War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet

So we all find the shore before sunset

War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet
J.M.W. Turner, 1842

A cat may look at a king,
an exile may look at a rock limpet.
In rust-red, a doomed sun rides down,
haunts the sky and sea.
Tents on a battlefield look beautiful,
ethereal ghosts blown by wind
from fight to failure, ripped and ruined,
hanging from barren orchards, orange
in the salt marsh dusk.
                       Limpets grip
grimly to hard hats, strong
against gyre and flow, ever resisting,
grinding moats and entrenching
sockets into hollowed rock.

Mists sink as spectres, clean
of mire and mortality, stare
from eyeless orbits.
                        A cat may look at a king,
an emperor may look at a rock limpet,
while we, each one of us,
watched by an all-seeing guard,
cling on.

© Martin Porter 2012

This poem is an exercise piece, based on Turner’s painting in the Tate Britain. The poem uses a combination of colour palette and composition, scene setting and the introduction of ideosyncratic imagery in an attempt to emulate Turner’s vision. The introduction of the cliche (dating from as far back as 1562) “a cat may look at a king” is intended to reflect the odd image of the rock limpet in the painting. Using the cliche also aids the inversion of the emperor looking at the rock limpet and it is this inversion that is one of the crucial elements of the poem’s central question of who is in control here.

Other elements are also in play. The ghost-like tents as a metaphor of the spectral group of presumed dead army also reflects the conical shell of the limpet, and the hard hats of the limpet reflect the armour of the dead infantry. The motion of the sea is used as a metaphor of the ebb and flow of military campaigning. The similarity of sound between “guard” and “god” is also intentional.

What else is central to the poem? The inclusion of the audience, perhaps of the painting or perhaps of the poem, to make a final thought was important. I did not want to leave without the thought that we, all of us, may be in some way responsible for war, not necessarily directly, but possibly by our lifestyle choices, our wilful ignorance (or ignore-ance) of the desperation of others or just sheer indifference to our societal responsibilities.

Although an exercise piece, this poem has something to say, difficult as it must be to anyone who comes to it cold. This has grown from a simple collection of ideas from a painting to encompass contemporary and disturbing concepts.

Horse in Winter

Horse in Winter

Uffington, 1964

chalk supple
stretch in mid-stride
holds my stare
to the downs

sharp silhouetted
clean profiled
the eye a stop
to my eye

yesterday
snow fall
from nowhere
covers the grass

i
look to the scarp
to see the horse
as nothing

© Martin Porter 2012

This is a simple descriptive piece with no punctuation. The “i” is left lower case as using a capital “I” gives it a significance that is not necessary in the poem.

Poems with limited punctuation can raise controversy. Avoiding the obvious punctuation maintains the simplicity of the description, relying on the line and stanza breaks to provide the indicators for the reader.

To further assist the reader the location and date of the event being recalled is included.

The Uffington Horse is one of the more famous ancient monuments in England and has been well preserved, despite the occasional defacement as an act of vandalism of for ill-judged publicity.

Poetry on the Move in Guernsey

I am honoured that “My Lover is a Rainstorm” is one of the poems features in the Poetry-on-the-Move project in Guernsey.

The poem will be displayed on Guernsey buses and at Guernsey airport in time for the Second Guernsey Literary Festival featuring Roger McGough, Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Candy Neubert, Michael Morpurgo, Louis de Bernières among others. Click on this link to visit their website.

Lagoon at Ngunguru

Lagoon at Ngunguru is a poem written as an exercise. I have three versions here, each using different line lengths, with only minor changes to the text. I have maintained three stanzas in each version.

Lagoon at Ngunguru
A spit in the sea, a dribble of sand,
white tussocked and strong,

haunt of hidden birds, their soft secret calls
skimming the surface, crying over

water, smooth, polished and buffed
for crossing with delicate footsteps.


Lagoon at Ngunguru
spit in the sea
dribble of sand
white tussocked
strong

haunt of hidden birds
soft secret calls
skimming the surface
crying

water so smooth
polished and buffed
for crossing with delicate
footsteps


Lagoon at Ngunguru

spit
in the sea
dribbling
sand
white
tussocked
strong

haunt
of hidden birds
soft
secret calls
skim
the surface
crying

water
so smooth
polished
buffed
for crossing
with delicate
footsteps


The line length changes the speed of reading. Interestingly I find the first slower to read on the page, but faster to read aloud. I prefer the second version because it splits the observations into line-sized chunks, but the coupling of ideas in the first version has an appeal,as does the detail offered by the third version, with one “concept” on each line. The third version also provides a fulcrum at the mid-point, the line “secret calls” as well as pleasing mid-points for each stanza.

Shell (Easter Monday, April 9th 1917)

Shell
(Easter Monday, April 9th 1917)

“I simply watched the shells changing the landscape”
- Edward Thomas

No man can take this land, it is nature’s own
Shimmering under full moon, and poppies autumn sown.
A long night exposed, watching, peaceful in the dark,
Listening to the thud, a dud, so close but still, no blast.

A shell of frost on mud in early dawn of day
Turns quick to blood red streams throughout the clay
Into the ditches, limp bleeding streams,
Along the other tracks he might have been.

Nettles have no peace to grow among the plough
Shares rusting in the burnt barns wrecked by fire.
Empty shell of snail holed by the thrush, now
Beak bladed open in the filthy mire.

A watcher turns field glasses towards an armoured sky
To the projectile falcon, at its summit,
Ready to drop. The shell still hovers higher.
Incessant noise, then autopsied flesh, then quiet.

“He was killed on Easter Monday by a shell”
- Helen Thomas

Shell (Easter Monday, April 9th 1917) is a simple poem paying homage to Edward Thomas, an English poet with a long writing career but short duration writing poetry. Thomas was a professional writer and was encouraged to publish his poetry by Robert Frost. A brief outline of their friendship and the consequences of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is available in an article in the UK newspaper “The Guardian”. Edward Thomas enlisted in the British army during the First World War and died on the first day of the Battle of Arras.

Thomas wrote at a time of immense change, breaking free from the constraints of Georgian poetry but not stretching as far as the modernist approach of Eliot, for example. Nevertheless, Thomas provides a peculiarly structured yet loose portrayal of England (rather than Britain) at the time of WW1.

In this poem there is a reference to Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” as well as Thomas’ poetry, particularly “Tall Nettles” supplemented by Yeat’s “Second Coming”, a post-war poem containing savage and mystical imagery and sharing the evolutionary path in British poetry that Thomas might have taken, had he not been killed in 1917.

Rhyme in this poem has been carefully controlled and disrupted in an attempt to display the evolutionary state of poetry at the time, as has the metre. Formal rhyming schemes come in and out of focus, initially aabb, but moving to a slant-rhymed abab at the final stanza.

Reading at the Mokaba Bar, Whangarei

New Zealand National Poetry Day is today, and Whangarei celebrated early with readings at the Mokaba Bar on Wednesday. I read new poems spread over two slots. The poems are all unpublished and included “Downtown”, "The Evolution of the Universe”, “Hare in a Glacial Sequence”, “Sunday after the Abbatoir”, “Lazarus and Martha at Tikipunga Falls” and “Maiden Voyage Wreckage”.

For... - Not Haiku

For Yuri

Yuri,
Filling new space moves
In circles, then falls back to Earth.

For Neil

Fly a figure of eight
To the Moon
For the dust of your age.

For my son

There are no secrets.
We offered you space
And gave you nothing.

© Martin Porter 1995

This is a sequence of three poems, dating from 1995 but somehow has managed to stand the test of time and may even be more relevant now than when it was written.

The poems are not haiku, nor were they ever intended to resemble haiku. The syllable count does not correspond to the usual 5,7,5 of a modern english-language haiku and the sequence of thoughts in each line does not follow the seasonal aspect, cutting through or reconciling that is frequently found in haiku.

The sequence is built from three poems of three lines, a structure that appealed to my sense of elegance in structure. Each poem contains fifteen syllables. The poems become increasingly structured, until the last poem which consists of three lines of five syllables. This movement from relative freedom to a more restricted form was intended to convey a corresponding movement from sixties freedom, to the more restrictive eighties. The final poem reflects the sense of disappointment as the idealism of the sixties collapses into the unregulated “greed is good” era ushered in by the mid-eighties. As such there is a polemic in both the structure and presentation of subject matter, perhaps not obvious. Even if this had not been intentional (which it was), living through the passing of manned Moon missions and the resultant change in perspective and subsequent disappointment would most likely have coloured my writing at the time.