Posted on by Claudia Gary · 1 Comment

Five poems by Claudia Gary


CLAUDIA GARY lives near Washington DC and teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Natural Meter, Persona Poems, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org), currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and several chapbooks, most recently Genetic Revisionism (2019), she is also a health science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal chamber music and art songs. Her chapbooks are available via the email address at pw.org/content/claudia_gary. 

Her article “Song as Conversation,” on setting poems to music, is online at

https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html

@claudiagary

Poet Under Fig Tree 

Some days he cannot choose

between the living and the dead.

The latter want too much of him,

the former want too little.

Talent’s a sticky riddle

whose seeds are strewn at nature’s whim,

whose fruit he heats and stirs to spread

before a mortal muse.

What Would Zeus Do? 

Most likely something with a thunderbolt:

Mistaking lightning for imagination,

he’d make the sky his canvas. Or he’d molt

into a swan, a bison, a dalmatian.

And you? Since I’m not Hera, you’ll keep looking

past me for glimmerings of her and Greece.

Your mouth will always water for her cooking.

It won’t appear, and we will have no peace.

As this land offers less and less to praise,

our beauty may be lost on one another.

Between the sleepless nights, how can the days

bring any comfort?  Here’s where Zeus’ brother

below ground and the one who rules the ocean

need to unroil, unrumble our commotion.

In the Void 

For one who loved Math and Latin

a spiritual Goth moment

became a teenage alias:

Nulla Ultima.

To be nothing, the extreme 

nullity, meant being 

on the inside of everything,

the ultimate persona.

Was it a pose? Did she 

actually know something

for one split-second—or nothing?

If it was only absence

what did she know in her absence?

This was where things could get 

interesting, if only 

for a nothing moment.

Presence               

Cape May, by Andrew Wyeth

http://andrewwyeth.net/artwork/cape_may_1992.html

As skies threatened rain I steered back the boat

to watch dappled clouds from this beach in half light,

frame planted, eyes fixed to the shifting horizon,

away from my flock for longer than planned.

You tell me my headdress appears to take flight?

Either this, or the being within, is disguise.

I don’t have the presence to open my hands.

The joy of the wind is caught in my throat.

On Having Misspoken        

Time set aside for poems I reassign

for wordlessness: to sort collected seashells,

see which of them already have their own

airgaps with room for silk cord, colored beads

on curved and rippled surfaces that cradle

all light, reflect it softly, hold it always 

at the best angle, unlike mistimed words.

Posted on by Thomas Simpson

Three poems by Thomas Simpson

THOMAS SIMPSON is a poet and sound artist based in Western Australia. He is completing a PhD at Deakin University combining poetry, walking, and soundscape ecology in south-west WA. His first collection of poetry Bone Picker was published by Ginninderra Press in 2022 and was shortlisted for the 2023 WA Premier’s Prize for an Emerging Writer.

Leading with the neck

Leaving the banks of Donnelly River

an emu blocks

the narrow gravel track.

Her plumage catching

ripples of blue and brown

in barred forest light.

I’m forced to slow

and mimic her gait—

hunched forward, hands folded

under the great lump of my pack,

I lead with the neck

and slowly lift each foot

all the bones and ligaments

relaxing and gathering in a point,

before they spread wide and sturdy

in each balanced step.

We stop and eye

each other side-on

before she darts

into the undergrowth of cycads   

and I stand up straight.

The other side of a mountain

Overgrowth heavy with last night’s rain

hangs over the track, its burden painting my sleeves

before soaking my socks.

As the winding starts and resistance builds,

towering jarrah starts to take on strange angles,

leaning away from the earth.

Dirt and pea gravel grow

into stones and quarried steps

of granite boulders.

Short and sharp breaths

leant so far forward I can smell the moss

hanging onto dimples in the rock.

Trees thin and the track disappears—

the only way is up.

Standing, exposed on the sparse summit,

clinging onto a gnarled and crooked sapling

in the sudden wind, I look west.

The humped serpent of the Darling Range stretches

along the horizon—the ocean and the safety of home

no longer visible from the other side of a mountain.

Sweep

Moving incrementally around the camp

with a morning sun—already weak

in its autumnal tardiness—trying  

to pierce the dense karri.

Wagtails sweep the dirt floor of the hut

while martins hop over the table and bunks

searching for scraps—glancing at the late starter

shivering as he shakes out his socks.

Posted on by Lucius Falkland

The Wounded Healer

LUCIUS FALKLAND is the nom-de-plume of a writer and academic from London

The wounded healer

The job description was always very clear:

You have autistic breakdowns, lose control.

Uncertain futures, a general sense of fear,

Takes hold of you and cuts into your soul,

So you palpitate and snap and use a word

That might cut me, but who cares? I’m not you. 

I’m part of unpredictable, absurd.

It comes upon you; I notice every clue.

My job is to absorb it like some spring

Mounted building on a fault line in Peru.

Sometimes you shun me, other times you cling

To me for comfort and I accept that it’s just “you.”

When I’ve got you back to calm and you say “Sorry,”

I feel closer to you then than I can show.

To be avalanched in anger, angst and worry;

I see the “me” of nineteen years ago:

The “me” at the age that you are now

Rejection-fear so strong I dare not send

My writing into journals, scared of how

I would take it. Would I contemplate the end?

Fear of talking about money. If things changed,

I would shout it like some primal, tribal chant,

Infantile and manically deranged:

“I can’t do this, I can’t do this; I just can’t!”

Now, when I hear those words from you,  

I know that only I can understand

The sensations, fear of chaos, fear of new,

That traps you like a foal in mud and sand.

Is our age gap merely a statistic?

Or must love on the spectrum so ensue?

To be soul mates you both must be autistic,

But the young girl will need guiding through

The shattering emotions that transfix her,

While the man, a wounded-healer, like a priest,

Controls his now, and age is an elixir

That mellows; the most frightening pains have ceased.

The job description wasn’t clergyman, but clear:

You have autistic breakdowns, lose control . . .

Posted on by Derek Turner

Deep state

DEREK TURNER is editor of The Brazen Head. He is also a novelist, reviewer, travelogist, and the author of the chorography Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire (Hurst, 2022). www.derek-turner.com. Twitter: @derekturner1964. Instagram: edge.of.england

“Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England”

‘Pike’, Ted Hughes

The plumber’s van’s been standing since the small hours

At the fishing-place beside the chartered town;

Its driver has been sounding deeper waters

Since he set up as the night was going down.

He saw the sun come wheeling up from ocean,

Watched whitening sky go glowing into gold;

Heard the birds orchestrate their calling,

Stamped booted feet to counteract life’s cold.

Cynosure of today these level courses –

These muddy understated lowland drains

Whose depths hide evolution’s shining forces –

Silver knights swim pricking on these plains.

Other men stare silent at reflections,

Itching for a twitch upon their lines,

Unknowing echo ancient Izaak Walton,

Compleatest anglers, contemplating time.

Coarse fishers here can sit on thrones like Doges

Wedded to the waters of their wealth;

Serene for once among the mace and sedges,

Each man an island nation to himself.

Slow surface holds deep state of planted kingdoms,

Mirrors showing sallow, alder, oak –

Chlorophylled and kingly-symbolled leaves

The royal trees on any English road.

The tops of reeds stand proud among sheet-silver,

Their dirty roots outshone by swelling light –

Excaliburs – or the lances of dead riders

Who rode here once to set the east alight.

Waterfowl calls urgently to offspring –

Brown fuzzy balls bob cheeping at her steer.

The angler cannot stop himself from smiling,

As he casts for luck across the haunted mere.

(Awake by now at home, his fishing widow,

Sipping her first coffee of the day.

Smiling at her grandkids out the window –

Her ducklings’ ducks, so soon to swim away.)

The plants that edge the lake have grown here always;

Reseeded from some Anglo-Saxon store –

Marginalia from the seventh century,

Still richly green if now less filled with lore.

Epona tails of Rome and Celt connections

Vanished lands in floreated forms –

Lush lowland lawn, these thronging herbs of nations,

Forget-me-nots and flags, dog-rose and thorn.

Apothecaries prospected these elixirs,

Water-mint and yarrow, woad and rue –

Cut and dried for daubed dog-Latined ewers,

Cures for flux, stone, plague, and marsh-ague.

Pallid fish slide silent near the surface

Or nose among new-inundated grass,

Animals always searching for advantage,

Ghosts glimpsed in oxidising antique glass.

Carp suck and spap and rise to find him casting;

Their ancestors gaped for God-believing men;

Now endless sky, that abbey’s painted ceiling –

Great fane forlorn, foundation lost in fen.

He throws his line along the deepest margins,

His hook hangs in the decomposing ooze;

He hovers with all fish beyond all ageing –

Quick and dead commingled in long view.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

A Man of Heart – The scribe’s story

The story so far. In the 5th century Vortigern’s attempt to hold the imperial province of Britannia together has been defeated, not by external enemies but by British rebels led by Vortimer, his eldest son. Vortimer is a devout Christian and has invited the Pope to send an embassy to restore the Church, and combat the Pelagian heresy. What follows is the second half of Chapter Ten. At Vortimer’s request, the Pope has sent an embassy to Britain to combat heresy, led by Germanus of Auxerre and Lupus of Troyes.[i] The embassy finds Vortimer’s court shrinking, his rebellion a failure. The chapter begins with Vortimer’s death, by poison, then backtracks a few days. Rowena has arrived, seeking instruction in the Christian faith. You can find chapters 2-10a on the Brazen Head. The complete story has been published as A Man of Heart, by Shearsman UK (January 2023).

Lupus offers Rowena instruction in the Christian faith

Why should I love my neighbour

when he wants to rape me?

I do not think you love yours

when he burns your house, kills your friend,

uses your women, serves your children to his dogs.

I do not think you love him then.

You will not turn the other cheek.

You carry your pride like a glass bowl.

Your Jesus was no warrior king

but he said one perfect thing.

I was hungry, and you gave me food.

I was naked and you clothed me.

I was homeless and you sheltered me.

There are stories told amongst my people:

families, without weapons, seeking land

came to these shores. They were hungry,

naked, homeless, and your good Christians

let them scrabble in the waste land,

killed the weak, abused the women,

sold survivors into slavery

then went to church and prayed.

Germanus instructs Rowena in the Christian faith

We drift on a winter sea

in the middle of a hailstorm.

                                                           And your faith protects you?

No, that’s the pagan way.

The whining, selfish child

begging for new toys,

throwing good metal in a bog

to appease the local fog,

as though tree could think

or river grant a wish.

No, faith is the destination

that disciplines the journey.

Cattle are born, eat, shit, fuck and die.

You can live like that. But

reaching for the impossible

is what brings us closer to God.

And the fact of Incarnation,

gives the church the confidence

to lecture bandit kings on the Beatitudes.

                                                            A beautiful impossibility?

She could have smacked his face with less effect.

He had been thinking aloud

not expecting this girl to understand.

Before he could reassure himself

she’d fluked the answer she said;

                                                            Your faith is not a shelter in the storm

                                                            but a way of living through it.

He blinks her into focus

seeing a new species for the first time.

Rowena and Vortimer

She is ice underfoot.

A golden symmetry,

that aches his fingertips

as he resists the need

to reach and touch,

curve, fall and flare.

Stray hair across her cheek,

tightening his throat.

In another version of this story

they are friends and wary allies

helping his father rule the country.

In another version of this story

she is his queen.

                        But she is not smiling.

She scowls, because he is stupid,

because she asked a simple question:

‘Why do you hate my people?’

and his answer was inadequate.

She is ice underfoot.

But then she smiles, and rises

fills the goblet,

‘Leofue freond wæs hæil.

For þine kime ich æm uæin.’[ii]

Lips on the goblet’s rim.

Lips glistening with wine.

Their hands touch lightly,

shocking him.

Her breath on his cheek,

her lips

delirious proximity.

He drinks. ‘Drinc Hail.’

Kisses her on the mouth.

Lingering.

She steps back, smiling.

A child, pleased with herself.

Adolf and Vortimer

They are on the same page

singing to the choir

on a level playing field

where no one’s moved the goal post.

He’s there for you.

You’ve got his back

and the wine goes round.

Best friends forever,

boozing buddies,

veterans on a park bench.

And the wine goes round.

Vortimer waiting for the pitch

for the sudden swerve

this is Adolf, who admires

the Roman art of usurpation,

who thinks the Roman way’s

a zigzag path through shadows.

Words bend, mean only

what he wants them to,

‘devious’ a compliment

sincerity, simplicity,

synonyms for stupidity.

So the wine goes round.

Knowing Adolf thinks he’s stupid

provides the King with clarity.

It rankles that he’s right.

They should have waited till the spring.

They’d all heard Gloucester’s stories.

Snowed in on The Wall,

roads you could swim over,

mud you could drown in.[iii] 

But Katiger had stumbled over Horsa

and grabbed his chance at glory.

Both men had died.

The forces Gloucester

set to spy on Thongcaester

had heard the news of Horsa’s death,

thought the revolt was underway and charged the gates.

Beaten back, then annihilated.

The survivors of the southern Saxons

had made their way to Thongcaester.

The northern tribes had stood behind his father

and all winter raiders had brutalised the lands

of anyone who challenged Vortigern,

with the vindictive precision

of the Empire in its glory days.

In the west Gorlois was sitting on his hands

ignoring every summons and command.

They had claimed a victory.

How bright had been that morning.

The thrill of cheering crowds.

Hail King of nothing.

Hail nithing, King

of Britannia

south of Watling street

and east of Tamar.

Heads.

Bags of heads.

Riders bringing sacks of heads,

spilling them in front of him,

‘til his steward said,

‘My lord, we’re running out of coins.’

Gloucester had warned him against the bounty.

Warned him that many of those heads

were once on British shoulders.

The purity of his intent;

to clear the pagans from the land,

so Christ might rule again,

polluted by self-interest.

How many private scores were settled?

How many family feuds resolved

under the banner of his leadership.

He’s seen the devastated homesteads,

the burning villas. He’d stood

in the groaning aftermath,

the smoking shambles,

and heard his father’s voice:

‘You can’t go hunting with untrained dogs.’

Only now he understands.

Soon Hengist will return

with thirty, fifty, sixty ships.

Baptise the woman,

he can’t play the pagan card.

But the card itself is false.

He wanted to establish

God’s Kingdom in this island.

A purified, united, church.

A people ruled by Christ’s example.

In your dreams child. In your dreams,

not in theirs. In theirs,

the endless whine of ‘What’s in this for me?’

Stripped of religious fervour,

his rebellion is mere peevishness.

Already his supporters

have started to remove themselves,

deaf to summons or instruction.

Come spring he will not have an army worth the name.

They’ll scatter it like leaves before a gale.

The wine is a peace offering

as Gloucester tries to save them both.

Avoiding the topic of The Woman,

he’s making an effort,

trying not to be abrasive

but water’s wet and why

this foolish boy can’t see it

is a mystery beyond his patience.

There’s a limit to the number of ways

you can explain something:

‘Without coin or office,

your only reward is land.

If you give that to the church,

how will you reward your followers?’

                                                           ‘The weightier matters of the law,

                                                           are judgement, mercy, faith.’

‘The only choice you have

is whether to survive or perish.

Power has its own logic.

You can no more

change this system

than you can push a cart and sit in it.

We live in the world,

not a cloister. Friends and enemies 

will judge you by your actions.

Your intentions are irrelevant.’

And the wine goes round.

                                                           ‘Germanus led an army,

                                                           more than once.

                                                           He’s run a province.

                                                           We could ask for his advice.

                                                           We should listen.

                                                           We could learn.’

Bit late for that, thinks Gloucester.

‘A bit too ostentatious don’t you think:

the hair shirt, the hard bed,

the hand-ground horse food?’

Soon his failure will be obvious

He will be Vortimer Nithing.

And he cannot face his father,

on the field of battle, or later,

after his inevitable defeat.

What is left to him,

except the Roman Way

for the defeated rebel general?

Best friends forever,

two lads on the piss.

You’ll buy the hangman’s drink

before he snaps your neck.

Find the Pagan Woman

It’s dark and Germanus,

is flapping between the buildings,

like a giant moth, until he finds the scribe. 

‘Boy, where is the woman?’

                                                           ‘She has lodgings by the gate.’

‘Go to her now. Tell her she must leave:

immediately. It is no longer safe.

Tell her to get out before the gates are shut.

And tell no one where you go or where you’ve been.

Or that I’ve spoken to you. Go!’

The job not the title

He dreads their silence

it disrupts logic, qualifies sense,

suggests the worst while saying nothing.

‘For your skill with words

you will join the Papal mission

you will travel to Britain.

You will record everything,’

said his superior.

He had accepted, thinking

the place was his by right

of skill and knowledge.

Only now he understands,

it was curse not compliment.

They picked the one that no one liked;

the one they could afford to lose.

Germanus had confronted Gloucester

Who has to lean forward to hear him,

thinking of the breeze

coming in over gilded water.

‘The British Lords have been in council

and through them God has spoken.

They will ask Vortigern to return.’

Before Gloucester can object.

‘God sees through you, knows

your pride and your ambition

No service, humility, compassion.

There is no Roman order

without Roman discipline.

No discipline without obedience.

Who follows someone who will not follow?’

Gloucester says nothing.

The Papal embassy is leaving,

The Boys are on the move

and they have the Pope’s support.

Germanus to the scribe

‘We go north,’ said Germanus,

‘to confront the heretics.

We will visit the shrine

of the blessed Martyr Alban.

You…’

                                                           And then that pause.

‘You will go west, to Gorlois.

Give him this. Tell him,

we admire his loyalty.’

And then

                                                           another

                                                                            pause.

‘Your time with us is over.’

                                                           The scroll he’s holding

is shaking. Terror is eating

the sentences inside his head.

‘Gorlois has need of skills like yours.

If not, stay west, find a community.

Seek God in prayer and silence.

In these alarming times…’

                                                           Another

                                                                                                                      pause.

                                                           ‘In these alarming times

So many die, nobody notices

unless they’re royalty.

One more body by the road

won’t interest anyone.

The west is safe.‘

Departure

People invest the past

with qualities they feel

are lacking in the present.

But for once in history,

those Empire days

really were that golden.

The sea was calm,

the sun was rising

the crew preparing

for the channel crossing.

They had cremated the King,

ignoring his demented order

to bury his head overlooking the coast,

convinced no raider would bother the island

while he kept watch.

‘So?’ said Lupus, standing at the bow,

enjoying the breeze, the gentle rocking of the ship,

the promise of an uneventful passage home.

Germanus watches the crew securing the last of the cargo.

Admiring the easy way they go about their tasks.

                                                           ‘So, we confounded heresy.

                                                           And The Boys are on the move.’

The nearest sailor moves away.

No one has come to see them off.

Messengers had been sent north,

seeking Vortigern to offer him the crown.

‘I’ve met The Boys, and they can’t win.

Though they’ll reclaim the island,

they might stop Hengist, not his people.’

                                                           ‘They have outlived their time.

                                                           Cheating your way to power,

                                                           only works while there are rules

                                                           and the other players follow them.’

Slipping their moorings,

the sail, cracks, grows taut.

The ship pitches then steadies

into an easy forward movement.

The grey walls of Porchester shrink,

slipping off their starboard bow.

Moving out into the Solent,

the breeze strengthening.

                                                           ‘The last legion left from here.

                                                           Roma Fuit. Urbis conciditatus.[iv]

                                                           These Britons.

                                                           These proud, sniveling rebels.

                                                           Adulterers, fornicators,

                                                           parricidal, incestuous,

                                                           assassins,

                                                           refusing to be ruled

                                                           but whining to the Empire

                                                           help us, save us, pity our distress.

                                                           We who do not understand obedience,

                                                           who will not pay the asking price.

                                                           Mouth Christians who forget their God.

                                                           He has not forgotten them.

                                                           He will fall upon this generation

                                                           and his wrath will be remembered

                                                           til the rocks melt.’

‘Then we’re agreed,’ said Lupus. ‘Britain is doomed.’

                                                           ‘Oh no,’ said Germanus, turning

                                                           to look back at the mainland

                                                           and the white chalk slash in Portsdown hill.

                                                           ‘The Church is safe. We did what we set out to do.’

[i] Germanus of Auxerre is the most ‘historical’ of all the characters in this story. He did exist and he did travel to Britain to combat heresy in 429. His miracles, described in the first half of this chapter, are in the Life of Saint Germanus, written down in the late 5th century. Typically for the Legendary History, the chronology is wayward. If Hengist landed in 449/450 he arrived twenty years after Germanus had left.

[ii] See the Wassail ceremony in Chapter Six

[iii] See Chapter Three

[iv] Rome is no more, the city is ruined. I can’t find the source of this quotation.

Posted on by Jeremy Hooker

Four poems by Jeremy Hooker

JEREMY HOOKER is a poet, critic and editor. His work for BBC Radio 3 includes ‘A Map of David Jones’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, and an emeritus professor of the University of South Wales. His Selected Poems was published by Shearsman in 2020. His most recent books are Word and Stone (Shearsman, 2019) and The Release (Shearsman, 2022)

Stonemason, Sculptor, Mariner

To Philip Chatfield

A man who came alive from a wreck

off the Cornish coast, in which

friends died; who clung

to a barnacled rock, which saved his life.

Rock, sea-washed,

jagged for a hand-hold.

           What stone gave him

he has given back

with imaginative touch

shaping images lovingly

with chisel and hammer –

the Virgin of Tintern Abbey,

the Madonna of Capel-y ffin –

mothering figures

that gather the silence about them,

and turn the master’s work to praise.

She brings flowers into my home

For Elin

1

She did not love me at first,

a stranger who appeared

in the middle of the night,

and woke up to a foreign land

with cycle paths and windmills,

flat pastures and fields of blue clay,

taken from the sea, which

always pressed at the land’s edge,

promising to return.

And the people were strange to me.

They look one in the face

with a directness that shows

no use for English irony,

as if to say: ‘And who are you?’

2

Who was I then?

A youngish man with a broken life

who was being loved back whole.

How should she care about that,

seeing an intruder in her home,

a stranger with whom she was required

to sit at table, disliking the way

he opened his mouth

and chewed his food, regarding me

with a critical eye that I was unaware of,

as I floated in the warmth of her mother’s love?

 3

Now, though, she crosses the North Sea

to visit me in Wales, and buys me

daffodils – no longer a girl,

but a woman in middle years

with two boys and a grown-up son.

And she is fighting the addiction

that ruined her mother’s life,

and fighting it successfully

with willpower and therapy.

‘No’, we say, ‘life isn’t easy’,

as we look into the past, seeing

the woman we both loved so much,

who would have given her life for us,

if she hadn’t been taken by alcohol.

What sadness we have known, what grief,

and how we have shared it.

Yet still, she says, ‘There is only love’.

Cuckoos at Deri

For Debbie and Ian Tog Jenkins

No cuckoo,

again –

              a deadness

at the heart of sound

through May & June.

No cuckoo,

but news of cuckoos

in our friends’ garden,

two of them,

muscling eggs

out of a blackbird’s nest

to bring the summer in.

Singing The Needles

1

It was a melancholy song,

the sound from the Needles’ light

moaning through the bedroom window

on a morning of mist or fog.

It came in with the thought of wrecks,

HMS Assurance and other ships.

Three stacks, and one lost to a storm,

Lot’s Wife, in the eighteenth century –

she shouldn’t have looked back,

gesturing to Old Harry across the Bay.

2

There are things that stand out

with the naked bareness

of being, answerable

to no one and no thing.

But these may be loved,

and mark time in the sea

of a human life – storm-battered,

or jutting out of the calm sea,

that is silver or gold in the sun.

3

Vanishing in mist, or with a sharp,

bright edge, as though, ingrained

in rock, a whole life becomes visible,

the splintered stacks stand.

Unseen, too, they are a mystery

that makes itself known,

moaning through windows

and marking a day of mist or fog.

Posted on by Larry Beckett

Five poems from The Book of Merlin

LARRY BECKETT’s poetry ranges from songs, Song to the Siren, to blank sonnets, Songs and Sonnets, to the epic American Cycle, including Paul Bunyan, Wyatt Earp, Amelia Earhart, and seven other book-length poems. Beat Poetry is a study of the poets and poetry of the fifties San Francisco renaissance. The Book of Merlin will be published in October 2023 by Livingston Press, the University of West Alabama.

Merlin was a 6th-century poet in northwest Britain, who spoke the Brythonic tongue. He was known as Myrddin Wyllt, or Merlin of the Wilds. He was a contemporary and comrade of Taliesin, and though The Book of Taliesin is extant, for Merlin, there are only a handful of poems in The Black Book of Carmarthen, The Red Book of Hergest, and other middle Welsh texts. But scholars have suggested that Merlin’s other lyrics were embedded in the Latin poem Vita Merlini by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Together, they tell of Merlin’s later life. My translation is the first time that his surviving words have been gathered in one manuscript since The Book of Merlin was lost in the 12th century.

Green Warriors

Can doom, so hard, so harm me by

spiriting away all my companions,

who made kings and far kingdoms

shake? We are uncertainty, death

is always here, and it’s in power

to strike with its secret blade, blow

poor life out of the body. Green

warriors, who will stand by me

in arms, stave off the commanders

coming to hurt me, and the armies

rising against me? You were brave,

and that bravery has spirited away

all your sweet years, your youth.

Oh only now you were charging

in armor and cutting all of your

enemies down. And now you lie

light on the earth: it’s reddening.

The Bride

I can hear Gwendolen grieving,

her tears: I grieve for her, down

in despair. No woman in Wales

of more beauty: beyond goddess,

the blossoms in the hedge, rose

in bloom, the lilies of the field,

in her, only, the light of spring,

in her eyes, only, constellations,

and in the gold glory of her hair.

All this is gone, the grace, away,

the blush, the snow, of her flesh.

She is not what she was, but worn

with crying, she knows nothing of

where her man is, or dead or alive,

and she lies sick, and she is fading,

in the dissolution of the long days.

Gwenddydd is by her side, in tears,

no consolation for her lost brother.

One, by marriage, one, by blood,

devoted, in mourning, pass time,

can’t eat, can’t sleep: they wander

all night in the wildwood together

with their anxiety burning inside.

To King Rhydderch

Let lords who think that they’re poor

have all these gifts, who, not content

with living simply, would have it all.

I’d rather have the oaks, the groves

of Celyddon, high hills, green vales

down below—that’s all that I want,

not what you offer, King Rhydderch.

And my wildwood, with all its food,

that I desire over all, will have me.

It’s men who pinch pennies, grab

for them, who go for gifts, and they

can be corrupted, so that their wills

can be bent any way they’re told.

What they have is not enough, but

for me only the acorns of Celyddon,

the shining creeks, and the grasses.

Let those misers have your bounty,
I can’t be bought: give me liberty.

Gwenddydd’s Lament

Mourn with me, women, mourn

the death of Rhydderch, a man

whose like’s unknown on earth,

peace-loving, all those warriors,

no violence, and fair to priests,

 with both high and low under

the law, the open hand, giving,

not keeping, all things to all,

doing right, knights’ blossom,

kings’ glory, kingdom’s pillar.

I am in pain, for what he was

is suddenly for worms to eat,

his body in the grave. We had

silk sheets: is this your bed,

your white flesh, king’s arms,

covered, under a cold stone,

nothing but dust and bones?

And so it is, our low destiny,

in the long years: none can

go back to what they were.

What use, this glory that comes

and goes, that fools and injures

even the mighty? The bee lays

out honey where it later stings,

like life. The best is brief; this

is its way: like flowing water,

all good passes away. So what

if a rose blush, a lily bloom,

a man, a horse, be handsome?

Questions for the god, not us.

So I’m leaving, all you kings,

high walls, local spirits, dear

sons, all that is of the world.

Today, by my brother’s side,

I’ll go live in the green wood,

and wrapped in a black shawl,

I’ll worship, with a glad heart.

I Decline

You are young, but at my time

of life, I can’t be asked to take

the scepter up, and to be fair.

I’m in old age; it has my body

and slacks my strength; I can

barely walk across the fields.

I have lived long, and enough,

in joy, in abundance, smiling.

In these woods there is an oak,

old and rugged, and so wasted

its sap’s failing, and it’s rotting.

I saw the acorn as it first fell,

and saw it sprout, woodpecker

above it, on a branch. I saw it

in detail, I honored it, I marked

in memory the place it stands.

I have lived long; age is heavy:

I will not reign again. I’ll stay,

green leaves: Celyddon Wood

is my delight, more than corn

of Sicily, grapes of Memphis,

robes in the perfumes of Tyre,

rubies of India, gold of Tagus,

tall towers, or cities in walls.

Nothing can touch me so, or lure

me away from the green woods,

so dear to me, as always. I’ll stay

while I’m alive; with its grasses

 and its apples, I’ll fast and purify,

till I’m worthy of everlasting life.

Look up, the cranes are flying,

in lines, in letters of the alphabet.

Posted on by Ian C. Smith

Three poems by Ian C. Smith

IAN C. SMITH’s work has been published in Across the Margin, BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Gargoyle, Griffith Review, Southword, Stand, & The Stony Thursday Book. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.

Prologue

‘And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?’ Act 2, Scene 2, Hamlet, Wm. Shakespeare.

At the Spithead a young midshipman rows through November’s dark ripple to meet his brother, Charles Christian, a ship’s surgeon. He rows, rhythmic, action immanent, peat smoke’s earthy scent of ancient moss airborne from the inn where he shall greet Charles in his familiar mocking tone buttressed by self-belief when they embrace. Charles’s journey recently completed, Fletcher’s is held up. They burn the candle quaffing ale, swapping news.

Charles, edgy, exudes relief recounting a tale of mutiny at sea on his East India Company vessel. He grips Fletcher’s arm, that pulsing strength, confessing his implication in the crisis, describes vile abuse, blows, loaded pistols, a terrible captain. Fletcher allays his concern with sentimental gossip about Cockermouth, mimics his own ill-mannered martinet he sailed with previously, raging in a fool’s accent about departure delays. In their cups, their bond infrangible, they laugh until it hurts.

Reassured, Charles leaves at first light, ships indistinct in mist. He turns, sees his brother’s face for what he can’t know is one last time, wishes him safe voyage, vowing to remember him in prayer, their fond farewells lost forever like all words uttered then. Fletcher, always exhibiting confidence, tells him not to worry. Bounty anchored in the roadstead’s silence, a sleeping soul cries out, dream as premonition.

Limp sails sigh in the Doldrums, belt of calms before sudden squalls; ahead, zero latitude, imaginary line between polar extremes beyond which their known world shall turn arse-around, where jacks might be kings, captains knaves. Harsh baptisms await the wary, but of a different kind.

South Seas palm trees in his mind’s eye, skylarking on deck to Michael Byrne’s sizzling fiddle, taking the piss out of Nipcheese Bligh’s parsimony, reeling to his specific orders, sweat flying, swarthy Fletcher anticipates the line ceremony: the tarring, the shaving, the acting, ducking-stool slowly swinging from the yardarm.

But this is not to be. Too brutal, Bligh, swearing no oath to Neptune’s courtiers, informs his log that is to become one of the most perused books from its time. He plans to quell the lads’ grumbling, their innate yahoo urges, by paying the initiates’ fines, topped with a generous issue of grog, so pleasing to the recorder of data.

Luau Love

Bligh responds to a roar, pounding on deck.  Fletcher jumps from one barrel into another, a standing spring, no hands.  The company, not Bligh observing bleakly, applauds this athletic gentleman, a lock of his black hair damp with sweat fallen loose.  Flicking it back, he grins, bows.  Now he claps with force, taps his foot in time with the dancing, the beat of his urgent heart.  Upper lip glistening, he radiates irony.

The only black in Bligh’s hair is the ribbon keeping it intact against his nape, though his rages be black blisters.  In the great cabin shared with 750 potted plants he suffers a megrim.  Chaperoned by chlorophyll’s calming influence, he polishes his sextant with a coat sleeve, reaches for a quill, his log always shipshape.  Hearing the sirens calling them he knows his vulgar jack tars will be ashore again tonight.  There are no suppurating gums, swollen faces, due to the fresh food and water.  Their grumbling in hiatus, he commandeers most of the provisions brought aboard, more tidy profit.

His cock seeing no action these days, he considers the pox, its consequences.  Ah, consequences.  Staring through a valance of leaves, not breadfruit for once, concealed from yet another ruckus of feast preparation, he is as hard as the nails these heathens covet so much.  He, also, could commit a sin watching the handsome six-foot woman the buggers call Mainmast kneeling, a devotee before her idol, hands, mouth, loving her Titreano, his skin, dark like hers, muscular shoulders, slim tattooed buttocks, clenching.  In this brief interlude of history, after Bligh’s encouragement of Fletcher on a previous voyage, he witnesses his bete noire, who mocks him receive tenderness from kleptomaniac savages who practise human sacrifice.

Dolorous memory flashes visit Bligh; hard bright light beating back from an endless ocean, England’s foggy harbours, cartography, sacrilege, as smoke sails across the verdant mountainscape, tang of bacon wafting.  He breathes faster, tries to divert thoughts towards a decent life again but a drumbeat crescendos, banjaxing his better intentions.  For privileged Fletcher, sated now, private torment awaits, a brooding time when the devils of melancholia shall steal upon his hours.

Pitcairn Scuttle

Carved images face distant Easter Island, eroded remnants of much earlier events on this micro-society’s incorrectly charted island perfect for pirates’ buried treasure rather than buried pasts, or worse; bodies. Women who shall survive watch from high above a cutter being loaded before hurriedly leaving an anchored ship, itself high – on a wanted list. The unravelling swell shirring leeside water peels back, baring this coast’s rocky hips. At first, nobody misses Matthew Quintal, nimble arsonist below, defying Fletcher Christian to secure his safety.

Those in the boat hear snapping and hissing as a shaft of fire engulfs the stern like a pyre. Charcoal flecks swirl, disappear into the air like angry words. Glow worms of minor eruptions backlight the much-flogged, mind-flawed Cornishman clambering back down to sea level, expression rapt now their identifier is doomed. They pull on the oars, away from radiant heat, feathering clear of the turbulent entrance’s white wash that guards their isolation boiling below the women watching from The Hill of Difficulty. These unified women expected another load of Bounty’s salvageable material, not this.

Flames, burning ash, shoot ever skywards, seabirds arcing the heat current while the women keen. Christian, whose initial exhilaration when he discovered Pitcairn uninhabited, its fertility, its water, though both scarce, most of its two square miles rocky slopes, some steep, understands the limits of human endurance. Distilling spirits from ti shall bring out the bestiality in the worst of them. His assumed authority eroded yet again, grief tugs at his heart, personal strain that remains mostly unexplained.

After suffering inhuman treatment from these Europeans the Pacific Islander men stage their own mutiny, first murdering John Williams, the armourer from Guernsey, Fletcher’s blacksmith, builder of their forge. Trapped gardening, startled, he cries out, swearing in French. When they confront Fletcher, also tilling his patch, perhaps saving him the ritual of a more ignominious end, through pain, his terrible ache for home, his last words are, Oh dear! Soft rain cleanses his wounds, his sins. He leaves Mauatua, who curates his skull for sacred reasons, their three offspring, the patois of English language she has learned, and an engrossing tale of memory and myth to pass on. He is gone. Oh dear, indeed.

Posted on by Derek Turner

A poet’s pole position

Arctic Elegies

Peter Davidson, Carcanet, 2022, pb., 72pps. £11.99

DEREK TURNER feels impelled to look to the north

There are poets associated with particular places, or special states of mind, but Peter Davidson has made a geo-poetical genre of his own, as celebrant of a cardinal point. His interests are wide-ranging, but magnetized in one compass direction – towards ‘Norths’ geographical and conceptual, Norths as landscapes and mindscapes, Norths as essences of bleak beauty and soughing melancholy. Auden, Larkin and others celebrated septentrional subjects, but Davidson brings a clarity and suggestiveness all his own to the lonely latitudes that lie above the treeline.

Davidson studied literature and art history at Cambridge, and taught at Warwick and Leiden before spending many years as Professor of Renaissance Studies at Aberdeen. He is now Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, University of Oxford. His earliest writings were monographs on Scottish drinking songs, but he has also edited works of the 16th century Catholic martyr St. Robert Southwell and the 17th century Royalist diplomat-poet Sir Richard Fanshawe, and written an opera libretto (part of which features in this book).

A 2005 topographical tour-de-force, The Idea of North, set him undeviatingly on his compass course, and he followed up with Distance and Memory (2013), and The Last of the Light (2015). His 2018 book, The Universal Baroque, was a radical revisioning of cultural history in which national labels were rejected as otiose, and the very word ‘baroque’ released from its period prison. In his latest book, 2021’s The Lighted Window, the illuminated opening is seen in all its symbolical aspects – as sign of warmth and welcome for those out in the darkness, alternately allowing insights into interiors or outlooks onto wide worlds.

He has gazed northwards from different standpoints, but always through a prism (or snow-globe) refracting an English Catholic sense of dislocation and loss. Northern Europe has long been mostly Protestant (or post-Protestant), but he stakes an older claim, of the far North as fiefdom of ‘the Faith’. His Norths seem often empty, yet always echo, with thin ghost-voices wired on winds across gulfs of territory or time.

He is a celebrant of half-light and half-memories, looking out through long library windows onto winter afternoons with the cold coming down hard – of gloaming peregrinations across parklands and along secretive streets – of old houses and of wildness, of solitary ships and wandering stars, snowstorms and woodsmoke, falcons and thorns – bittersweetly aware of sacrifices made, failed schemes, doomed adventures, long exiles, lost expeditions and causes. Like Rose Macaulay, he takes pleasure in ruins; like Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, he finds substance in shadows.  The North, he notes in Distance and Memory, can be a place of “grim consolations” and wintry raptures, where dearth and even death can be counterbalanced by pristineness and purity. The lights of the North are conventionally held to be harder than those of the temperate zones – but even under the most unforgiving rays this evocative writer finds ample room for romance and ornate symbology, conveying great meanings in vastly evocative blank verse.

From a British vantage point, Norths are not necessarily polar wastes, but can be Pennine hillsides, Yorkshire towns, or Hebridean isles. Even those motorway signs on the edge of London which read “A1(M) The North” act almost as ambassadorial outposts, indicating richly-imagined places, and suggesting the supposed attitudes, habits, and traits of those who dwell in them – guardedness, practicality, sternness, stubbornness, terseness, thrift, toughness. The folksong phrase ‘North Country’ has long elicited images of lakes left by the Ice Age, broad fells, and drystone walls – and even today’s political term, ‘Northern Powerhouse’, is more romantic than rational, conjuring a domain of latent strengths. Entire Northlands can be evoked immediately in everyday architecture and art – stained railway arches, empty mills, the evenings of J. Atkinson Grimshaw – or even sounds – foghorns, geese, the haunted songs of Joy Division. In other countries, their Norths can be our Souths; an Italian’s idea of North may be Austria, and an African’s Italy. In Australia or New Zealand, vague notions of Northness may be swivelled to the South, with Antarctica taking the Arctic’s place in the cultural imagination.

The English east coast under snow. Image: Derek Turner

One of Davidson’s lost causes is the Stuart succession, with ‘Jacobite Song’ launching this second collection for Carcanet (following 2008’s The Palace of Oblivion). The forces of the pre-Reformation, clannish, chivalric Caledonia that briefly terrified Anglican, mercantile, rationalist England in 1745 are honoured in absentia – “The regiments like snow all overborne / The boat rowed far from the cold shore, long gone. / O blackbird taken in the fowler’s snare / He is now far who will return no more.” His king over the water has now gone over the ice, once-bonnie emblem of a past that has “Faded, flown, taken, frozen, falling, gone.” Later (‘Secret Theatres of Scotland’), under a carving of a stag in 1740s plaster he ponders scratched Scots words of desolate departure, graffiti of the gone – “Lang befor daylicht, he began his flicht”.

We then journey to find the jaded, tired Queen of the Adriatic reflected in Murano-made convexity in ‘Venice Glasses I’, one of three poems inspired by Victoria Crowe’s paintings. We can almost smell the Grand Canal and see gondolas rocking gently at their posts as another frantic day fades out – “When vanished things take shape in the stir of the waters / When glimpses and shadows pass at the edges of glasses”. This is a black and dank prospect, suggesting slimed piles and a faint under-whiff of sewage, mercifully uplifted by ‘Venice Glasses II’, where an overflying aircraft scrapes a bright stripe across the darkening welkin.

Back in the hushed old-maid austerity of Edinburgh, he scans second-hand bookshops well-stocked with the frigidly unsatisfactory productions of the eighteenth century – “A back room full of quarto shelves of Scotland / The August pleasures of dead advocates”, searching for sparks of passion within rows and rows of reason – “These wintry precincts of enlightenment / Which hold out for the moment, just, they hold.”

He hovers above 1845-8 to birds-eye the high-tech, high-hoped, disastrous Sir John Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, which got frozen in forever, where “The ice grows downwards building in the dark”. He soars skua-like back to anxious England, and awaiting Lady Jane, pacing in her garden, seeking psychic aid to link to her too-long absent spouse, and eventually enlisting patriotic public opinion to make the Admiralty send in too-late search. We think of those famous pictures of the frozen corpses discovered long after – the luckier ones who died earlier, and received obsequies, before the rest perished miserably out in the white hell, benighted among bitterness, enmired in allegations of anthropophagy, insanity, lead-poisoning, and uncertainty. Davidson prays for intercession for these expeditionaries still – “Lord of the treasuries of Hail, absolve them now, / Queen of Miraculous Snowfall, lead them home.”

In ‘The Early Christian Monuments of Wales’, a poem titled like a treatise, we find evidence of earliest missionaries in monoliths on hawthorn-studded hills, and crude lettering in eroding inscriptions – the gospellers who gave birth to the monks, and the monks to the Matter of Britain – “Words growing thin in time’s vastness, names themselves breaking” – apostles long unreachable, and yet omnipresent even in today’s physical and psychological landscapes. Some poems are more straightforwardly devotional, like ‘St Edmund Campion meditates on the Passion’, or ‘Sonnet for Trinity Sunday’, but his abstractions are rooted in the natural kingdom of the North – “For we are God’s hands and eyes through each green day / Of dog-rose and elder, plough-furrowed leaf of the hornbeam.” Serenity of God is one with sublimity of scenery.

Faith filters into everything he writes – onto the fretted neck of John Dowland’s lute (‘Mr Dowland’s Midnight’), and into his allusions to Caspar David Friedrich’s hyperborean heroism, (‘Dialogue at Kloster Edelna’), and the works of other painters (‘Pryde’s Ghost’, ‘Rex Whistler’s Blues, August 1938’). The most personal lyrics of all thaw all permafrost to remember old friends, taste again late fruits once eaten in disordered once-elegant rooms (‘Lastness, or Rory’s Apple’), and honour his ages-ago aunt, losing her mind yet still able to remember Rilke (‘September Castles’).

Davidson’s conservative, mordant philosophy feels very far removed from those of most modern poets – indeed, it diverges radically from all modern outlooks – but there are times when he can cut through the deepest coldness, to pierce the most glass-slivered heart. He shows us in Arctic Elegies a land and state of mind both lyrically described and thrillingly delighted in – a land and state of mind both eminently deserving of celebration, and capable of shining suddenly with beauty and transformative warmth.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

A Man of Heart – the scribe’s story

LIAM GUILAR continues his epic of early Britain

The story so far. In the 5th century Vortigern’s attempt to hold the imperial province of Britannia together has been defeated, not by external enemies but by British rebels led by Vortimer, his eldest son. Vortimer is a devout Christian and has invited the Pope to send an embassy to restore the church and combat the Pelagian heresy. What follows is the first half of Chapter ten which loosely follows the fifth Century Life of Saint Germanus . You can find chapters 2-9 on the Brazen Head. The complete story has been published as A Man of Heart, by Shearsman UK (January 2023), available here

At the court of Vortimer the King

Above, bare wooden beams.

The hall is badly lit, too many

shadows confuse the walls.

The candle complicates the page.

There’s a broken wreckage of a man

beyond the table, out of sight,

but he knows he’s on his knees,

the shadows can’t disguise

how uncontrolled his sobbing has become.

Two armoured men are looking carefully

at the wall behind him.

‘For your skill with words,’

said his superior,

‘you will join the Papal mission.

You will travel to Britain.

You will record everything.’

Only now he understands

it was curse not compliment.

Here words slither and slop,

like the entrails of a corpse

he has to carry to its grave.

‘Who saw the King today?’

the officer enquires.

The scribe indicates he cannot hear the man’s reply.

The guards move, the man sobs.

‘The pagan woman, the Earl of Gloucester,

slaves, attendant lords…

hand poised, aware the sentence is unfinished.

The officer leans forward. ‘Who else?’

Like a secret heard by accident,

so soft, if a voice could hide, his does:

‘Your masters.’

The two armed men stare at the wall

The scribe puts down his stylus.

They have questioned slaves

who revealed nothing before they died.

There are several court officials

who saw the King in their daily duties

but each swears he saw nothing

and no one saw him without others present.

There were still many wished to see him.

Not like that.

Remembering the last time he saw Vortimer,

writhing, frothing at the mouth,

fouling himself, screaming.

Lupus of Troies enters. ‘The King is dead.’

He indicates the scribe should write the news.

The guards remove the witness,

as Germanus of Auxerre re-enters;

Bishop, on an embassy to combat heresy,

ex-governor, ex-general, proto-saint.[i]

The scribe has travelled with these two,

has become alert to the way they rarely say

that water’s wet. Their silence has

so many meanings but they navigate

the alternatives and rarely get them wrong.

He is aware the words he writes dress

one version of the truth and send it

marching off towards the future

while other possible interpretations

loiter round the edges of the page

like unwanted slaves at an auction.

Germanus:

‘Every Lord who heard his welcome speech

has to be a suspect.’

‘It was poison.’

‘Domestic or foreign?’

‘Impossible to tell unless the vial is found.’

‘And that’s impossible?’

The drama of silence. How can there be meaning

without interpretation in what’s unsaid?

The words he writes across the parchment

have no spaces, but here so much happens in the gaps.

Face blank, he moves the words across the page

and later, perhaps tonight, perhaps at the ugly hour,

staring into nothing, curled into himself

a long way from his home,

imagining all the ways a boy can die,

he will wonder if he hasn’t just recorded a confession

and signed his name to his own death warrant.

He knows what wasn’t written down.

Germanus rests his hand,

so very gently on his shoulder.

If he touched the hand, the ink might blot,

might suggest to an observant scrutineer,

‘Here something happened.’

‘We came to root out heresy.’

They have been arguing.

Germanus is troubled by the inquest.

‘Pope Siricius debarred from holy orders

all who after baptism held administrative posts

or served in the army, the civil service,

or had ever practised as barristers.’

Lupus searches for the appropriate quotation.

He knows this man is closer to his Christ

than anyone he’ll ever meet.

But his literal reading of the gospels

is a cliff on which every ship must wreck.

His Christ never ruled a kingdom;

or had to deal with heretics and raiders;

or arbitrate between contenders for a throne.

He finds the appropriate quote

in his well-trained lawyer’s memory:

‘These powers have been granted by God

and the sword has been permitted

for the punishment of the guilty-

those who wielded it were not blameworthy.’[ii]

‘My Christ,’ says Germanus, quietly,

‘came to save the poor and wretched.

He bought a message of hope and charity.

How can I love my neighbour

and send him to be tortured?

What kind of lover sends their friends

to the executioner?’

‘A disappointed, saddened one?’

The ruthless governor, the iron fisted general,

the lawyer who could kill with words,

flashes to reanimate the bag of bones

and Lupus, despite himself, steps back.

‘Faith does not deal in dialectics.’

The scribe watches, wonders why this,

why now, and why this pause?

He watches Lupus, waiting, saying nothing,

until Germanus shrugs and they both smile.

He can hear the wooden walls

settle. He can hear the fire.

He can hear, outside, voices

and lamentations. Someone repeating:

‘The King is dead. Vortimer the King is dead.’

A gesture indicates the scribe should write again.

‘Where is the woman?’

‘Fled from the court my lord.’

‘And Gloucester?’

if you listen, and ignore the shock,

it’s there, the faintest trace?

Amusement? In the voices.

‘Outside, trying not to pace.’

‘Better bring him in then.’

Somewhere in northern France, months earlier

A young man on his knees

in the cold austerity of his cell.

Rare visitors, three much older men:

one white haired, chicken necked,

dressed only in a tunic and a mantle

despite the time of year:

his holiness, Bishop Germanus of Auxerre.

The other tall, solid, well-fed:

Bishop Lupus of Troies.

‘They are sent by our Holy Father in Rome

to combat the Pelagian disease in Britain.

They need a scribe to record their victory.

You have been chosen,’ said his superior,

who seemed small beside the others,

‘for your skill with words,

your beautiful calligraphy.’

And the sin of pride was his.

Thinking, of course, I am the best

and it is just that I am recognised

after the years of being slighted

by the other scholars.

They will watch me leave.

They will see I have been chosen.

He had not been outside his community

since he entered as a child. He had not seen

beyond the familiar sky line,

the terrifying open space

stretching before, behind, above.

They plodded towards the coast.

It was the ash end of the winter,

cold lurked in the morning

and a wind that shrank skin against bone

blew over the flat dead fields.

Reports of bagaudae made them cautious.

Incongruous discrepancies:

‘An historic Papal mission to save Britannia’s soul’

sounded grand on parchment, but

two old men, a boy, some servants

and a bunch of bored and scruffy soldiers.

They had sheltered in a ruin,

the walls liquid stains

on a darkness with no boundaries,

full of furtive noises. 

Shivering at the edge of light

scattered by their feeble fire,

he knelt for the comfort of prayer,

startled by a strange mewling sound

he recognised as his own voice.

The darkness split. Imploded.

A voice in his head screamed silence

and a vague stain appeared

suggestive of a man in chains.

Stones rose, began to pelt the travellers

who scuttled for shelter, except for Germanus.

‘What ails you? Why do you harm us?’

The stone storm falters into sounds of stones falling.

Germanus strides towards the ruin, passing the boy.

‘Follow child.’ He pauses at a pile of rubble,

speaks quietly, knowing the soldiers had come.

‘Bring light, dig here.’

Two rotted bodies, still in chains.

‘Thieves,’ said Lupus, ‘condemned men.

Dumped like the rubbish that they were.’

Germanus was offended.

‘Images of the Almighty, made in his likeness

should not be so mistreated. Find something

we can use for shrouds, bury them properly.

We will pray for their souls. ‘

The two bishops square off against each other.

One strong, virile, the other bent and old.

Neither speaks until Lupus smiles and bows.

Next morning the boy had stumbled over Germanus,

who was grinding barley for his breakfast,

dressed only in his hair shirt.

Lupus had servants to make him comfortable.

Germanus slept on the cold ground,

a faded military cloak for blanket.

But the old man was friendly,

keen to know the boy better.

‘My father left me with those monks

when I was barely five years old.

He would have sold me off to pay a debt

but couldn’t find a buyer in our village.’

Germanus sees,

bewildered, frightened and alone

a timid child in a hard bare cell.

‘God sees through you.

You were terrified of being wrong

so you learnt to be correct.

The library was home, the classroom

and the daily rituals offered certainty.

Applause substituting for affection.

Approval and your teacher’s admiration

as compensation for your peer’s contempt.’

Skewered, the boy looks away,

remembering the casual nastiness of boys

who had agreed he was the victim.

‘But you fell in love with words,’

continues Germanus.

‘The way they could be marshalled

to march away from ambiguity

and took a sour delight

watching boys who bullied you

being bullied by their teachers

because they were slow, and stupid

and didn’t know one case from another.

It’s alright child. You’ve done no wrong.

There is no grammar of divinity.

Language like the evening fire

only illuminates so much.

God exists beyond the pale glow

of human reasoning. Only fools

believe they understand his ways.

He had a plan for you and here you are.’

The boy looks beaten.

And because Germanus

can manage a robust kindness:

‘Do you have any questions?’

‘What is this Pelagius? Child, he was a British fool

who thought a man might find his way to Grace

without the help of God. Much that he said…

Much that he said was good.’ The old man’s

mottled hand moved the mortar slowly,

the rough barley crackling between the stones.

The disturbing bustle of their camp

distanced by the creased and speckled hands.

‘Pelagius said: A man must try to live a sinless life,

and if he fails, it is his own fault.’

‘But…’

‘Child, where is God in this? For Pelagius,

a man stands or falls alone. He doesn’t need

God or the Church. Nor can priest absolve the man

or give him penance. One sin damns you to hell.

Where is Christ’s charity in that?’

What manner of man is this, that even the wind and sea obey him?[iii]

First sight of the sea; a sullen border

between dark land and empty sky.

His shot nerves torn ragged.

The smell and noise and restlessness

of the wharves had no grammar, and then

the pointless rage of heaving waves

pushing and crashing and trying to erase their tiny ship.

He had clung to the rail and prayed

as the world lurched, rolled and staggered,

until, opening his eyes, he saw

right at the bow, Germanus

drenched in the rise and fall

like the saviour rising from death

shedding the green water,

hands raised, arms outstretched

and he will swear on the holiest of relics

on his chance of salvation

and on his faith in the risen Lord

that Germanus of Auxerre

ordered the sea to be calm.

And the sea obeyed him.

Arrival

They watched the riders coming down the beach

and he was frightened by the powerful grey horses;

teeth, hooves and sweating muscle,

and their armoured riders, more beastly than their mounts.

He knew their type; animals who could not reason,

or be reasoned with. A casual indifference to other’s pain.

He remembered men like this, riding through his village,

their arrogance, their twisted humour,

the ease in which they warped from indolence to rage.

Burnished armour, banners scraps of sudden colour on the breeze

and when the herald had established their identities

the riders moved aside to allow a young man on foot.

Dressed in gold brocaded silk; the kind of man, he thought,

who looks at home in silk. Not much older than himself,

but confident and eager. ‘Where is the King?’

asked Lupus, affronted by this lack of protocol.

‘I am Vortimer, ruler of this kingdom.

Vortigern is my father, a failed King his subjects drove away.

He brought in heathen people. They broke our laws,

defiled our women, corrupted our good customs.

We have destroyed their army, driven them to their ships.

In this new land we worship the true God.

With your help we will rebuild His church.

Every worthy man shall have his place,

and every serf and slave will be set free.

Church lands I will entrust to you.

Every widow will be exempt the tax

upon her husband’s legacy.

We will help you root out heresy

and crush all heathen practice.

Hengist, who will rot in hell,

has lead my father into folly, corrupted him,

used his daughter to confuse him,

until he turned his back upon the church.

You are welcome fathers,

together we will rebuild this battered island.’[iv]

‘I thank the Lord who made this world

and put such holiness herein,’ said Lupus.

But as they stumbled up the stony beach, the scribe

overheard him ask Germanus,

‘Did you see the reaction? His retainers?’

Germanus struggling on the shingle,

stopped and muttered, ‘A holy fool.

Not long for this world.’

Gloucester describing the rebels to Lupus of Troies

‘Champions of the church?

Don’t make me laugh.

Gobshites and wide boys

chancers on the make

jumping at an opportunity.

A patrician elite

suddenly without the power,

influence and prestige

their fathers had inherited

following a strutting fool

who talked a good war.

Men who squirm at discipline,

who dislike Vortigern’s desire

to protect the weak,

his willingness to deal

ignoring faith and place of origin.

They did not remember his ferocity.

How he stacked the corpses,

devastated towns, left nothing,

not a dog nor rat alive. They think,

he has outlived his usefulness.

Theirs is this new world

and they forget who made them possible.

They cluster round Vortimer,

like rot on an open wound.

His father’s son, and little more.

He owes his status to his name

donated, unrequested but

without that gift, incompetent.

A fool no one would tolerate.

Nice enough to have around

but not one to be followed.

The great men of the kingdom

no longer deferential,

no longer asking his opinion

have left him to his bitterness

and this pretence of a court.’

Vortimer, talking with a British bishop

‘The heretics will meet. They will debate.’

Gloucester entering the room like he’s storming a redoubt,

shattering the conversation. ‘She’s coming here?

With an escort and safe conduct?’

‘She comes seeking instruction in the Christian faith.

She asked for my permission to remain here with my father,

and for my father’s sake, I have agreed.’

‘Kill her,’ says Gloucester.

The bishop is still framing his response 

when Vortimer, sounding

so much like his father;

‘And that would be her introduction to Christianity,

if you were her instructor?’

‘She will ride through an avenue of severed heads

to reach your gates, and some of them were relatives.

You placed a bounty on her head. Is that yours?’

The bishop skilled in diplomacy,

tired of their bickering:

‘Your objection was her faith?

She comes here to be baptised.’

‘My lord the King

rebelled against his father

because he favoured pagans.

If she is baptised,

why are we fighting Vortigern?’

Vortimer, offended by Gloucester’s tone,

speaking in his own voice:

‘We will treat her with respect.

She will be baptized.

You will not harm her.’

To be continued

[i] Germanus of Auxerre is the most ‘historical’ of all the characters in this story. He did exist and he did travel to Britain to combat heresy in 429. His miracles, recorded below, are in the Life of Saint Germanus, written down in the late 5th century. Typically for The Legendary History, the chronology is wayward. If Hengist landed in 449/450 he arrived twenty years after Germanus had left.

[ii] Lupus is quoting Pope Innocent 1’s reply to an enquiry on this matter.

[iii] The Gospel of Mark, 4:41

[iv] Vortimer’s speech here, which follows Laȝamon, is one of  Laȝamon’s most astonishing additions to his sources.