Poetry1 by Nicholas Coleman

On the South Downs, 1937

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Nicholas Coleman's Poetry, page 1

Maps of the Underground,

The gold-fingered travelling gang have passed this way,
exuding a stench of steaming tar.
I had always thought I could follow the patches
back to where I came from;
now a future blackboard sticks
to the soles of my workboots.
The trenchline of the watermain that I meant to use
to lead me back to a beginning,
has snapped.
Once I could tell you of poems of mine
buried under each patch in the road,
sealed in date-stamped bread wrappers;
underground words
waiting for Murphy’s children to find.
Or the poetry that flowed unpenned
down the fingertip controls
of a Japanese excavator,
hissing through hydraulic rams,
compressed by Bosch wackerplate
into Jurassic seams.

Nic 18Nov99

Rooted
You were conceived on Sussex clay.
The kind of clay that lines Downland dewponds,
and landfill sites;
the touch of moisture makes it swell,
it sucks you in.
That's when it takes hold, the golden clay, at conception.
Growing up free as the swallow tied to instinct's route,
as clay platelets, like Bentonite, seal, steal into cells,
gravity pulls a denser child down.
You climb The Hill,
dreamride the clouds,
and read too much of distant lives,
careless of settling layers of summer's dust.
You could have left while light enough,
to escape naked to the Back of the North Wind,
but that flying horse you chose
slowed, stumbled, broken-winded,
fetlock deep in clay.
White bones coffined in yellowclay land,
wait ‘til Anderida draws them from the soil,
to breathe them out to drift with the settling dust.

NiC 30/9/99

Fencing Vermin

The fool has no ear
for the foreign wind
from beyond The Hill,
as he hammers staples
into split chestnut spiles
round an acre not for sale.

Elsewhere,
wire slices the wind which plays
about the blank bone faces,
and crucified fingers hang on the dollar
compounds which Keep Out the chattering air
with mesh that multiplies the cuts.

Turning up his collar,
trenchcoat back
to the fishing trees
that net the tears
from crying winds,
he unrolls another length of stock fencing.

Nic98/99

Soap

Poetry's not for real.
Put down that pen, there's pigs need feeding.

So,
you watched homebound crows
dip down
Firle Beacon's flank
as you listened
to the corncrake
on the hill?

So,
a pheasant's
flown bleeding to the sun
sliced feet
standing guard
in the hayfield with its young?

So what if we were lovers once
back when the drum mower
was a bloody-handled scythe,
and Haybobs had wooden tines?

Get real,
I'm listening to The Archers on the wireless,
and tonight I'm going to watch Emmerdale on T.V.

(for the Americans amongst you: these are the longest running soaps in Britain, on 'real' country life)

Wording

Summer passed
without words;
chased out by figures,
sums of living.

Summer passed,
eating heat,
sleeping sweat.

Grass grew
without words,
and without words
the scythe sliced
dew-honed stems.

September came;
cranial yellow puffballs
dusted a silent breeze
with spores

that floated free of unborn words

unborn words. .

Do I need words, breathing in Autumn air?
In insect worlds do crane flies cry out for words
on their only autumn pasture day
begun on a silver cobweb dawn?

But cobweb dawns have laid eggs in an idle brain;
black maggots begin to crawl round around,
as galaxies of oak tree gnats
dance their sunshaft dance. And
as thoughts crawl in
bloated words
crawl out
in
out
thin
stout
feeding, feeding, feeding.

NiC 6thOct97

The Woodlouse (sowbug in U.S.)

Heading from the red light in the heat
tens of feet tramp unseeing onwards.
No time to read the book or wonder
why it's open at one page or the next.
Mindless of games played by human gods
indifferent as to how the light shines
or how the darkness is switched on.
Must march on, blind to boundaries,
till touched by something not understood
he turns in on himself, an introverted Atlas,
to carry the weight of his world alone
inside his armoured sphere. Black Dog
flicks a tail, his world rolls into flames.
Somewhere in a different universe
a supernova flares, then fades to ash.

NiC.28 Nov96

Neanderthal Man, a separate ape-like branch of the human race, lived alongside our ancestors for 200,000 years, disappearing 30,000 years ago. Thought to have had no language or art, but recently a flute of his fashioned from the thigh bone of a bear was found in a cave in Slovenia. It plays the same scale of seven notes that is the basis of modern Western music. Think on it.

The Thigh Bone of the Bear

What silver scene set under a youthful moon
woke that dull aching to compose.
From where in that scowling skull did come
the urge to set your world to tune.
And in your quiet thoughts did you suppose
your flute would be o'ertaken by the drum,
that for you the Earth was but a barren womb
with no child of yours to tend your tomb

And were you all enslaved by our forebears
kept caged like larks to lilt and chaunt.
so gentle that you lost the instinct to survive
and played your tunes to chide away your cares.
What haunting hymn flowed from that flute,
raised your spirit, kept your hope alive,
as Philomel played on the hollow bones of bears
did the flow of music replace your flowing tears.

Your race was not raised to the beat of the drum
but softly lilting sounds of blown bones.
A harmony of a hundred thousand year
ended when you had nowhere left to run.
Did homo sapiens drive you from your homes
as humble happiness was replaced by fear
of the devil's descant that was to come
as the dark side of the Moon displaced the Sun.

And so one day, millennias from now,
will apes be playing instruments of grace,
debating if we had the soul to sing
and wonder, finding clarinet and strings, just how
that dull dumb breed, the extinct human race,
did have what lets the heart take wing
inside that primal head, that domed brow,
to sing as songbirds upon the blossomed bough.

I want to know, I have to understand:
Were you the Adam, do we come from Cain
and was the apple the thigh bone of a bear.
What killed your song, were you the final band.
And as the flute played the interlude to pain
did the serpent hear your melody of fear
that flowed out faint across a sterile land
as Eden sank slowly under grains of sand.
nickcoleman
12thApril 97

Four Minute Warning, 1961

The world learned to count
when he was twelve.
The number of eggs in a pigeons nest
was all he knew
the number of his sisters
and of his brothers.

But by twelve he could count each of fifty four mile
to a college of cassocks cawing round a refectory table.
Reigate Redhill Leatherhead Staines Slough Windsor
counting the slap
of each name
on the palm
of his hand.
Counting cats-eyes.
Counting hairs on the back of his fathers head.
Counting gathering clouds. The front is near.
Thames mist is mustard gas. the Journey's End.

In nomine patris say a prayer for Cuba
before we die our father
(Runnymede Runnymede I met JFK on Runnymede plain)
Our Father
counting
240 180 120 60
four minutes
you'll only need
to count
to four
my son.
(Runnymede Runnymede we played the game on Runnymede)

I still find myself counting up to four
when I cross the Playing Fields
where a cracked rock
commemorates
the visit
of the man in black.

NiC 22ndOct97

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