BUKOVINA

 

My poem 'Bukovina' won the HWC Members' Award in the Newcastle Poetry Prize last night

BUKOVINA

 

a little star still falling

even as we speak

 

 

 

night train to Vatra Dornei

 

so much of it is village dimly

coup upon coup

cropping through flat lands

 

hear only the speech of steel wheels

track clatter and rattle, all to the north

 

towers of old smoke until the mountains come

 

passing away like a country, the night

the place that was before 

 

in through an open window, it is a headlong thing

 

the Romans laid these Dacia lines

this must be the thousand year train

 

undoze for first light

that’s how long we’ve been

 

fine cloud, coarse

barns to fill, hummocks ring  

 

peach, birch, pine

 

a mess of wires, cranes, river runs

all the industrial trackside leavings

 

and from some windows

clothes hung to freeze

 

churchyards full of the gone

old car wrecks cast to the sidings

 

the stolid station master with the flag

now all the flush tints come

 

mist yet here there too

 

the valley opening, opening

sometimes whole farms dance

 

the green all greener than the hill is high

 

fences and tracks leading where

 

tin tile timber roof

crosses all round

 

old walls and yellow wells

the road itself runs by

 

snow pockets the furthest view

 

 

I love a fence falling

 

gone off its way

 

left languish, nor by wire now touched

 

perhaps its others are taken for smoke

scratches of pencil on paper

 

perhaps sunk far in time                                   

 

just a post stood

where the rust once fell

 

sculpt first

some rings of a tree

for a while

 

can you call it such?

 

it’s for the ants to carry away

it’s for the worm

 

pure as rot

 

in the end

this map in the head is lost

 

and still such a place

will be somebody’s home

 

this too is a sort of soil

 

all that we touch

poem at Câmplung

 

even in the snow, our leavings

 

once fruit fell at our feet

 

an axe through the head of the forest

a cross saw, the body in half

 

that was us and is

 

the winecart comes

a moment’s joy

 

ladder – timber as clouds are

 

the lowing fields of dung

 

all our own work

 

he and he – all that was done

 

and she, like a shame indoors

ladling smoke, sadly gone

 

we make our iron tracks through the green

bare limbs, call ourselves winter

 

the house is a head

it won’t matter

how fast, how slow

 

who has sense would tremble

 

cuckoo

bit of a cuckoo high in the hills

 

just one note short of the koel

but this one invented the clock

 

we all repeat the childhood against us

 

we were never on time

how can we agree?

 

you can’t argue with the cuckoo

 

unlike the woodpecker

it vanishes without a sign

 

I wouldn’t call it singing, would you?

 

though, like your parents, it remains to scold

just a bit further off

a now-and-then hesitation perhaps, for emphasis

 

it won’t let up

not a pause in which to reply

 

you have the boots and the heart for this

you have to climb higher is all

 

 

 

they decided to dig up the whole town

 

someone must have been elected, appointed

had to have thought of it

 

roads and pavements, sewer mains, all the supplies

every street, the roads out of town

 

graveyards! the dead went free…

many of them joined in digging

 

no one could remember what they were looking for

there was a kind of stubbornness

characteristic, some might have said

 

hi-vis vests and ten o-clock shadows

they dig as they shout as they

have their own language for this

 

they dig in the shade, dig in the sun

 

how the machinery roars!

rusting down through generations

 

so that was how it went

 

when they finished with the town

they started digging up mountains

they had to take out the forest first

 

soon they will start on the sky

 

the bells are still ringing

 

the bells are ringing

they won’t ever stop

 

not everyone believes yet

not everyone attends

 

these are the bells were sent to save us

 

dogs go berserk, driven mad by

 

bells go on regardless

so loud! no one’s ever heard themselves think

 

a bird in the bell must be brief, no nesting

 

here’s a kind of universal tinnitus

heathens beware!

 

many have wished on them

or called a curse and hallowed be

 

some say it’s a Sunday thing

but the bells are everywhere

 

for sanctification, bells ring themselves silly

there can be no argument with bells

 

a kind of joy to bend the neck

to make obeisance

 

a king inclines to ring them too

 

all night the bells toll out, bats flee

vampires do their dark

 

bells drown all the singing

what muezzin could survive?

 

bells are tolling up crusade

bells ring for an auto da fé

and for thee

 

a wedding, a baptism, funeral, crowning

the destiny of dynasties

all these things are to unravel

the bells have spelled disgrace

 

even carillon

was never quite what you’d call a tune

 

bells are well before time, they are after

 

someone has to have been swinging from the rope

 

and like the cuckoo in the clock

they make the world machine

 

should they ever stop

and I know they won’t

those bells would still be in my ears

 

who forged them?

and who hung them where

all the town would have to hear?

 

these are things must not be asked

 

where is the well known dragonfly?

but fast asleep elsewhere

 

peasants on a train

 

go west

and past the rapeseed fields, fresh ploughed

 

have the smell of work that can’t be finished

 

there is this cloud of a hilltop passed

always the sun in the eyes

 

little smoke machines

out on the road

they go the other way

to a future

 

and these less-than-washed

tender they are for their own

 

they are building an extra storey on the old farmhouse

and maybe one higher after that

 

stork on the nest like a statue of height

it all depends on the neighbours

 

this Christ on the cross is theirs

 

 

 

untitled

 

just as dollars so a roof

so the shirt on my back

 

thus I put up a store

could call it antsworth

a squirreling

 

and lifework

all these little proofs against time

the tussle with urges

 

lay down in the sun and the snow

nothing there that bites but sleep

 

be eaten next spring

in the first thaw

fresh as the day you were born