The Collected Poems of Edward M Robertson - Volume II Read online

  where, frozen, found no longer

  flowing in liquid life,

  it lies rock-hard,

  free once,

  but now death bound.

  The hill has become the year's tombstone

  and on it bronze bracken

  and russet marsh grass

  write its epitaph.

  AUTUMN  DUSK

  Half-sights and half-sounds,

  slight smells - apples and damp ground,

  leaves lapsing into rich humus;

  interweaving counter-point of curlew calls,

  owl deep-hollowing out of billowing trees;

  bat-wings flailing ripe night air,

  winnowing rich grain of insects;

  robins halting-the-heart

  stippling on hedge and bush

  bright points of sound;

  chestnut trees turning to golden fountains

  and spiked green hail;

  geans and rowans differently burning

  to reds and glowing purple;

  shapes of hills and great trees by-the-river

  merging, water and land flowing

  into darkness half-seen, half-heard

  drawing and moulding me

  to a new half-knowing.

  NOVEMBER GALE

  Go out into a gale-lashed day;

  let the wind blow through your mind,

  and toss your wild thoughts far away

  over tumbling hills.

  Take your ragged images that

  whip-clap and clash,

  caught in the branches of the trees wind-slashing

  and let them there go flying free.

  Let loose on seagull-wings your wishes

  and the gale toss to sky-height

  your dreams'

  Where the high eagle threads

  the eye of the needle of daylight.

  And where the sun sheds sky-lark song,

  silver, shimmering and bright.

  Then let your mind descend,

  wind-wide over the

  opening landscape,

  fresh with the wonder of

  new sight.

  WINTER ROBIN

  Even the bird - song was brittle

  in the frosty air,

  a robin's singing found thin ice

  over the wintered garden,

  not claiming territory

  but affirming it was alive,

  would live,

  its territory the warm mystery of life

  impenetrable to the cold clarity

  of frozen death.

  Beyond the logical analyses of frost,

  beyond the notes of song, plotted

  on the computer-screen of a Winter sky,

  the frail bird's life, flame frosted,

  drove back December's harsh reductionism

  FROST

  Here on the hillside

  the raiding clans of frost

  retreat,

  while on the flat strath

  blue mist hangs about

  the farms like smoke

  from winter's icicles of fire.

  But at the valley's end

  broad mountains billow

  in pink tinted clouds of snow

  downing into soft legends

  the cruel realities

  of winter feuding.

  MID-WINTER

  Mid-winter comes -

  driven on by packs of wind

  rampaging in defenceless hills

  where all the black-sheep pine trees

  tightly penned, rush, heave in panic;

  where the still pool

  of hill lochs

  beaten brown becomes sheep held,

  swirling and leaping round

  into a water of dark wool.

  Mid-winter comes -

  swept on by rivers,

  building a muscled-mass from

  sinew streams,

  thrusting aside thin eyesight,

  beating the solid piers

  of the bridge into

  fierce opposition,

  until their counter-thrust

  makes stone seem light

  and it must skim the water and become

  a Catamaran rushing upstream

  and out of sight.

  Mid-winter comes -

  the moon's sharp sickle

  scythes the short daylight down,

  scattering stars

  like grains of light,

  spilled from its meagre harvest;

  sprinkles the fields of sky ploughed

  into darkness - soil of night -

  fields yet more cold than dark,

  more felt in the eyes

  than simply now seen through them,

  more shattered ice than bars

  of cloud.

  WINTER WINDS

  The bitter winds that hold us prisoner

  in our car, cannot deny us the freedom

  of eyesight.  From up here on the rising

  edge of the Sidlaw Hills our gaze

  wanders at will over the

  brown-green quilted strath.  Snow

  dapples the tops of dark distant mountains

  like foam cresting gigantic waves.

  While nearer at hand tiny houses

  huddle in small grey towns.

  Look here!  beside us, above the roadside verge

  a fluttering kestrel hangs, wings

  scarcely moving.  It seems in this

  storm-tossed sea of wind,

  to inhabit some island of stillness

  that moves untroubled with it,

  or to sail a small boat that drifts

  only to anchor again fast above

  some tussock of quivering grass.

  WINTER

  Light, like thin cold soup, is

  ladled out into the

  beggar's bowl of the frosted valley,

  while hills, permanent as the poor,

  draw clouds in tatters

  round stark limbs.

  The misery of winter

  digs deep into this place.

  Brewing tea to bring cheer

  to my shivering flesh

  I look out of the kitchen window

  and feel the garden's grim greyness

  freeze my eyes;

  when, suddenly - like laughter

  in a prison camp -

  a blackbird's song gospels the day.

  Tentative, half-remembered phrases

  question the finality of dawn's chill prophecy

  of death.

  The singing notes climb

  numb-fingered up

  sheer cliffs of frozen air,

  reaching at last a peak,

  a point of credal affirmation

  of a baptismal winter-death

  and spring rising.

  WINTER DAWN

  Briefly the Winter dawn glows

  and dies down into dull grey.

  Etched on the sky an urgent arrow

  of geese divides the still, steely air.

  Against the drooping belly of the clouds

  the tall stark trees stretch out

  dark veins, and now the wind

  uncoils and whips away

  all hope of warmth,

  and certainty of life prolonged.

  Coldness intense as hatred

  repels the right to live.

  How can the midget mouse

  the miniature wren,

  scuttling amongst the wreckage

  of the hedge hope

  to keep death at bay?

  (“Yet Winter's hate must at last give way to Spring's life-giving love, and love lasts to eternity”.  Anon - quoted by Sheila Cassidy in "Good Friday People")

  CHILDREN SLEDGING

  The sunshine of those dull days

  was the laughter of children playing

  in a world, snow covered, of white delight

  transformed from green braes,

  where slithered and sped bright


  plastic sledges bundled with excitement.

  And their laughter was a sparkling torrent

  flowing freely in a world imprisoned in ice;

  glittering and gleaming natural joy

  unlocked an inner door,

  stirred the dull adult mind

  with a wonder that lightens our darkness

  when a child plays.

  THE  KEILLS

  (A rugged promontory in Knapdale, Argyll)

  "As we die of a disease, so we live of love, hidden within us."

  (La Soif - Gabriel Marcel)

  Here, where I stand on the land's thrust of the Keills,

  the rock-rent ground, the sea-thrashed shore about me,

  the wind, thundering in my ears, hurtles from Jura,

  across the battering Sound.

  I look at Jura's mountains - massed menace wrenched from

  patient miles of moorland;

  everything about me is glory and torment,

  its contradiction thrust through my being

  with this wind's fierce, final questioning.

  The rocks (not flat, slab-heavy masses) rise

  round me, a thousand spires

  pulling against their weight,

  reminding me of the small chapel behind me -

  stones, useless now, except for memory to penetrate

  time, to recreate in thought a living community of worship,

  a meeting of men,

  there gathered to face full-force the wind out of

  the contradiction of their own flesh and spirit,

  on that stone slab where was concentred

  all the encircling contradiction of this place.

  What mad metaphysical system

  bodied their belief?

  What superstition-sodden faith

  drenched their prayers?

  What cruel charity

  of righteousness and the damned

  bent their self-will to care and respect

  for each other?

  No matter.  They held out words

  to give their being in return

  for Being received.

  There on the black menace of Jura

  a light, a speck - no more - flickers

  and stares, as clouds clear sun from water.

  It is in me,

  that light that flickers

  and yet steadily stares in silence.

  Wind out of contradiction cannot extinguish its glare.

  For this small flickering light

  stills the wind's thunder, melts mountains,

  solidifies the sea

  into peacefulness.

  This light takes all gleams, glances, dances,

  flickering and bright glories,

  and binds them in me into

  one beam of brightness.

  This light unwinds the tangle of light and darkness,

  the wavering warfare of joy and pain,

  and says, "I stand, not I, but love stands in me.

  All is love-living, whether unfolding in peace or

  tortured by suffering.

  Love in me is an openness, light-leaping

  yet still,

  joy-feeling, yet not holding.

  Out of the contradiction of rock and sea,

  flesh and spirit, suffering and celebration -

  out of it all - light, love in me is

  reflecting the Being of Light and Love

  who made this place."

  HILL-TOP

  When man first separated himself from the animal

  by the height of a hill,

  pulled out of the gravitation of instinct,

  and by his first flickering intelligence,

  made the unwelcoming wind

  his neighbour;

  took rocks and built on the hill

  his own hill

  set higher still against

  the cruel tongue of the gale -

  scandalmongering, harsh tale-telling to the whole

  open heavens his weak shivering nakedness -

  shut up her mouth with

  the ragged dyke of his first hill-dwelling;

  then the amazement in the chill first morning sight

  of his separateness of hill-height

  echoed down his labyrinthine mind,

  setting him level with the sun rising

  equal,

  as his mind dawned with re-echoing

  life-and-death power to match

  the sun's flower of flame.

  And in its dying a wonder

  projected him to the first space-exploration

  of sight,

  throwing his eye-open feeling

  wildly reeling about the

  shatter of scattered stars,

  in awakening ecstasy, as he welcomed night by growing  night

  the still glowing glory of

  pregnant moon,

  who in time from her full womb

  gave birth to his worship and dread delight.

  Out of the animal jungle,

  against the grain of himself,

  he climbed,

  to make rock and mind,

  heaving giddy height and imagination

  his element.

  By these hills he raised himself

  to stand above himself,

  become more than he was,

  set his mind madly mountaineering

  on visions and dreams,

  made this wild place

  the discovery of a human wildness;

  mountain-leaping, stretched out

  wings of longing,

  and became eagle minded,

  soared and plunged,

  loved and despaired as never

  in the blind earth-bound jungle.

  To-day I come to this place

  of heaving, harsh, unsympathetic rock,

  of tormenting rejection of wind,

  to set the human jungle

  of town-and-earth-bound people

  at a distance -

  to be a person,

  to become in the wind's frantic action,

  still -

  to be, by the height of a hill,

  myself,

  separate, alone, human -

  and, by the soaring sweep of sight, to

  waken again the height and depth

  of longing,

  of love and despair, to dare

  the eagle wings of

  dread and delight.

  THE  BLESSING

  Not the thrusting, eager cry of geese

  striving to rise or arrowed

  against the wind, but,

  from behind the great pine tree,

  a mellow, murmuring music of swans

  flying in line, low,

  wide-winged and slow, with

  flowing, round sound,

  calling, thirteen in number;

  passing overhead, yet not passing

  but blessing, and white-clad too

  as the newly baptised, washed white

  by the obedient blood of the man,

  answering love's invitation

  to death.  All this at that point

  where the ground-bound desolation

  of prayer, sharing the will-bending

  weight of others' pain and frustration,

  and the impossible burden

  of uncertainty;  at that point,

  when at last prayer too rose

  in flight, winged with the spirit,

  uplifted by the crucified affirmation,

  there the swans flew straight,

  like a saint's will joyfully

  answering God's call;

  and my heart was touched by

  the feather floating breath

  of blessing, from thirteen white swans,

  answering God's call.

  SELF – QUESTIONING

  Why are you always mourning?

  Tears again at the touch of a word,

  A phrase, sight or sound.

 
What have you lost?

  Is it forever the dead mother

  Departing into the relentless assimilation

  Of the cold, pitiless ground?

  Loss it is; the impossibility

  Of recovering prisoners time has taken.

  But it is more - the sense of the possibility

  Of discovery, gaining more ground,

  If we could only risk the wave's torment,

  The fathomless deeps,

  Travel out from the shore.

  OLD  AGE

  “Christ turns all our sunsets into dawns”

  (Clement of Alexandria - 2nd Century)

  This they call 'The evening of life'

  implying there a mellowing,

  a sheltering, a relieving from the

  knife-thrust of competitive self-fulfilment,

  which is known as 'Getting On In The World'.

  Do they forget that evening is bright

  with burnishing clouds into gold,

  sword-thrust of dazzling beams of light

  sun-setting, glorious glowing red sky

  fulfilled, and that life, like light, may seem to die,

  but rises always beyond sight's limited horizon?

  THE  FORCE  WITHIN

  There is a wildness in my mind, confined

  behind the bars of rigid duty which define

  the practical precincts of each day.  Only the wind

  is free to come and go where he must live,

  and stars shed silver sparkling tears

  into the deep pools of his eyes

  where, as he lies,

  he looks with longing

  at the freedom of the skies.

  From time to time his restless tread

  thuds like a heart-beat in my head;

  his shadow ripples over the bars,

  and sighs like birds fly to the stars.

  Sometimes I wonder if he is there.

  Then, with the breeze, his nostrils stir

  and waking, he leaps against his cage

  until the wildness of my rage

  surprises me.

  Or, when the sun draws ecstasy of life around,

  a sudden longing for the hills

  startles me, stretching against the iron bound

  necessity of duty.

  I lie awake at night and ask myself

  if I took strength, crumbled the bars, let him go free

  would he, insane with lust,

  imprison himself in my destruction or

  would he, with a wild leap of love,

  take me his prey -

  and set me free?

  RUBERSLAW

  Centuries of experience have wrinkled

  your rock-skulled face.

  A dignity lies deep in your

  millennial age and,

  in the slowness of your year's change,

  a gradual grace.

  The growing tree is, to you,

  a leap of life,

  over as quickly as foot returns

  to the ground.

  Flowers flicker a moment,

  smile at the corner of your mouth.

  Yet everything about you possesses its

  own unborrowed place.

  Slowly you gather all growing and dying

  to your decay

  as time, which you seem to hold timeless,

  must have its way,

  and you too pass as the swift shadow-clouds