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Spirit Mountain
“Said to be haunted”
“Source of strength and madness”
Alone on the night mountain
I wait, curious.
Screeches and groans
Tear the night, only I
Know they’re ravens
Not demons.
Harbour lights, town lights, wandering
Headlights shine and
Are gloved into mist
Pale flame of sunrise
Seascape afire
Ghosts? Then within us
But a trickle of
Welsh blood speaking:
Perhaps in the soil
Out of time, sleeping.
That was the poem that started me writing poetry again. Note that it isn’t regular in any conventional sense: it doesn’t rhyme and although the rhythm is such as to make it easy to read aloud, it doesn’t follow a set pattern. So this is free verse?
Not entirely. Notice how similar-sounding words are spaced out – ravens/demons, speaking/sleeping and arguably (in the endings of two successive verses) mist/within us. The speaking/sleeping pair end the poem, giving it something of an air of finality and completion. It’s the first, exploratory verse that has no such links.
Here’s another.
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WOLF
Cry in the night
A wavering yearning wail
Remembered
The pack all know their part
The smell of sickening deer
Bloods their comradeship
Torn flesh is life
Wolf dreams the voices in the leaves
The running of a long-lost mate
The tumbling play of cubs and then
Midwinter snowlock, icy breath
Fairytale devil
Hiding in homely things
Better to eat you, dear
Ravenous, clever
A chalice for our wish to kill
For rape and for rebellion
To turn the world right upside down,
Of chaos, and the homeland’s milk
Of law and lace for all time spilt
Wolves ride our dreams
In each dark wood
A half-remembered beast
Down each sharp slope
They wait, or wander like the wind
To fall on anywhere they wish;
The fearful grope
Of climber on the alp falls short
Because the wolf waits just beyond
But at his fall the wolf will stand
And soon have sport
A child is missing
Sheep are torn
A travelling brother never comes
Folk knew the wolf must be the cause
So hunted it with dog and gun
Until one lonely wolf was left
Searching for any of its kind
Into a trap and hung to rot
So who had killed the lost child now?
Some human wolves must roam the night
And must be burnt to break the curse
To wolves the random rage of men
Is like a maddened hurricane
That picks this up and sets this down
Safety and death in hands of clown
That wail again: no devils of dream
Unearthly through the forest stream,
But wolfpack hunting in the night
And not a tiger burning bright.
There are a number of pairs of similar-sounding words here (leaves/breath, devil/clever and the actual rhyme short/sport) but it’s significant that rhyme or near-rhyme comes in when the poem reaches a greater intensity in the fifth verse (milk/spilt to end the verse) and at the very end ( men/hurricane, down/clown and finally night/bright, imitating William Blake’s epigrammatic style to disagree with him). The poem as a whole is irregular, but if all that remained of it was the last two verses, people would think this was a fragment of a regular poem.
I do this to create a sense of coming together and intensification as the poem progresses. It usually happens without conscious planning: as my mental state intensifies, I find myself rhyming and using more regular metre.
Third and last:
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ESTUARY
The church is early 12th century. Some two miles from here
The Romans crossed the estuary by a ford
Now long impassable
The shades settle
I am confused by their weight, my questions muffled
By their insistent conversation
As though wings beat in dissonance, we struggle
Before they leave for the drowned land, the sky darkening,
One with a hidden face leaves me a thing
Carefully carved from wood, now pocked by seaworms living
I put it to my mouth, it makes a sound
And at the calling, all the shades turn round.
You can see the same thing happening here. The first verse is almost chatty, not weird at all except in the last line, and free of any such pairs of words. Then as the poem gets stranger there is a process of growing echoing: muffled/struggle; darkening/thing/living (which somehow doesn’t sound like rhymes) and finally, a rhymed couplet (sound/round).
I’ll come back to this and look at how poems can hide internal links and echoes.
copyright Simon Banks 2012 and 2013