I looked around, no word I said,
but rent her limbs with smoking hands,
then closed the door on that room so red.
The Nails

I recall some rusty nails, three or four,
in the top right-hand drawer
of an oak desk in my uncle's house.

And that dull pair of shoes he used to wear,
bought for gardening from an Oxfam shop,
their ancient leather hard as bakelite,

that he wore until the soles were gone.
They were also worn by another then long dead
and nameless, save to strangers far away:

for we felt someone there we couldn't see,
that rose from the life the shoes had led
before they came into my uncle's home.

And when he died I found those hand-wrought nails,
all wrapped with muslin, very old,
and wondered what their hidden history was

and what they might have pierced so long ago.
Then I knew someone else was standing near,
out of sight but with a hammer in his hand,

who reached for me from suffering and love
and knew my heart was lamed and broken down,
like some old horse that's never known a shoe.