Title Page
Laurie Lee
Selected Poems
Publisher Information
First published in 2014 by
Unicorn Press Ltd
66 Charlotte Street
London
W1T 4QE
www.unicornpress.org
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright in text © The Laurie Lee Estate.
www.laurielee.org
Cover artwork reproduced with kind permission by Jessy Lee.
All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright holder and the above publisher of this book.
Designed by Felicity Price-Smith
Dedication
To Jessy
Note
Most of these verses were originally published in three separate volumes - spanning perhaps a decade or so - and for this selection I have cut them down by about half.
They were written by someone I once was and who is so distant to me now that I scarcely recognise him anymore. They speak for a time and a feeling which of course has gone from me, but for which I still have close affection and kinship.
L.L.
Invasion Summer
The evening, the heather,
the unsecretive cuckoo
and butterflies in their disorder,
not a word of war as we lie
our mouths in a hot nest
and the flowers advancing.
Does a hill defend itself,
does a river run to earth
to hide its quaint neutrality?
A boy is shot with England in his brain,
but she lies brazen yet beneath the sun,
she has no honour and she has no fear.
A Moment of War
It is night like a red rag
drawn across the eyes
the flesh is bitterly pinned
to desperate vigilance
the blood is stuttering with fear.
O praise the security of worms
in cool crumbs of soil
flatter the hidden sap
and the lost unfertilized spawn of fish!
The hands melt with weakness
into the gun’s hot iron
the body melts with pity
the face is braced for wounds
the odour and the kiss of final pain.
O envy the peace of women
giving birth and love like toys
into the hands of men!
The mouth chatters with pale curses
the bowels struggle like a nest of rats
the feet wish they were grass
spaced quietly.
O Christ and Mother!
But darkness opens like a knife for you
and you are marked down by your pulsing brain
and isolated
and your breathing,
your breathing is the blast, the bullet,
and the final sky.
Spanish frontier, 1937
Words Asleep
Now I am still and spent
and lie in a whited sepulchre
breathing dead
but there will be
no lifting of the damp swathes
no return of blood
no rolling away the stone
till the cocks carve sharp
gold scars in the morning
and carry the stirring sun
and early dust to my ears.
Andalucía
Music in a Spanish Town
In the street I take my stand
with my fiddle like a gun against my shoulder,
and the hot strings under my trigger hand
shooting an old dance at the evening walls.
Each saltwhite house is a numbered tomb
each silent window crossed with blood;
my notes explode everywhere like bombs
when I should whisper in fear of the dead.
So my fingers falter, and run in the sun
like the limbs of a bird that is slain,
as my music searches the street in vain.
Suddenly there is a quick flutter of feet
and children crowd about me,
listening with sores and infected ears,
watching with lovely eyes and vacant lips.
Cordoba, 1936
Juniper
Juniper holds to the moon
a girl adoring a bracelet;
as the hills draw up their knees
they throw off their jasmine girdles.
You are a forest of game,
a thought of nights in procession,
you tread through the bitter fires
of the nasturtium.
I decorate you to a smell of apples,
I divide you among the voices
of owls and cavaliering cocks
and woodpigeons monotonously dry.
I hang lanterns on your mouth
and candles from your passionate crucifix,
and bloody leaves of the virginia
drip with their scarlet oil.
There is a pike in the lake
whose blue teeth eat the midnight stars
piercing the water’s velvet skin
and puncturing your sleep.
I am the pike in your breast,
my eyes of clay revolve the waves
while cirrus roots and lilies grow
between our banks of steep embraces.
At Night
I think at night my hands are mad,
for they follow the irritant texture of darkness
continually carving the sad leaf of your mouth
in the thick black bark of sleep.
And my finger-joints are quick with insanity,
springing with lost amazement
through a vast waste of dreams
and forming frames of desire
around the thought of your eyes.
By day, the print of your body
is like a stroke of sun on my hands,
and the choir of your blood
goes chanting incessantly
through the echoing channels of my wrists.
But I am lost in my hut
when the stars are out,
for my palms have a catlike faculty of sight,
and the surface of every minute
is a swinging image of you.
Landscape
The season does not leave your limbs,
like a covered field you lie,
and remembering the exultant plough
your sheltered bosom stirs
and whispers warm with rain.
Waiting does not leave your eyes,
your belly is as bright as snow
and there your naked fingers
are spread over the dark flowers
shaking out their roots.
My kiss has not yet left your blood
but slumbers in a stream
within your quie
t caves:
listening to the sun it will cry forth,
and burst with leaves, and blossom with a name.
The Armoured Valley
Across the armoured valley trenched with light,
cuckoos pump forth their salvoes at the lark,
and blackbirds loud with nervous song and flight
shudder beneath the hawk’s reconnaissance:
Spring is upon us, and our hopes are dark.
For as the petal and the painted cheek
issue their tactless beauties to the hour,
we must ignore the budding sun and seek
to camouflage compassion and ourselves
against the wretched icicles of war.
No festival of love will turn our bones
to flutes of frolic in this month of May,
but tools of hate shall make them into guns
and bore them for the piercing bullet’s shout
and through their pipes drain all our blood away.
Yet though by sullen violence we are torn
from violet couches as the air grows sweet,
and by the brutal bugles of retreat
recalled to snows of death, yet Spring, repeat
your annual attack, pour through the breach
of some new heart your future victories.
Larch Tree
Oh, larch tree with scarlet berries
sharpen the morning slender sun
sharpen the thin taste of September
with your aroma of sweet wax and powder delicate.
Fruit is falling in the valley
breaking on the snouts of foxes
where children bury the shattered bird.
Fruit is falling in the city
blowing a woman’s eyes and fingers
across the street among the bones
of boys who could not speak their love.
I watch a starling cut the sky
a dagger through the blood of cold,
and grasses bound by strings of wind
stockade the sobbing fruit among the bees.
Oh, larch tree, with icy hair
your needles thread the thoughts of snow,
while in the fields a shivering girl
takes to her breasts the sad ripe apples.
The Three Winds
The hard blue winds of March
shake the young sheep
and flake the long stone walls;
now from the gusty grass
comes the homed music of rams,
and plovers fall out of the sky
filling their wings with snow.
Tired of this northern tune
the winds turn soft
blowing white butterflies
out of the dog-rose hedges,
and schoolroom songs are full
of boys’ green cuckoos
piping the summer round
Till August sends at last
its brick-red breath
over the baking wheat and blistered poppy,
brushing with feathered hands
the skies of brass,
with dreams of river moss
my thirst’s delirium.
Interval
All day the purple battle of love
as scented mouths position
soft fields of contesting langour
or jealous peaks of suspicion.
All day the trumpeting of fingers,
the endless march of desire
across the continent of an eyelid
or the desert of a hair.
How long we roam these territories
trailing our twin successes,
till the bending sun collapses
and I escape your kisses.
Then I drink the night like a coconut
and earth regains its shape;
at last the eunuch’s neutral dream
and the beardless touch of sleep.
Equinox
Now tilts the sun his monument,
now sags his raw unwritten stone
deep in October’s diamond clay.
And oozy sloes like flies are hung
malignant on the shrivelled stem,
too late to ripen, or to grow
Now is the time the wasp forsakes
the rose born like a weakly child
of earth-bed’s pallor, death-bed’s flush.
Time when the gourd upon the ground
cracks open kernel or decay
indifferent to man or worm.
Time of no violence, when at last
the shocked eye clears the battlefield
and burns down black the roots of grass.
And finds the prize of all its pain,
bedded in smoke, on leaves of blood -
love’s charcoal cross, unlost, unwon.
Milkmaid
The girl’s far treble, muted to the heat,
calls like a fainting bird across the fields
to where her flock lies panting for her voice,
their black horns buried deep in marigolds.
They climbed awake, like drowsy butterflies,
and press their red flanks through the tall branched grass,
and as they go their wandering tongues embrace
the vacant summer mirrored in their eyes.
Led to the limestone shadows of a barn
they snuff their past embalmèd in the hay,
while her cool hand, cupped to the udder’s fount,
distils the brimming harvest of their day.
Look what a cloudy cream the earth gives out,
fat juice of buttercups and meadow-rye;
the girl dreams milk within her body’s field
and hears, far off, her muted children cry.
Village of Winter Carols
Village of winter carols
and gawdy spinning tops,
of green-handed walnuts
and games in the moon.
the flag of fear I flew
riding black stallions
through the rocky streets.
You were the first faint map
of the mysterious sun,
chart of my island flesh
and the mushroom-tasting kiss.
But no longer do I join
your children’s sharp banditti,
nor seek the glamour of
your ravished apples.
Your hillocks build no more
their whales and pyramids,
nor howl across the night
their springing wolves.
For crouching in my brain
the crafty thigh of love
twists your old landscape
with a new device.
and every field has grown
a strange and flowering pit
where I must try the blind
and final trick of youth.
Guadalquivir
Here on this desert plain
the fields are dust,
strangled by wind,
burnt by the quicklime sun.
But where the river’s tongue
scoops out its channel deep
across the iron land
trees grow, and leaves
of vivid green
force back the baking air.
Fish and small birds
do strike with diamond mouths
&n
bsp; the windows of the water,
while memories of song
and flowers flow
along the slender cables
of the mud.
So to the wires of love
do my limbs leap,
so does your finger draw
across my arid breast
torrents of melting snow
on threads of seed.
The Wild Trees
O the wild trees of my home,
forests of blue dividing the pink moon,
the iron blue of those ancient branches
with their berries of vermilion stars.
In that place of steep meadows
the stacked sheaves are roasting,
and the sun-torn tulips
are tinders of scented ashes.
But here I have lost
the dialect of your hills,
my tongue has gone blind
far from their limestone roots.
Through trunks of black elder
runs a fox like a lantern,
and the hot grasses sing
with the slumber of larks.
But here there are thickets
of many different gestures,
torn branches of brick and steel
frozen against the sky.
O the wild trees of home
with their sounding dresses,
locks powdered with butterflies
and cheeks of blue moss.
I want to see you rise
from my brain’s dry river,
I want your lips of wet roses
laid over my eyes.
O fountains of earth and rock,
gardens perfumed with cucumber,
home of secret valleys
where the wild trees grow.
Let me return at last
to your fertile wilderness
to sleep with the coiled fernleaves
in your heart’s live stone.
Christmas Landscape
Tonight the wind gnaws
with teeth of glass,
the jackdaw shivers
in caged branches of iron,
the stars have talons.