The Shady Side of Summer

Since the other prospects of money-earning are tenuous, I've decided to rummage through my old poems and see if there's anything worth sending to magazines. Recently I reread the war elephant poem that I posted on this blog months ago, and felt rather smug about it; so, though I went through a long episode of thinking that my poetizing is pretty hopeless, it seems that I might as well give it a shot.

Information provided by the Sharing Wycombe's old photographs website: "E/NE across Bury Pond, a view of the SW aspect of The Bury mansion, with the parish church tower beyond. Chesham. c 1900
Photographer: Francis Frith"
"Copyright managed by High Wycombe Library
Image kindly loaned by Mr J.H. Venn" [Photograph inserted March 13, 2015]

Here is a poem about the Thames that I wrote (based on a photograph) whilst researching Buckinghamshire for one of my lousy historical tales. Since I've never seen the Thames except for the transcendently murky, brownish-tan stretch amid the concrete banks at the London Eye and Parliament Buildings, I've decided not to even attempt to send it to a magazine. It was written in June 2008 and revised just now.

On the Thames in June

Betwixt the banks there lies the rippled,
algae-suffused, silvery surface of the blackish water
beneath which the brownish waters
are transfixed with shafts of softened light
clouds of motes and shreds of fibre
dying gently in the liquid earth,
and the ungainly, supple stems of water-lilies
seek the sun from the morbid murk of the riverbed.
The willows, whose boughs in streaks of grey
and tresses of long gold-green leaves
flock on the banks and sink into the water's edge,
stir the sluggish current and dent the meniscus
where insect corpses, legs askew and wings collapsed,
are borne away to their inglorious camelots,
and the twisting deep-grooved mass of submerged trunk
anchors as iron in the unseen earth.
Lengthy banks of reed on either side are tufted sadly
and bear the tarnished, worn beige tones of famine,
as quivering dragonflies with bulbous head disport
themselves with fleeting shimmer of the wings,
and skittering water-bugs race or circle
meditatively, or dart, like skaters on the ice in winter,
perilously prolonging their stay over the devouring river.
Above these banks, embowered in the firs and beeches
that rise so densely and so grandly on the shore,
the knapped-flint church with tower of four turrets,
and flying flag, and weathervane too slender to be seen,
the windowed nave and shady chancel and humble porch,
and an assembly of the graveyard's stones
upon the winding, flowing lake of grass,
which pours itself, through dapple-shaded tree and shrub,
into the river. And the swans, again, who swim through its reflection,
their feet a gleam of amber darkly tinted red,
an unwinking contemplation in beaded eyes,
and an untroubled curve in the ample, white-plumed body,
mutely agonized neck and modestly dipped beak,
in a calm far deeper than that of the stream or even
the low resounding of the church's bells
or the shadowy branched realm within the beeches' crowns,
but in quiet accord with the funereal soil
and the roaming skies and the untiring breeze.

And here is a far less serious, 18th-century-ish poem:

The Horseman's Mishap

A horseman rode the path serene
Among the gently nodding trees;
To every side the path was green;
The scent of blossoms rode the breeze.

The horse itself was not at rest
As he traversed the rocky path;
A fly lit on his back -- the pest --,
Stung, and filled the horse with wrath.

His hooves he raised toward the sky
And whinnied for forbearing grace,
When to the ground, which was not dry,
The horseman fell and hit his face.

The fallen man did not resemble
A specimen of Christian man;
His fury he would not dissemble,
And the prudent stallion ran.

"Oh! woe is me!" the rider moaned,
"My lovely face is full of dents!"
No luck; the rider, as he groaned,
Did hobble home, his clothes in rents.

(May 2007)