Poems 2007

POEMS 2007

I

Oh my love-filled days,

where have you gone to?

I’ve got up from bed in a daze,

no dreams to turn in to,

unless they’re yours, my friends.

The means do not justify the ends,

I’m sorry, I mean

the end doesn’t justify the means.

In love I must not be mean,

and in the end friendship is love,

for me agape is above

eros. But give me one more true love

before my days end.

II

I plucked for her that poem like a flower

although it was after midnight,

if I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t know the hour,

I could have kept my lips sealed tight.

Now you know I am a night gardener

and sad in Russian is garden; her

is anonymous and general here,

naming names in poetry can generate fear.

She may be in the past present or future,

breaking the frail chronology is her feature.

I’m not going to impress on her any rigid features

and won’t force her to unpick my wounds’ sutures,

enough that she be in this night room with me

somehow in spirit, mind and body

so that I can be less lonely, less no-body,

so that we can together be.

III

‘All’s fair in love and war’,

‘Make love not war’,

and my fair love

the olive twig holds the dove.

I’ve written my share of war poems

from unbunkerlike homes.

Envelop me in your love, my friends,

I may become more sore and needy one day.

As for now, in the silence, I’m keeping sleep at bay.

The day has ended, night rules

and the fishing line spools

out. I’ve caught another wish

and broadcast it on a satellite dish:

freedom for Jamshid Karimov, the journalist,

no abuse for this Uzbek, take him off the blacklist.

IV

When a country’s war lasts longer

than its peace. When evil is stronger

than good – wherein lies the hope?

Is there really any scope

to create peace after terror –

somewhere there’s a fundamental error

in human nature that allows humans,

of all the species, to assume an

aggressive position,

whether it’s not allowing a robust opposition

to a ruling party or

not coming to terms with history of yore.

James Bond perverted live and let live

to live and let die. I’d give him a lecture or two in four languages

for I’m beginning to box my age.

The Cold War and Peace is hotting up with global warming,

it’s up to poets too to issue a solemn warning.

‘In hope I bide’ is the MacIan motto,

before I become senile or blotto

I’m not prepared to bide my time,

I strike and the wish is on,

give us hope for our daughters and sons.

V

A little bit of world melancholy,

how softer it sounds than depression,

see, at the end of the word is holy,

you wouldn’t notice that at a first impression.

Baudelaire, Coleridge et al. were all drug users.

I have no need to go cold turkey,

not myself being a user or rather abuser.

No screw on me turns the key

though I have had mental confinements.

I am free to exercise poetry’s refinements,

two handfuls of rhymes at my behest

and with an infinite curiosity I am blessed.

If I were a cat I’d be killed nine times

but I haven’t been flogged with the cat-o-nine-tails, though oft times

I interpreted for torture survivors.

At heaven’s gate they will not fluff their vivas

in whatever language they take them,

but Peter, Azrail give them life and hope before you take ‘em.

VI

Helen, Captain Michael, are you sleeping down below?

As for me, my feet are firmly on the ground below.

The Uzbek radio journalist thanked me for my pain –

my God, here sing the birds thinking it’s dawn again.

I’d never been thanked for my ‘pain’ before,

how did he sense on the telephone I was hurting?

He’s right – it’s more than empathy for

others’ pain but it’s infinitely mind opening and rewarding.

There’s Uzbekistan, where I’ve never been,

there’s this guy in the psikhushka whom I’ve never seen.

Here’s me staying up very late, starting a cycle on love

and finishing up with something above

politics but political but not litigious.

It makes complete sense to Pushkin, and I’m not disingenuous.

I read Pushkin to calm myself down

but like my pipe tobacco he boosted me up and calmed me down.

VII

FOR RAY SHORTHOUSE

The seventh poem in this nocturnal cycle

returns to love, not just my love

and yes, ‘a fish does need a bicycle’.

I’ve asked travelling friends for pebbles from above

the shoreline and from the sea itself.

I hope they don’t shift, the tectonic shelves,

though passionate love can be a volcano.

Hephaestus or Vulcan, oh

they were lame like the forger of these verses.

I risk being perverse

and my father in the 70s said to me: ‘No one likes a dissident’,

but when to death he made his slow descent

he said he admired my work at the Medical Foundation

and that gave love to our parting and a secure foundation.

‘The peace of the world that passeth all understanding’,

I’d like to add my drops of ink to understanding

in a non-blasphemous way. Give us a driving metaphor

to carry us from the troubled sea up onto the shore.

VIII

So many people are anti-tyranny

especially those under tyranny.

Do the people get the leader they deserve?

No, that’s like saying the military

has ‘toys for boys’. I’m chary

of obita dicta

but angry against dictators.

It’s I myself who sucks these hours

out of the night. Others have greater powers

of communication than this humble poet,

skating on thin ice with a rollerball, don’t you know it.

There is solidarity in the BBC World Service Radio band,

late night listening – carry me my little waves,

lull me but not yet to sleep.

My adrenalin is flowing and I can’t keep

in bed. Families were split in the 40s,

the radio reminds me. Don’t split Jamshid’s personality

and, Doctor in heaven, don’t split mine.

It’s wake up call at ten past nine,

just over five hours to go,

my poetry has already had a wonderful go.

IX

When the driver gets an adrenalin rush

in a risky but necessary overtaking manoeuvre,

when a poet is writing his magnum opus,

or in medias res of a new oeuvre,

how does he come down from the sublime

to his small room in his provincial time:

this is how he does it – he writes himself down.

It’s a serious thing in the circus playing the clown,

I wear no mask in country or town,

so you can see my real smile or frown.

I never had a cover so it could not be blown,

I’ve managed to avoid debts and loans,

I hedge my bets before I place any,

yet somehow I have inherited and developed a bravity

with its own specific gravity

and I fight for myself when I fight

for others, that unity of comradeship

that goes most of the way to purge fright –

no need yet to bail out the ship.

X

Tomorrow or rather today I’ll have

a helluva poetry hangover.

In the morning I’ll already have

had a close shave, a too brief sleep over.

But I’ve noticed my strength to recover

and this without a live-in-lover

to confide my confidences in.

It’s how one misconfronts ‘sin’

that can lead to the bin.

I have to swallow the News in sips,

I still sometimes feel a shudder when I hear the pips.

I should realise here I’m closer to journalists

than to most poets, though both I enlist.

Whole Cycle, Night of 19 January 2007

Richard McKane
IN MEMORIAM HRANT DINK

I

Difficult not to be devastated or rant in anger or turn to drink

on hearing the news of the shooting of Hrant Dink

but he’d want us more to write

and to give life to that most basic human right

to live and let live. His life was taken –

he did not give it lightly:

his struggle was for human rights in Turkey

and he turned the keys of politics and history.

His life was spent in defending minorities,

not only his Armenian but the Kurds and within the framework of his

                                                                                                  country.

Threatened with death threats and court cases,

supported by his close family and friends, he found a basis

not only to exist but work and live

and stay on in the country and city he loved.

He described himself in his last article as an apprehensive

pigeon, now we know he was a brave dove.

20 January 2007

II

I didn’t want to write an elegy for Hrant Dink

and I thought it was better not to drink

the poisoned cup of his foul murder to the lees

but give thanks for his life with pleas

for a cessation of violence and for reconciliation

among the hybrid Turkiyeli nation.

‘Then you can put it aside’

one of my best friends said.

I know Hrant Dink has died

but since I never met

him it’s somehow as though he’s not dead.

Have you ever had that feeling? Absurd yet

it may ring true for you too –

as though Hrant is still editing anew,

Agos, his Armenian Turkish newspaper,

as though there is no need to light candles from a taper.

No, it doesn’t really work this substitution caper.

He’s been shot, that’s it for him,

he is now the dead victim

who went out on a limb

for us and we are the survivors of him.

21 January 2007

Richard McKane

FOR RUTH AND JAMES CHRISTIE

I told Hajar, the pretty Turkish waitress,

that I am going to write this poem to you,

so I order another cappuccino

and sit down to it without strain or stress.

We worked well together today

and work with you is serious play.

We translated A White Bed

by Tuğrul Tanyol and I led.

Then I realised I was not leading but led

and the poem was a totally joint effort.

When I dropped a word or vice versa each other we caught.

You’d been in pain, your gums had bled

when  the tooth was extracted,

but now you concentrated, were not distracted

and the whole session was enacted

and our shared wisdom in the poetry was impacted.

We’d come to the end of another

book together

to add to Oktay Rifat and Nazim Hikmet.

We went back to how we met

at Cevat Çapan’s talk –

today I couldn’t persuade you to walk

to the Café so I came here with James

and we sat in the garden and talked

not so much Turkey as turkey.

We three sing in the same key

and though Ruth and I don’t play the cello

or the computer as well-o

we share a musicality of line, that’s no delusion.

A Russian speaking loudly interrupts

my train of thought, corrupts

the poem with his intrusion.

You realised that I am in a different space

these days. To Russian poetry I’ve set my face

again and time flies and time races

and none of us can readily adjust our lifelong paces.

‘How good it is to remember you’

as Nazim said, but no four walls

divide us and the remembering you

is more thinking of you than recall.

Others’ words in Turkish

became our words in English,

so one language prompts

another into the preparatory exprompt.

There is a slight breeze

which puts me at ease

as the evening starts.

God protect our hearts,

lead us through the valley of life,

you two inseparable man and wife,

sometimes the stiff upper lip

can be more than just a quip.

Scotland has been yours since your cotland

and you both carry her in London within you.

We give to each other more than a hand,

there are many poets – translators are few.

We are in the same boat

when we take a poem on an outing.

Our linguistic wrangles never lead to shouting.

When Burton read Fern Hill he fought with a lump in his throat.

You have, Ruth, what the Russians would call a broad diapason,

your reading takes us into various zones

and we three dote

on each others’ anecdotes.

James gives generously of his wit.

I have lifted from it selected hits,

all three of us now have senior moments

when we forget what we meant.

But we’re adept at piggy-back memory

and our conversations individually continue.

I don’t want to talk about memento mori,

I just want to remember that we give each other clues.

Thank God in lyric poetry

there is no concentration on chronology.

Time darts and plays like a fish

and keeps the mind fresh.

Chez vous we had an orange soup

and a kidney bean and tuna salad

and wine white and red before putting Tuğrul through the hoop

and working on his poems, not ballads.

Yes, my rhyming may be facile

but it’s the right side of it.

We’ve translated our last poem together for a while,

but translation, we’ll never get enough of it.

The poems we’ve translated have teeth

as well as the ones in our mouths now,

they also have taste somehow,

none of us are washed up on retirement’s reef.

Activists of the brain,

playing ping pong with languages,

we’ll go on for ages,

for we are still in training.

Those who translate feel a double

strain for both languages when trouble-

some give rise to seemingly impossible

quandaries, but with a twist and a turn the target tongue is enabled.

Words are not imprisoned but free,

yet we translators liberate

them in English, that mighty

language which in its essence no one can berate.

It was by chance I stayed on in the Café garden,

almost out of tobacco I felt like heading home,

then to write a poem to you two, my will hardened

and here I am completing it at night at home.

It’s the longest one I’ve written

since starting my quatrains with which I’m smitten,

which would give any publisher kittens

since they are now in their thousands.

James, remember the robin on the wall

and our quipping ‘run robin, run robin, run, run, run’,

serious lines mix with unalloyed fun,

this is the sort of poetry and life to which I’m called.

I think best these days and nights

with pen in hand, then I worry less.

The words can’t quite

catch up with the thoughts which may be in a mess.

Well, with my new resolve

of not writing into the wee hours

to save for the morning my powers

I’m going to leave this poem with the clock hands to silently revolve.

If I don’t think it’s finished,

in the morning refreshed

I’ll go fishing for words again.

Sleep well, Ruth and James Christie – and Richard McKane.

***

Up in the night once more – there must be unfinished business.

Whence this busy beeness

that turns me into a nocturnal animal,

does it come from method translation of Tuğrul Tanyol.

I’d actually slept an hour

to the tunes of Radio 3,

but I’ll not let this writing turn sour,

it’s just there’s still a ripeness that dwells in me.

It’s good to have direct addressees

to write this poem to,

thereby I guarantee

an audience of two of you.

Sleepy head, get thee to bed

and ignore the zithers of your breathing.

These last hours you’ve said

enough to be bequeathing.

In the morning, fast approaching,

into the computer I’ll be broaching

these lines – a sign of the times

with all their rhythms and rhymes.

Press on regardless, otherwise known as POR,

when opportunities for good verse are

on offer you have to seize the night,

then sleep and rest till well after it’s light.

I wonder when the pencil sharpener was invented.

These words I have ventilated not vented –

see how they fill the silent night air,

taking up so little room there.

Unspoken they are, only read by me,

but when you read this part of me,

it’ll be ours, mine and yours,

selfishness doesn’t reign, for you this pours.

I know when to stop: when the stream

of consciousness dries into sleep,

when the curve of the night becomes too steep

to ignore and the graph tells you to write no more.

I’ve not quite reached that compromise

but my health I’m not compromising.

I’ll have a long lie in, I promise

myself and really the results are quite surprising.

If I make haste like the shepherds to The Birth,

it’s because we are only guests on this earth.

I believe we only come round once

so I’m eking out my extra energy’s every ounce.

I’m only burning the candle at one end

and I have replacements in the kitchen.

It’s our own power cut that is the flipping end,

come on you readers, this craft’s ready for hitching.

Hold steady now, the harbour is nigh,

both readers and poet let out a sigh

of relief. We’ve avoided the rocks’ teeth,

we’ve pierced through the dangerous reef.

No, this writing

is too exciting.

I can’t alight from it yet,

it’s too bright inside my head.

Have I broken the sound barrier?

We’ve broken the language barrier.

No carrier pigeon will carry this long message

which is more than a rite of passage.

So, I’m up at night, the silent Muse at my shoulder.

When we three are together I never feel you’re older

than me – we are all contemporaries

and our partings will be temporary.

Do you remember giving me the recording

of Wallace Steven’s Idea of Order at Key West?

Such perfect words ordering –

he was indeed blessed.

Now not just tiredness but real fatigue

is setting in. I am in my pyjama fatigues.

Is this writing a form of somnambulism?

No, I am talking not walking at waking and sleeping’s schism.

It may take quite a few blows

to hit the nail on the head:

three o’clock strikes and I’m not abed,

I’m not hiding that from you, God knows.

I sharpen my pencil that’s run down.

I trust this is not going down

like a lead balloon –

it’s really not a load of ballyhoo.

If it wasn’t for these fourliners’ formality

I wouldn’t be able to exercise informality

for there wouldn’t be the frame even if it’s limericklike.

This is my main work now – I’ve got on my bike.

It’s more superobservant

than hypervigilant.

Night fishing for words

can end with  the dawn chorus of birds.

I’m pushing the boat out tonight

like a Robin Hood smuggler.

I haven’t taken on whisky galore

or the Tsar’s Vodka – I promise I’m not tight.

Nonetheless it’s a bit like a student

staying up to meet a deadline. If I’d been more prudent

I’d have started this poem to you years ago –

but now at least I’m giving it a go.

It may seem overwhelming

but there’s truth in its fragments.

A wealth of poems is something

and I think you follow the arguments.

So still now the night,

now no element of fright,

now I’ll give in to slumber,

page 14 is the notebook number.

When I pause for a line

I have a minute smoke –

the ass gives birth to the moke –

of addiction a sure sign.

Do I kid myself it keeps me alert?

It’s the poetry itself that is the winner.

I know others get hurt when I am hurt,

of omission especially I am a sinner.

I’m never going to resign my poet’s commission,

there’s a slender line between vocation and mission.

I don’t object to being in the term of ‘semiretirement’,

less interpreting puts me in my writer’s element.

The dawn chorus comes a bit earlier every night

and starts with solitary notes.

Through the heavy curtains I have no sight

of the bird – I just hear the song from its throat.

I’ve topped my record for number of lines

but I’m feeling fine,

but like a stitch for a runner is a warning sign,

I should pick it up in time and save nine.

Yet I plough on in the dark – my brain is floodlit.

I am an ark on the face of the waters,

floating prepared when the deluge rains hit,

with four by four lion-hearted lines I face the conservation disaster.

4-5 June 2007