Landscape with glove

So here's a draft of the longer poem. It picks up the rhyme scheme from Dover Beach and some echoes of Auden, and Masefield and Patrick Kavanagh (both courtesy of Ciaran O'Driscoll) especially later on. 

In a Facebook post Ciaran said he thought Kavanagh's greatest contribution was "to move from the literal parish to the 'parish of experience'," which includes the original geographic parish. 

Not too earnest I hope. As a note, that I saw at Jackie Will's lovely birthday party on Saturday, read: 'The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing'. I worry I make a lot of 'real mistakes'!


Landscape with glove

Albany: There is my pledge;
Throwing down a glove
…
Edmund: There’s my exchange:
Throwing down a glove


King Lear Act V, Scene 3 The British camp near Dover


~~~


Gloucester: But have I fall’n, or no?


Edgar: From the dread summit of this chalky bourn.
Look up a-height; the shrill-gorged lark so far
Cannot be seen or heard: do look up.


Gloucester: Alack, I have no eyes.


King Lear Act IV, Scene 6 Fields near Dover


~~~


You cannot see the glove.
out of shot off left. It’s black,
floppy, pointing pointlessly above.
Nor can you see the sheep. They’re hiding there –
behind the trees and shrubs down to the right.
The sun you cannot see, that’s on your back
and floods the fields below with razor light.
No roads are visible through the enchanted air,
nor the nanoparticles that infest it.
Waves of power and data infiltrate
each settlement from altogether elsewhere
breaking into unseen minds, invisible, silently
flinging out signals of hope or hate.
But you can only hear wind–change, violently.

John Masefield long ago
never saw it coming, though something cried
as it passed him by on the Downs, some flow
of spectral Arcadian dreams, the English con,
a land without any change, the cockeyed 
vision, green and pleasant and wrong.

You cannot see
the widow in her cottage, hypocrisy, the effects of the ‘87 hurricane,
railway buffet trolleys, individual emotions – however strong,
nurse to patient ratios in hospitals, the torrent of transactions,
the aspirations of the couple recently arrived from London, want, American
influence, the decline in the population of grey partridge, obesity,
the tolerance of bus drivers, fracking, disagreement about statins,
the family en route to the steakhouse, the jealousy of lawyers, thongs,
fixed ideas (examined but never relinquished), fairness, coffins, ‘wealth creation’,
the heroic culture of A & E departments, tables spread for parties, African
asylum seekers, the money stashed away by everyone who can, songs,
prejudice, the interconnectedness of every switch and lever, deceit.

In spite of all appearances and ghosts,
no matter how different or abstruse
each web of lives, can we not still produce
a weighing up of all that matters most, 
through hybrid vigour take up the other’s glove
with certitude and peace, to champion
and re-imagine our joint demesne?
Swept with change-wind we see from above
conflict’s learning: nothing debarred by love.



PS The photo was actually taken last Thursday but I remade it today!