Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems (14 page)

To these green woods where I found my love:

To the green wood where I held my love:

To the green wood now my love is gone.

I follow death that stands on my breath,

My heart cut out by the timeless scythe,

All grievous foliage stifling and still.

I carve marks on the bark’s rough edge

To convince my grief he came here once

Whose spirit shivers the aspen tree.

To the green wood where the woodcock flies,

To the green wood where the nightjar hides,

To the green wood with red eyes of a dove.

The young jays springing and curious

Who peck eyes from the lamb’s sweet face,

Resemble too well my heartless step.

For he loves me and I love another,

I love another yet he still loves me,

He loves me still yet I love another.

To the green wood where the green air fades;

To the green wood fluid with icy shades;

To the green wood afraid I follow fast:

Past Syrian Juniper and tall grass;

Hanging with dark secrets the Brewer’s spruce;

The pond that drew the young child in;

Among darkening leaves: a nightingale

Sobbing in the sunniest season,

‘My love, my Love, why do I love another?’

To the green wood where I found my love;

To the green wood where I held my love;

To the green wood now my love is gone.

Published in
Poetry
(Chicago), 81, 1952–3.

A pencil left in her sweet room,

If love is true then sing our tune,

Lovers always know their doom.

And his cool mind the pencils know,

And his pained eyes her hands attune,

Lovers’ glasses wine-rimmed flow:

Two glasses share each smile and pun,

These favoured two none else would do,

Held a secret… death sought one…

Amid the trees, and books on art,

In sun such greenwood songs grew blue,

Filtered through their drinking heart.

Now stiff in death like icing cake;

And green as moon the grasses’ hue;

Only one now drinks and waits:

But she whom death has iced away

Soon breaks in glassy fragments two

Birds and flowers from out her spray.

A pencil left in her sweet tomb,

If love is true then sing our tune,

Lovers always know their doom.

Published in
Poetry
(Chicago), 82, 1953.

A whirl of cobalt birds against

A cerulean sky, flashing light and seen

Through the rigid hand holding a vase

Of cornucopian grace.

Window, falling back like a concertina,

Mellow mild happiness.

A pink distempered warmth

A rainbow of books, only the day

Grey and dishevelled surrounds the village

Like straying hoofs.

A chart of bird songs, prints, and

Two china dogs shine wisely from the shelf.

The orange-scarlet brazier of coals,

Flickering flames mauve, red and green;

The crimson heart encircling my love

Photographed in the cabbage patch.

Published in
Poetry
(Chicago), 82, 1953.

The ‘pele’ fetched in. Water

Cracked, broken and watered down

Carried into the home. Sticks

Chopped on the iron top yard,

Then suddenly the snow. The sky opened

And out of it shed, these floating flakes

Dazzling blinding all earth’s features

Her smaller troubles and unfinished tasks

Covered by a huge silence.

Sitting in the emerald of twilight

And I its singular flaw,

Whose eyes like forgotten stars droop

Nebulously into distant light years.

Wishing the past as dark as night

And the future all light, clarity’s rays.

Yet knowing obscurely

At some central motive of my being,

That all will arise, all turn,

Encircle me, as the light years have spun

Invisibly around their gravel point.

Through the trees… sea,

Down to the sea-lanes… sea,

Sea downs, down-stream,

Pools and prisms of water.

Black at its nightfall,

Wretched in its vapours,

White-pitched and

Pure in its daystream.

Sweet, meadowsweet air,

Quiet pastures sloping

Down, down to the sea,

Towards their own mirror

And sea, sea of perfection.

For seven days the dawn,

And on each day a fresh fold of sky

Until the fifth, when a thick glow

Spread like a heath fire, and the fields,

Farm and hedges lay beneath like a Welsh

Quilt frozen stiff upon the washing line.

Wailing, the birds, like no other day

Would come suddenly, fly away at the sight

Then flutter down from all sides,

All kinds together.

Neither from the frosted leaf nor from

The grey hard ground could they find

Relief. They were no longer birds but

Beings searching after food, spirits of flesh.

Peering at,- out of the trees.

I’ll not wash now Mam

The big red earth will

Rise in my face as I

Open the drill…

I’ll wash tonight.

And he died and lay

In the drill and the big

Red earth covered his face;

And he said this Saint Swithin

Now I am dead I can have

My wash, and it rained this day,

Next, and every day since.

If I could create one tree

And hang it in the sky

And spray it with the living

Gold of the sun, and hold

The natural pattern of its growth,

I would say that I had done

More than enough.

But observe when the sun

Has set against the black

Edge of the leaves,

How other leaves seem

To drift from one

Branch to another, or

Were they birds against

This darkwinged Brazilian sky?

Wings that edge the

São Paolo woods.

This flitting by,

This sudden appearance,

And inconsequence of time,

Is the moment I would

Hold before you;

Tomorrow evening it will

Have gone.

And as the log burnt up and bright

So we shared our simple pleasures;

And as the grate cooled and grew ashly

We fed at poverty’s gate;

Suffering persecution and equal bars

Of discomfort. It was not easy.

It is not
. In spite of the tempest raging

Over the planet’s calm green face.

Fields of camomile and clover

Wet and green as the lakes of Peru

Guarding Chapel deaths and their

Domineering graded stones padlocked

behind a spiked iron fence. The

Jealousies and jockeying for space,

Like chessmen where one move

Could shake the boards of death;

Where pawns can eliminate a queen,

Peasant, a squire’s disgraceful scene.

The now sad plighted machine-lettered century

Leaving no culture of their own, but a

Metallic copy of their earlier neighbours,

Whose deep set letters on shoulders of slate

Announced their death with the pride

Of a spirited horse.

Concrete slabs measured overnight into

A façade of walls. The top flat with its

New pane of vitamin glass, reflecting

A precipitous green of sky, of weird

Accumulator hue. No curtain out of

A square white room: but tree shadows tremulous

On ceiling. The parallel beams of sun

Shimmering with neon springs of air.

A chromium chair, and wider day of light;

A workshop from where ourselves we lean

Over sill and table: yet do remain surrounded

By boarding brothels: and through the lurid

Hours of dawn, face up to a firing squad

Who would not have us write and type

Not at that time of night!

Eyelashes like barley hairs,

Calm – sweet sighs

Absolving her angry

Interval like water

Overcasting fire. Shrill

Cries dissolving. Gurgles

And blue pool eyed caves

Stretch like a sewin of tantrums

And rest under the water’s wave.

Stern pattern cut.

A frosty child

Writhing with seasoned tooth

Purple headed and radiating

Rays of piercing pity, –

Poison and fissure distress.

Out of the hot womb into the cold night breeze,

Out of a synthesis of mist and winter pain,

Dark green ivy on wet branched trees,

         Sprang to birth my son

         From his own mother

                  Revealed

                  Overjoyed

God’s blessing from His mightiest word.

Green gregarious green

Dredged into the very roots,

Lighting up a shine of green

Green light bathing the earth.

The whither-thither of splendid leaves

Rollicking in the spring of the sky:

The wind breathes the branches apart,

To the core of its heartwood

And resilient rays.

Dark-glowering leaf pattern,

A spread of flaming black

Radiates at the tip of each blade,

Fixes an impregnable pattern

Of stoic growth of purpose,

In such a purposeless world.

When fold of iron blue and

Rolls of sparse corotesque grass

Recede further and further away

Leaving a multitude of space

Taking as you go

The salutation from my side

I imperceptibly accept the pale

Night and its immense face

In which to hide my frozen fear.

If you have your heart in a thing

Work or person and this is mocked at,

Then this is death.

It is a crack in the heart

That saps your pulse away

Into a damp pattern.

That flattens the mind

Like mountain ash against the sky

With frost crouched close at its heel.

Very strange is this fish and gift,

Instinctively it has a myth;

Caves of Poseidon watch it drift

Towards Medusa’s opal plinth,

Orphic chants on pink scaled nights

Resemble well my lover’s rites.

With eyes like tired skies and shifting explosion

Of nerves; these saints of Bloomsbury, blue bulls

And poodle men, sniff out their congested haunts,

Shelve, or move on a drink scrounge to a plaid green pub.

Sneer over plastic tables at the empty glass;

Drink – in caustic celebrities to upbraid them –

When their own minds warn them of defeat –

That ‘they are as phoney as a porterhouse steak’

Then to return in rubbled muddle, with flashing

Ties and black picoted nails; round and out

Into the bleak night of streets; down coffered cellars:

To peony papered walls: broken beds: chip and bacon whores.

There was a carpenter at my door,

And the smell and sound of the paint blew into

My nostrils and ears, and gathered

My thoughts, as I looked out of the window

With my hands warm among the washing socks

To the wet earth sodden with too much water

And the green plants persisting

Among the cavernous ruins.

And this I remembered.

It was a long time ago and they were

Of mellow brick. The books charred and torn

Falling out of their structure.

Such is the justice of man that he will

Appal at such destruction; yet for the same feat,

Go with heroic strides to have his own breast

Plated with tinkling medals.

Under this Sacred Temple,

Inner Temple and London’s Shrine, such

A week’s devastation melted half the

Block with the fury of rising flame-throwers.

Then to Pimlico where I took the bus���

I found warm flesh charred…

It was a long time ago,

And there at the same time a family

Unknown gave me an egg from their only hen

And an armful of mauve lilac:

They promised me as well some Iris roots,

‘They’d send to Wales’, they said.

I ate the egg. Destroyed my soul,

For such an immense tragedy can not withold a soul.

But I did not receive the Iris roots.