Extract from ON WARWICK CASTLE

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!