 |
| Warwick Castle, Warwickshire, England |
Today, another short extract from my long poem ON WARWICK CASTLE, originally published by Nine Arches Press in whenever-it-was, now out of print but still available on
Kindle as an ebook.
This poem was written during my year-long stint as Warwick Poet Laureate and is about the past and present Warwick Castle.
It was described by David Morley, poet and Director of the Creative Writing Programme at Warwick University, as 'a Modernist piece de resistance' - he also wrote the Foreword - and by David Floyd, writing in Sphinx, as 'one of the more ambitious works of public poetry generated through a local laureateship.'
So you have been warned ...
The old man sits behind
them
on the grass, clay pipe
stuck to his lip:
‘It was a day like this
we rode against the King. Fifty years back.
I was a boy then.’
A black mist, first thing,
and out of that mist,
the hiss of an arrow-storm,
burning.
Those that survived
were sent down into the
dark for it.
So, with the concealed
blade
from a pocket knife, Master
John Smith
etches out his name, and
date
of his imprisonment:
Master John Smythe,
Guner to his Majestye Highness
was a prisner in this
place and lay here
from 1642 - tell the
Here, he's interrupted by
the blade breaking
or a tour guide,
descending.
There are rules even in
darkness.
For a really serious
breach,
the guide book tells him,
such as plagiarism or
pastiche,
a man might be hung alive
in chains
near the scene of his
crime.
'Tell them,' he was to have
finished,
'I am a traveller in time,
a master smith
forged here in the shadows. I fall.
I stop. My flesh decays.
Yet here my name remains until
the very end of days
when there may be time
for the courtyard gift shop, after all.
Follow the signs.'
Up here in the light, every
movement
is blinding.
Stone light, grey
as a pigeon’s feather, cold
on the rise
to Blacklow Hill
where Piers Gaveston fell:
a moment’s struggle
in wet grass,
then the surprised head of
the king’s lover
rolls free, his lips drawn back,
still twitching.
Down in the village, a boy
armed with a spade
washes his face; trudges to
work.
This rough mound, the sign
says, was fortified
on the orders of William
the Conqueror.
So, while Mercians dug,
Normans sat,
pining for the wheat fields
of France.
Hony soyt quy mal pence.
1066 and All That.
'No matter the right or wrong of it,
we had to follow Warwick.
Sheer black mist, first thing,
and out of that mist,
the hiss of an arrow-storm, burning.
My father fell there in the confusion,
a few miles shy of London.
He died at Waterloo.
Took a bullet in the Crimean.
Fell at Ypres. Was listed
among the missing.'
The boy stopped speaking ...
Read the rest of
ON WARWICK CASTLE as a Kindle ebook. Currently only 77p!
