Landscape 2007

At the end of the grassy lane, past the row of terrace houses, over the top of Bully Hill, the old vicarage set back off the road, way into the distance. Overgrown stones, names faded in a new life that seems out of control. With a scramble the bramble is parted to reveal a past, a last life ordered with a hierarchy; ordered, but gone now.

Here I am in the morning with wisdom and the poetry of the saints

Alone with no one else around

No choir or congregation, alone with my past

Tiny words, of great ideas and inspirations, of winds and ghosts

Of heavens and constellations

Water colours of a smaller place and a simpler time

Where cart tracks trundled into meadows, trees gave shelter

And we had a candle for late nights behind the moon

Time resumes, caught on a stairway between the old and the new

The railway line runs east to west, carrying the few

The flight path north to south rather more consumes

My toes tingle, where do we call our home

With sounds that let us be single, walking, on the shingle beach

Or further, somewhere more easily out of reach

All the while my mind flicks in and out of groove

From one place and then to another

The rain falls at the slightest threat of sunshine

I am restless; without anything to prove

I am restless, without my life to smother

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Arrival

Reading back, just before melancholy

Flash forward to that second war

Of holidays and shepherds

With moons and trees, moons and trees

Artist, artisan, poet, musician or painter

You are one, whichever you breathe

Leave the washing and tobacco

Push the boats out into the sea

Sail along; holidays with shepherds

Under moons and seas

Sail along without of cause to grieve

Say belong; belong beneath the trees

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Afterwards

Echoes engraved on troubled minds

A shepherd sits under a quarter moon, the story fits in three small rooms

Words taken as a bough

Or a row of branches, barely in leaf, echoes of a troubled time, shadows of relief

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Samuel Palmer (1805-1881)

Light stays with you to the end

The shepherd stays with you

Resolute

…rightly

For seventy years or so

You held the light to nature

Your passion shouted loud

…quietly

The curator sets you apart

With only the smallest of etching

In a very plain wooden frame

You halt the procession

…entirely

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Postcard

Graham Sutherland on holiday with Peter Watson, John Craxton and Kathleen Sutherland

Three petals on white

Camouflage in shadow

Greens with blacks

Entrance to a lane

The picnic hamper is somewhere other

Of the gesture yawned at

By the overlapping seas

Waving in the settling sun

Who is to say

Let things come to rest

Or who is to say

Let things come otherwise

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