David Myatt - Some Rejected Poems
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sliddell_3David Myatt - Some Rejected Poems
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sliddell_3DW Myatt: Some Rejected Poems
Editorial Note: In the Introduction to his published slim volume of poetry - One Exquisite Silence
(ISBN 978-1484179932), later republished under the title Relict (ISBN 978-1495448386) - David
Myatt wrote that:
"My poetry was composed between the years 1971-2012, and is of varying quality.
Having undertaken the onerous task of re-reading those poems that I still have
copies of, there are in my fallible view only around a dozen that I consider may
possibly be good enough to be read by others. This collection contains these few
poems, and most are autobiographical in nature."
I include here those of his rejected poems which in my view are indeed "good enough to be read
by others".
JR Wright
NYC
2014
Apple Blossom in May
There is a reality about Spring
When grass grows green with the sun:
Days lengthen bringing the warmth
That reassures and one is pleased
To run a hand where wind moves
And blossoms have been blown:
Every hour is unique
When rain stops.
In the town - three hills
And a valley to the left Music slithers from a shop
While people rush,
Gathering.
A drill strikes stone
Where youths gather
Sneering at people who pass.
There is a pleasure about Spring
When free grass grows in the sun,
A slowness when wind rushes tree:
Nearby
The curlew and lark
Where sun glints
Upon rain sodden earth:
How are you today, Mr Hughes?
Oh not so bad, you know Better for the sun.
Aye, will dry the ground
So we can seed.
Over the elds White clouds making faces
In the sun
(c.1983)
Hermit Tent
It is so cold ice has formed
In my boots while
Frost-bitten snow crunches
When you walk the short
Distance to water
Gathering ice in a pail
Ochre, the morning sun lies shrouded
By mist, casting no heat
As the birds do not cast
The imprint of their feet
Upon snow:
The rose cutting juts
Above white there
Where last week I buried
That car-killed cat and where a leaf
Unfurls in
Intimation of Spring
Over the tree, a crow
Calling:
Nothing answers
Awkwardly I amble through the cold
While ice forms on my face:
Slowly
A crake awakes
To life
(1975)
Was There Ever Such A Bliss As This
Here, sea, Skylark and such a breeze as rushes reeds
Where sandy beach meets
To meld with sky
And a tumbling cumuli of cloud
Briey cool our Sun.
I am no one, while ageing memory ows:
For was there ever such a bliss as this
While the short night lasted
And we touched kissed meshed ourselves together
To sweat, sweating, humid,
Fearing so many times to fully open our eyes
Lest it all really was
A dream
But Dawn arrived as it then arrived bringing with its light
Loose limbs and such a reminder
As would could should did
Make us late that day for work.
So, here: a tiredness of age
Brightened by such a June as this
When sandy beach meets
To meld with sky
And that tumbling cumuli of cloud
Briey cools a Sun
(2009)
One Moment, Moving
A slight breeze
To curl the waves, a little,
Where this now calmer Sea
Stretches
Below blue
And some annoying ies
Bite the hand that writes.
For it is warm
For end-September
Keeping Summer the way I keep
My loves, remembering:
Stretched and taut with such a slender lament
Connecting them to Life
As the fragile body hazing my horizon
Now so slendly hangs between dark Space
And the blue-green-brown
Of Earth.
I am only this, here One moment merging to another
For empathy overcomes:
No cold Thought to spoil by abstractions
The way the factory bolt despoils the lamb.
So much wasted so often
I have no measure to measure-out
The blame
For I am falling, fallen
Having failed myself so often:
No stories, text, to capture such a loss
Of both empathy and love.
For I am only this, here - Oystercatchers catching
Where sea greets sand
And the waning Moon still glows, a little,
As on that night
When the distant lighthouse pulsed in darkness
And the sea sounds under stars sent their calls
Down deep down into greeny-blackness
As if some unknown entity of the deeps
Was here, there,
Listening, waiting, lurking
Unprofaned still by the hubris
We mis-name Discovery.
For it is not right to give names
To some things
Now, I am this, here - where only stiness
Numbness thirst hunger age
Remind one moment
To move
(2010)
The Returning
All seasons transcend
Since each day diers
Through its cloud and its sun.
In the wood, gold spreads
Slowly
Like the slow death it is
As every soft colour is returned.
Only pasture remains green
Below mist
While brown earth is broken
By plough:
Suiciency is shelter itself
And the once reluctant farmer nods
As he turns with his bent back
Where sun rests
Between its hill and his home.
It will be gone, soon, this sun
Lost
While stars stare down the sky
Where for fty years
His house has stood
Stone grey among muddy sheep-torn grass.
There was a horse, then,
To plough the steep slope
Of his hill: a dierent way
When even the village
Fifteen furlongs west
Was wary of all change.
But shelter is suiciency itself
He knows
As he walks the short path
To his home.
There will be re,
A son's warm wife
To welcome this leathery skin.
He is old, he knows,
Worn like the oak, and his path
Which three years of bloody hands
Tore from Her earth
And which each year She renews.
All rain can be smelt
In the wood, wind spins
Slowly, like Earth.
There is a mist, a mingling
While the fallen man waits among leaves
Like Her kestrel
For death.
Every wind is his breath.
(c.1984)
A Warm Day One Spring
In the hills
Where heat haze is scattered
By wind
Wisdom sits like the shepherd
Waiting;
No words suice
While bleached bracken
Scratches beneath blue.
Nearby, heather sprouts
Where silty shales chewed
By frost
Crumble slowly like life:
There is no haste
Where eighty years of wind
Have twisted the small Douglas tree
Like this Peregrine twists
Itself in ight:
Somewhere a death
While on the road below
Two cars scurry
Noiseless like lice:
Soon they will rust
Just as I will be bleached bones
And dust.
Little endures
Like this rock
(c.1984)
Travelling
A hot day in Summer as I walk
Slowly
But fastly sweating
Down this road
While speeding traic passes
As speeding traic does:
The drivers seem unaware or careless
Of my slowness
And grimly swerve to almost
Touch me
Here where a town - ten miles distant - creeps
Over a river to spread across
A narrow greening plain.
There is food in the town,
A path's beginning to take me upward
And turning through a forest
To the sheep-sided hills
Beyond.
Slowly, my world passes I cannot comprehend the rush
And sit in the hot sun on a low wall
Having passing through the breathless body
Of this town.
Even my water is warm
And suspicious faces watch me
As their owners in gardens surround themselves
With sound:
There seems a rushing in the seeping loud
Music, a barrier
To keep my slow moving solitary travelling world
Away I smile, but my beard, my worn clothes Perhaps my eyes - mark me.
A few hours
And it is good to be alone again
Among the peace of hills
Where my walking slowness seems to frame
Each slowly passing world:
Above - clouds
To herald some future rain.
(1975)
Remembering
Haunting
As the cry of the owl
Within the frost of night
When I walked to this stream
With no moon:
I saw your face as I waited for dreams,
Tired by my waiting:
You the ghost walking the path
Of my life.
Sun came, slowly, bringing
A little mist around the stream,
A spreading calm to make me stretch
And walk like an old man
Bent by cold and doubt.
Here in the valley no trees exist
To greet in wakeing this Winter's sun There is only frost-bruised heather
And fern,
No song
Of birds, only
The timbre of stream.
Slowly, cold-raw hands
Transform a little warmth
From my dream:
How many more nights shall I need
To remember
Until I cannot forget
Again?
(1987)
cc David Myatt 2012
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