Frenetic bluebottles saw the air.
Blackberries scratch with poison.
Love is taken before knowing the mistake.
The last thief grins
At the look of life.
There are many, so who cares?
The trap is a loaded crossbow,
Ratchet-pulley sinewed back
From birth and set in wait.
None walk upright from the bolt’s release.
LEFT HANDED
The left hand guards my life.
I use. It uses. Sinister
Alliances shape plans.
Left hand is fed by the heart
Strategically engined
Between brain and fingers,
Sometimes filtering intelligence.
The left eye is in line with hand
And pen. The left lung
Rotted when I tried the right:
Lesson one was spitting blood.
Vulnerable left side lives in harmony
And liberates the rules,
Rides monsters who fear to eat themselves,
So do not bite.
NEW MOON
Since men have waved flags on her
Classified geology with peacock colours
Sent cameras probing every angle
The moon has turned lesbian;
Shows brighter now in her woman hunger
Goes with purpose to her lover
In the Milky Way, nothing more from earth
Yet better by far than shining palely
A mirror for courtiers to gawp at –
And that stricken poet who ached
In her unrequiting love but now is free.
OPHELIA
When Ophelia lay a finger on the water
The cold and shallow brook scorched flesh.
She pulled it back.
The fire was love.
She was forget-me-not’s daughter,
Each eye a pond of flowers.
She climbed the arching cliff
Where water sent its clouds of salt,
Luminous across the sun.
The nunnery was found:
No one saw her body spin.
A lunar sea-change sent it cleanly in.
ALIOTH THE BIGOT
A bigot walks fast.
Get out of the way
Or walk faster.
He walked faster too
Veered right
To evade me.
I increased my rate
Hinging left to avoid
The fire in his eyes.
Collisionable material
Should not promenade
On the same street.
We muttered sorry
Then went on
More speedily than ever.
CHANGING COURSE
Down the slope to the horizon
Fix the black-dot sun before departure.
When the day sets at the storm’s end
Far along the moonbeams that flow in,
Shut the barometer, hang the watch away
Lay the sextant in its box.
How deep the valley which enclosed
The lifeboat washed against the shore.
The heart says goodnight at dawn,
And hopes the dark is best
Which fears the day to come.
ON FIRST SEEING JERUSALEM
The way to knowing is to know
How useless to talk of hills and colours
Looking at Jerusalem.
To know is to keep silent
Yet in silence
One no longer knows;
Can never unknow what was known
Or let silence slaughter reason.
One knows, and always knows
Unable to believe silence
A better way of knowing.
One sees Jerusalem, knows
Yet does not, comes to life
And knows that walls outlast whoever watches.
The Temple was destroyed: one knows for sure.
One joins the multitude and grieves.
Knows it from within.
One does not know. Let me see you
Everyday as if for the first time
Then I’ll know more:
Which already has been said
By wanderers who, coming home,
Regret the loss of that first vision.
The dust that knew it once is mute.
Stones that know stay warm and silent.
From pale dry hills I watch Jerusalem,
Make silence with the stones:
An ever-new arrival.
NAILS
Tel Aviv is built on sand:
Sand spills from a broken paving stone
And sandals cannot tread it back;
Waves beat threateningly
A sea to flow through traffic
Climb hills and wash Jerusalem.
Feasts on oranges and people,
Envying their safety;
And their rock through which
Six million nails were hammered
As deep as the world’s middle,
And the sky that no floodtide can reach.
LEARNING HEBREW
With coloured pens and pencils
And a child’s alphabet book
I laboriously draw
Each Hebrew letter
Right to left
And hook to foot,
Lamed narrow at the top,
The steel pen deftly thickening
As it descends
And turns three bends
Into a black cascade of hair,
Halting at the vowel-stone
To one more letter.
Script comes up like music
Blessing life
The first blue of the sea
The season’s ripe fruit
And the act of eating bread:
Each sign hewn out of rock
By hands deserving God as well as Beauty.
I’m slow to learn
Cloud-tail shapes and whale-heads
Arks and ships in black, pure black
The black of the enormous sky
From behind a wall of rock:
With their surety of law
Such shapes make me illiterate
And pain the heart
As if a boulder bigger than the earth
Would crush me:
Struck blind I go on drawing
To enlighten darkness.
Such help I need:
Lost in this slow writing,
Clutch at a letter like a walking-stick
Go into the cavern-mouth
And sleep by phosphorescent letters
Dreaming between aleph or tav
Beginning and end
Or the lit-up middle.
Dreams thin away:
In day the hand writes
Hebrew letters cut in my rock
Painted by a child on the page,
For they are me and I am them
But can’t know which.
SYNAGOGUE IN PRAGUE
Killers said
Before they used their slide-rules
‘Death is the way to Freedom’:
Seventy-seven thousand names
Carved on these great walls
Are a gaol Death cannot open.
Eyes close in awe and sorrow
As if that name was my mother
That boy starved to death my son
Those men gassed my brothers
Or striving cousins.
It might have been me and if it was
I spend a day searching the words
For my name.
I’d be glad it was not me
If the dead could see sky again,
Reach that far-off river and swim in it.
What can one say
When shouting rots the brain?
The dead god hanging in churches
Was not allowed to hear
Of work calling for revenge
To ease the pain of having let it happen
And stop it being planned again.
Letters calling for revenge on such a wall
Would vandalize that encyphered synagogue,
And seventy-seven thousand
Stonily indented names
Would still show through.
Vengeance is Jehovah’s own;
To prove He’s not abandoned us
He gave the gift of memory,
The fruit of all trees
In the Land of Israel.
ISRAEL
Israel is light and mountains
Bedrock and river
Sand-dunes and gardens,
Earth so enriched
It can be seen from
The middle of the sun.
Without Israel
Would be
The pain
Of God struck from the universe
And the soul falling
Endlessly through night.
Israel
Guards the Sabbath-candle of the world
A storm-light marking
Job’s Inn – open to all –
An ark without lifeboats
On land’s vast ocean.
ON AN OLD FRIEND REACHING JERUSALEM
No one may ask what I am doing here:
Olive-leaves one side glisten tin
The other is opaque like my dulled hair.
I travelled far. I walked. I ate
The train’s black smoke,
Choked on Europe’s bitter sin.
When forests grew from falling ash
I gleaned the broken letters of my alphabet
And sucked them back to life for bread.
Christian roofs were painted red
And four horizons closed their doors.
Pulled apart by Europe’s sky
My soul is polished by Jerusalem
Where I fall fearlessly in love
Ashen by the Western Wall,
And through my tears no one dare ask
What I am doing here.
FESTIVAL
The moon came up over Jerusalem
Blood-red
An hour later it was white
Bled to death.
The breath of memory revives
On the Fifteenth Day of Ab.
The spirit and the flesh
Don’t clash when men and women
Walk in orange groves
To reinvigorate the moon.
God knew the left hand
And the right
When Lot chose
The Plain of Ha-Yarden
And Abram – Canaan.
An excruciating noise of car brakes
Comes from the Valley of Hinnom.
Jerusalem is ours.
YAM KINNERET (THE SEA OF GALILEE)
Galilee is a lake of reasonable size,
Unless immensity is measured down
In dreams, in darkness.
Then it becomes an ocean.
Distant sails are birds trapped
On the unreflecting surface,
As if savage fish below
Pull at their wings.
With casual intensity
And such immensity
Are new dreams made from old.
EZEKIEL
On the fifth day
In the fourth month
Of the thirtieth year
Among the captives by the river
A storm wind came out of the north.
Ezekiel the priest saw visions:
Saw Israel
Had four faces
Four wings
Four faces:
The face of a man
The face of a lion
The face of an ox
The face of an eagle.
That was the vision of Ezekiel.
THE ROCK
Moses drew water from a cliff.
I set my cup
Till it was filled.
Water saved me, and I drank,
Reflecting on
The shape of flame
Of how a fire needs
Putting down
By swords of water.
IN ISRAEL, DRIVING TO THE DEAD SEA
I drive a car. Cars don’t
Figure much in poems.
Poets do not like them,
Which is strange to me.
Poets do not make cars
Never have, not
One nut or bit of Plexiglass
Passes through their fingers.
No reason why they should.
To make a bolt or screw
Is not poetic. To fit a window:
Is that necessary?
Likewise an engine
Makes a noise. It smells,
And runs you off too fast.
What’s more you have to sit
As fixed at work as that
Engine-slave who made it.
Nevertheless I drive a car
With pleasure. It makes my life poetic
I float along and tame
The road against all laws
Of nature. I stay alive.
Who says a poet shouldn’t drive
On a highway which descends so low
Yet climbs so high
From Jerusalem to Jericho?
EIN GEDI
(After Shirley Kaufman’s essay: ‘The Poet and Place’)
When David went from Jerusalem
The itch of death was in the air.
The salt sea bloomed.
King Saul bit himself and followed.
The cave had no windows to steam and view.
David’s gloom was David’s soul, and hid him.
Whether to go or stay became
A cloak that fitted when he went.
After the mournful grackle’s note
Saul came searching for the kill
But never felt the sword that cut his cloak.
Darkness is our place.
The cave gave David birth:
Memory was born, and all his songs.
EVE
In Israel I looked out of the window
And saw Eve.
Her hair was so black
I called her Midnight
But no answer came.
Her eyes were amber
Jewels made at midday
When she looked at me.
She crossed Gehenna
In her sandals.
My daylight wanted her,
A few-minute love-affair
Lasted forever,
As she entered her City.
from Tides and Stone Walls, 1986
RECEDING TIDE
The tide is fickle.
After going out it comes back.
The moon sees to that.
It’s what the tide reveals
When it huffs and leaves
That means so much,
And what the tide covers
On nibbling back
That opens our eyes:
Archipelagos left unexplored
And rivers unsurveyed:
But before the meaning’s known
The regimental rush of waves
Is preceded by
The brutal skirmishing of dreams.
BRICKS
Bricks build walls
They erect homes
Both rise up
Men make them out of earth and clay.
Water tightens them
Ovens bake them to withstand
Bullets and dour weather.
Rectilinear and hard
Red or blue
Porous or solid
Beautifully stacked:
They invite the mason’s hand
To choose.
Bombs are the enemy of bricks:
Stroke them tenderly,
And share their warmth.
LANDSCAPE – SENNEN, CORNWALL
How many died when the height was taken?
&nbs
p; Upslope the armoured horses went:
Old refurbished iron-men
Zig-zagging from rocks,
And knights already fallen.
The cunning defenders
Jabbed soft underbellies,
Brought riders down
On gleaming daggers.
Victors mourned
As the defeated King rode
Into rain beyond the hill.
Blood makes history,
And desolation
A winter’s day.
BOARDED-UP WINDOW
If I rip these planks back
Will I see
Something new, or out of nature?
Years ago I put them on
Felt glee in my fist
As I swung the hammer
And saw each nail
Biting into seasoned wood.
I didn’t know what I boarded up:
Sunlight on the beach
Pebbles in my palms
Grass in my teeth –
An upturned rowing boat.
Thumb and forefinger held the nail.
I laughed at something new
Or out of nature.
They paid me – though not too well.
If I have the strength (or tools)
To lever off those planks
My soul will dazzle me with grief,
And out of my own nature blind me
With what I boarded up.
DERELICT BATHING CABINS AT SEAFORD
Well, they would, wouldn’t they?
They’d say anything.
Doris and Betty got undressed.
Bob and Fred did the same next door.
The things that went on in these changing huts.
Well, with the War over, what could you expect?
They came back like new men.
Well, they came back.
They came, anyway.
Sometimes it was you and my Fred.
Then it might be me and your Bob.
It was nice with us, though, wasn’t it?
Nothing but a clean bit of fun.
Sad they went in a year of each other –
The dirty devils!
Nothing but a clean bit of fun,
When we changed into our costumes,
The sea washed it off, though, didn’t it?
We had some good swims as well.
And now look how they’ve smashed ’em up.
Poor old bathing huts.
Never be the same again.
The sea chucked all them pebbles in.
Don’t suppose it liked the goings-on.
Then the vandals ripped the doors off.
They didn’t like it, either.
Old times never come back,