Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems (15 page)
Read Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Online
Authors: Lynette Roberts
To pine, moan, grieve, to hone,
But this is not my world
There is no sunshine.
Grey grebes break in the sky
Trailing a line of fire,
Leaving a thread of red silk
Like a newborn wound:
They fall despairing into
The soil, and unlike us,
Hide among the bogs.
The flash of poachers, their
Carrion ways against the bank;
Heap of feathered mass:
And wild eyed shame.
He alone could get me out of this
But he neither knows nor cares
After Hell there is a full stop.
The storm in my brain its
High tensional rays,
The sickness in my soul
And the growl and biting grit
That sets me back
Each moment forward I want to fly
Forward on the wake of some aerial device.
Where every moment is fresh
A flower or bird not seen.
To some trespassed spot
Of rippling streams, good natured
Enchantment, ease, and plentiful rest,
Where there is no access to these painful and
Immediate idiosyncrasies:
Where peace is formal, wholesome and pure.
And I would not call this escape
Nor would I call this inaction;
But a source from where all
Growth and activity could reside,
Could breed and acquire
A new note and thought,
Conspire with him whom I have recently admonished,
A new foregathering of Spring.
Because you produced the birth of sound within me
Because you pierced me with your personality
I strive to reach you O people of Cambria
For I have something to say:
With corbeau hue in the spirit of a bird
I have sharpened my beak on the blue vein of rocks
These the oldest strata to your age.
Like a cynometer I have measured blue sea and sky
Seen the cycle of vision with Branwen’s eye
Learnt the song from Rhiannon’s wood.
O people of Cambria listen
For I have something to say.
Silurian age gave silurian fish saurian-mouthed
A surrealist world half creatures of sea and land
My company for thousands of years.
Out of this arose the Cimmerian age
Cave dwellers of cavernous birth
The cambutta and campastoral life
Dragons, long staffed Bards and Kings.
O people of Cambria listen
For I have something to say.
With wandering wings and a restless spirit
I flew in search of light in warmer climes
To find leguminous plants, camels, and cambric
All connected with the Greek cycle of K.
Cyperous pools strengthened my way
With music more liquid than dew.
There I found a Phoenecian fleet
Of colours that stretched all seas.
O people of Cambria listen
For I have something to say.
I followed these ships in a circular flight
To Islands as distant as Java, Penang, Bali,
And the purple Isles of Pliny.
With hardship and toil a hard storm
Scattered my glazed plumage with stones
Camstones from the astronomical skies of Sirius
That bleached my green feathers for life.
Scarlet sails shaded with the salts great sea
The ship deep waisted, splashed with Cyprian wine and silk.
The Luds warriors from north eastern Crete
Pulling their way, and the ships of Tarish
All guided to your shore by the
Stern face of the stars.
For the richness of your soil.
O people of Cambria listen
For I have something to say.
All this occurred before the birth of Rome.
Came fleets also - sounds from Indian seas
From the opposite direction
Thus completing the cycle of K.
So from this circular flight of a bird
A circle of sound is traced
The greek letter of K has resolved itself into C.
K is your letter and K the key to your tongue.
K stands in its migration more mystical than 7
Go back to the stars and soil
And great will be your reward.
I own,
Broken-down cars, doll-houses and pies
These the spice of the day.
I use,
Freedom and fearlessness hand in hand
To frighten gowned tutors away.
Hands crashed on piano and paint
The type-writer too carries my weight.
Flying tremendous
Throughout the hours,
I follow my fancy if fresh bread allows.
Exercise
never
! –
Except singing and swinging
To balance the hours into endless winking.
Where leaves grow out of tree trunks
And light of the sea is erased
By the moon’s blanched rays
Into a sombre task of a grey
Serenity. The dolorous hills
With their cumbersome outcrop
Of green, hold my locked head
This evening as I grieve
Uphill through the rain.
My slow feet quite detached
From the full measure of my
Ponderous brain weighted with
So much sorrow on its bodiless carriage.
I spent my days in passage ways,
Groping in the dark. Lost in a maze
Of doors. And though I went through
Each one there was, they always led to places I knew.
Hearing only my futile walk.
For I knew of the way to the castle moat,
And where I could find a rowing boat.
Then one day there appeared a door,
Where there’d been nothing at all before.
And as I knew that it might
Lead to light, I tried, and I was right.
So now I enjoy the light of the sun,
As much, and more, than anyone.
Sitting surrounded by wasps,
My only view in this lovely
And sad caravan
Are the graves and tombs filling
Each window pane
Clustering up the sweet earth.
And towards the front, –
For that is the side and back view only, –
They are at this moment
Building by degrees
From a five tiered cartload
Sheaves of barley into a
Platform of dry trash:
This I understand to keep it dry
For I have never seen this done before.
So the rats will come and their omens
But with them with more hop and joy
Fearless birds of splendid plumage.
One of the earliest memories I have of my childhood was to wander out of the gate
and stare at the South American pampas. The quiet grey grass stretched over to the
horizon where a plantation of sugar cane and maize drew a thread of bright green along
its edge. A bison wandered over the plains and nothing more. Near the house lived
an old woman who earned her living by making mud bricks. My father, who was in charge
of the Mechita railway junction, and always rode back and fro to work on
horseback
, scolded me one day for straying on the plains. Then the bison disappeared.
It was when I wrote the rondel ‘Blood and Scarlet Thorns’, which was published in
my first book of
Poems
in 1944, that I used these early images for the birth of Christ. I shall now read
you the poem:
Who bends the plain to waist of night
And stems the bird to tree of flight,
Who stretches leagues to see a bone
Of bison cast as proud as stone,
Who lengthens maize and sweeps the light
Of grenadine right out of sight;
It is the hard and monstrous plight
Of weeping birth this citron dawn,
This citron dawn,
A heart breaks through the ice of night
Who is, and bursts a paper kite
That sails the day into a dome
Of joy, and tears, and monotone,
This day maintained: a child was born,
A child was born.
The New World with its strange subtlety absorbed me with its vivid impressions, the
spinning windmills irrigating the
quintas
, and as the
corrugated
containers filled with water, I bathed in them within shadow of the peach trees.
A favourite haunt of mine was the patio kitchen, filled with creollos and flies with
the smell of the carbon fire and oil, where I would wait until I had sucked the very
sweet
maté amargo
out of their
bombillas
as they passed the gourd round. We ate frogs and wild birds and the first view I
had of a large spider lifting the roof of his house in the mud and slamming it back,
I shall never forget. The small pueta where people lived with their horses tethered
to the wooden post outside their shacks, their songs,
knife-fights
, guitars, the dark shadows the peons cast as they gamble behind
clouds of dust as the horse race took place. They were and still are the root culture
of the Argentine soil. So when the thatched roofs were torn down and corrugated roofs
placed in their stead and values were placed on the wrong issues, I rebelled and wrote
to establish belief in these people in my poem called ‘The New World’. Here it is:
Memory widens our senses, folds them open:
Ancient seas slip back like iguanas and reveal
Plains of space, free, sky-free, lifting a green tree
on to a great plain.
Heard legend whistling through the waiting jabirú,
Knew the two-fold saying spinning before their eyes
Breaking life like superstition, they too
might become half-crazed.
Staring sitting under the shade of Ombú tree,
Living from the dust: kettles simmer on sticks,
Maté strengthens their day’s work like dew
on hot dry grass.
So the people baking too close fulfilled time,
Mud became brick walls and the legend flared high,
Shadows broke, flames frowned and bent the sky
proclaiming Indian omens.
Roofs fell clattering in on man and child,
Black framed their faces, from fire not from sun:
While before them land divided announcing
stake peggers’ loud claim.
Death ate their hearts like locusts over a croaking plain,
Tears fell red as fireflies on the rising dust;
Barbed wire fenced them in or fenced them out,
these outcasts of the land.
So the people fled unwanted further on into the land,
On to the Plain of White Ashes where thorns spread
Like the wreath of Christ. Further out on to
the Ancient Sea of Rhea.
Ombú turned hollow as it stood alone:
Spiders lifted the lids of their homes and slammed them back
Sorrow set the plovers screaming at the falling
hoofs and feet:
Cinchas bound their eaten hearts: leather sealed their lips;
Ponchos warmed their pumpkin pride: as insects floated,
As windmills grew. Ventevéo! Ventevéo! And further they
strove, the harder not to be
seen.
Lost now. No sound or care can revive their ways:
La Plata gambles on their courage, spends too flippantly,
Mocks beauty from the shading tree, mounts a corrugated roof
over their cultured hut.
This reminds me that an editor asked if I couldn’t change ‘corrugated roof over their
cultured hut’, it was so ugly. He did not see that that was the purpose of the whole
poem. The
estancias
were being sold or mortgaged and the money drifted into the Casinos at La Plata.
The peon or gaucho and the land were left in despair.
During holidays from the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Buenos Aires I often went
on my father’s yacht on the River Plate. He had such a fever for boats and sailing
throughout his life that I even remember his building a boat and its hull, which hung
like a skeleton mammal in one of the Mechita stables. And this was far from water
on the plains. So I watched this River Plate as it lapped past reflecting the blue
sky, the oranges blown into the water, wild sylvan grass and its own warm fawn colour,
and I wrote this song for the River Plate:
The pampas are for ever returning
The orange river pounding the sea,
From a high dry plain with a tint of tea
La Plata spreads, and churns drowning
The dust from the charcas murmuring
At the bare roots of the Ombú tree:
The pampas are for ever returning
Bright green birds into a piranha sea.
Over spare-dust and barbed wire slowly
Cattle die from thirst wounds, returning
Like maté ships shivering, bringing
No sound but white bones back to me:
The pampas are for ever returning
Bad bones and dust into an angry sea.
Other holidays were spent at the foot of the Andes on the Chilean lakes. At Traful
there was just the one house and on a distant hill a white horse, whose owner would
appear once or twice a year to change maize for
leather-work
he had made. No one knew his language. A
guarani
sang as she washed at the open tub, a wild fox tame at her side. Mrs Dawson had tamed
it, and
her husband was out shooting pumas, the children riding barefoot and
bareback
throughout sandstone gorge. We raced after the wild animals and threw
bolas
. But I rode with a sheepskin and could not throw the
bola
well. They caught their game. Then into an Inca burial, where a skeleton was found
lying upside down, handmade gold jewels and trinkets. Mrs Dawson had them on her mantelpiece.
So I wanted to know more about Peru and the Incas. Certain phrases of theirs inspired
me, such as lion grass, the mountain where the sun was tied up, the eyebrow of the
mountain. The word ‘Traful’, where we played, apparently meant ‘lake of pools’. And
these later grew into a poem with the Inca title ‘Xaquixaguana’ meaning ‘the Valley
of Beauty’. In this I tried to create the whole quality of that race:
In the lake of pools
Where icebergs stand firm on the ground,
And refrain to move for beauty of their image,
Five Temples lie wounded on their sides
Each plundered and more progressive than the last.
I speak of the one with the grey-crusted sleepers
Sitting in the splint-blue cave.
Especially he, of the up-side-down burial
With arrows set like buhls in the rib of the wreck:
Who was this white man of Peru?
And what flat burial did he deserve
To stir their sandstone agave? To face emerald sky
And snarling rocks where the sun’s tied up:
Lying stiff among gold filaments and animate clay
Snouting Azrael forms and intricate beads:
Those Huacas spread and exposed under cacti waterbeds,
Green as tunas, weathered with poisoned alizarin darts
Who was this man who stole their store of gold?
Who found down here down Pilcomayo way,
Near lion grass and glass birds sailing the lake,
Who was he, that lies buried at the Haravec’s feet
Aggrieved by this ice and basaltic sheet?
During the interval that my father was General Manager for the Buenos Aires Western
Railway and was contemplating buying an
estancia
in Mar del Plata, I sent him a sonnet supporting his opinion of administration and
the beliefs which he held. And beside him throughout this period was the office boy
who first helped him at the Mechita Junction. He was now his private secretary. I
said in this poem to my father in 1939, which I called ‘Argentine Railways’:
To you who walked so proudly down the line,
Promoting men from engine plates, skilled
Workers from the sheds: the Board soon killed
The cut you had to socialise the ‘decline’.
You, who planned man’s bonus among the whine
And shrill of people on the go; filled
The sleeper’s clock with admiration; drilled
Time in travelling into a close combine.
But now I prefer to think of you set back
Upon the land, with eucalyptus trees
Shading corral from dust; plan as you please
The round hill into a wholesome farm. ‘Their’ lack
To accept your methods receive with ease,
For they will come to that in the end or ‘freeze’.
For the British born in the Argentine there are many sea voyages, and in one of these
ten trips I particularly remember having the director’s coach set down to us in order
that we might go up the one cable railway to São Paulo. During the war, from a Welsh
village these nostalgic
saudaded
came back to me and I write this poem ‘Royal Mail’:
I would see again São Paulo:
The coffee coloured house with its tarmac roof
And spray of tangerine berries.
I would again climb the mountain cable
And see Pernambuco with its dark polished table,
The brilliance of its sky piercing through the trees
Like so much Byzantine glass or clear Grecian frieze.
As we stumble higher, strolling gourds and air-plants
Spring from muscoid branch to barnacle wire:
I would see old man should it come my way,
The mahogany pyramids of burnished berries, gay
With surf-like attitudes of men sitting around
In crisp white suits, starch to the ground.
The peacock struts and nets mimicrying butterflies,
And the fazenda shop clinking like ice in an enamel jug
As you open the door. The stench of wine-wood,
Saw-dust, maize flour, pimentos, and basket of birds,
With the ear-tipped ‘Molto bien signorit’, and the hot mood
Blazing from the drooping noon. Outside sweating gourds
Dripping rind and peel; yet inside cool as lemon,
Orange, avocado pear.
While in this damp and stony stare of a village
Such images are unknown:
So would I think upon these things,
In the event that someday I shall return to my native surf
And feel again the urgency of soil.
And then on these same journeys almost as soon as the ship had dropped anchor off
the Cape Verde Islands, Las Palmas, Madeira, a great sweep of hundreds of boats frail
as matchsticks, overloaded with lace trinkets and shawls, and up these men would scramble
and without pause for the eye to rest, in a flash the long stretch of the main decks
were transformed into gorgeous bargaining bazaars. The gulls screaming and gliding
overhead the farewells. Here then is the ‘Seagull’ poem:
Seagulls’ easy glide
Drifting fearlessly as voyagers’ tears:
Quay and ship move as imperceptively,
Without knowing we weep.
Cry gulls who recall
An ocean of uncertainty;
Greed of rowing men
Mere flies at the ship’s sides.
Last bargains roped and reached:
And as imperceptively regretted,
Tears of fury and stupidity
Reel down the runnels of those cheeks.
And then after a long interval, as I drew upon the rich store which this lovely country
had given me, I wondered if I might not write a long ballad, an autobiography of my
early childhood. Then I again rebelled. There were too many books, poems, etc. of
childhood memories. I resolved then to write about a true [story] which had occurred
on the pampas, in
surroundings
which I knew. Mr Cadvan Hughes had sent me many letters about [an] expedition his
father-in-law had made into Indian territory. And as this had been conveyed to him
personally, while Mr Evans was living, I choose this theme. And so the Ballad of ‘El
Dorado’ was born. In it of course I used many of my own memories, as a background,
or reconstruction of the event. For instance, a habit we have on the pampas when out
riding of continually tightening or loosening up the
cincha
, the belt which holds down the sheepskin, the leather stirrups, the hooded ones that
I had seen and the looped leather stirrups which I had used. The quality of the
thistles which they used for fuel and making rennet, their hollowness and crack, seeing
iguanas as they flashed past from before the horses’ hoofs, the legends, the racoon
that I found on my dressing table, and who later was found curled up in sleep in my
bed, the nutrias in hundreds, and flight, colour and song of the myriad birds, these
I wanted to recreate. And so from the journey out of four companions, the Indian massacre
of three and
solitary
return of Evans to his Patagonian soil, there remained for his comfort the pampa
lullaby, one that the great naturalist W.H. Hudson quotes as being two centuries old.
The same lullaby which my mother in Mechita sang to me and is recorded here at the
end of this ballad, which was
broadcast
in the early months of this year, and from which I will only read a few stanzas of
the setting out, and a few stanzas of the return of Evans alone: