Collected Poems by Alan; Sillitoe Read Free Book Online Page B

lead
    Forcing flower to give fruit
    Green flame shifting up iron trunks
    To poke out buds.
    Leaves hang all summer
    Shaken by rain and wind
    Shrived by a little heat:
    Such yearly swing must wear them
    To a death so flat by autumn
    That blood draws back
    And lets the leaves go.
    Trees suffer in frost and snow:
    Force-fed by soil, drained by age
    They brood and bide their time.
    How many summers can they take such weight?
    How long is life, how rich the earth,
    How weak the heart?

ROSE
    A rose about to open
    Thinks air and sun
    Can turn it into
    Something it is not already.
    The pink slit of life shows
    Between tight green blades –
    Hasn’t it seen enough
    Without wanting everything?
    Behind its packed unopened petals
    Are roses still to flower
    And blossoms not yet dropped;
    Outside, those same are tempting it,
    Scorched and shrivelled on the grass.
    Rose about to open, why do you do it?
    What force pushes
    So subtly that it does not feel?
    What beckoning power beyond
    Draws it with perfume sweeter than
    The one that will be made?
    They promise nothing but the last decay:
    The will to come or stay is not their own.

CREATION
    God did not write.
    He spoke.
    He made.
    His jackknife had a superblade –
    He sliced the earth
    And carved the water,
    Made man and woman
    By an act of slaughter.
    He scattered polished diamonds
    In the sky like dust
    And gave the world a push to set it spinning.
    What super-Deity got him beginning
    Whispered in his ear on how to do it
    Gave hints on what was to be done?
    Don’t ask.
    In his mouth he felt the sun
    Spat it out because it burned;
    From between his toes – the moon –
    He could not walk so kicked it free.
    His work was finished.
    He put a river round his neck,
    And vanished.

SIGNAL BOX
    Level-crossing signal box
    With three and a half hours between trains.
    Bells stopped, gates shut and blocking the line:
    Levers taller than himself palisade the moon,
    He on the safer side.
    Elbows space aside and tunnels
    The last green spitter of sparks
    Up the stars and soaking turf towards London,
    Whispers along, snarling, a retreating song,
    Signals on gauges like slicked hair downarrowed:
    Line clear for the next open crossing.
    Guard in waistcoat and jacket
    (Good to children who just want to see)
    Iron dragons slip through his fingers a hundred times a day
    Responsibility too great to feel power,
    Warning others down the line of its approach,
    He sits by teaflask and prepares a book,
    Needs an opium-portion to become
    Captain of a rusting steamer
    Crawling the coastal buffs of Patagonia,
    Or Nemo in his flying boat
    Lording at the Pole or South Sea hideout.
    A good tale every night is better
    That the telly or a homely bed.
    Trains growl on steel snakes
    Straight and sleeping close,
    Locomotive kings of the dawn
    Behind signals from another cured of sleep:
    Wide gates open for the first black arrow
    A circle in its packed and moving forehead,
    As he closes his book
    And lets the day pour through.

BARBARIANS
    Walls he sat by had fallen long ago:
    The city smoked after capture and rapine,
    No brick left upon another.
    These barbarians – this boy
    Sitting on the littered scrub –
    Belonged to a Scythian family
    Who found the city as if following
    A far-back shutter-flash,
    Crazed with hope after a famished trudge
    Over steppe whose herbs
    Scorched by the haze of the sun
    Pulled horses’ ribs so far in
    They were almost dead.
    By tale and memory this Scythian offshoot
    Saw a glittering metropolis,
    People and laden horses queueing to get out.
    No brick upon another. While the boy’s
    Mother scraped at rubbish
    He played at tapping stone with stone
    Cracked lips moving at the sky
    Waiting for her to find food,
    And idly placing one brick on another.

SOMME
    A trench map from the Battle of the Somme:
    Doesn’t matter where it came from
    Has a dead fly stuck
    At the lefthand corner
    By a place called Longueval,
    Rusty from blood sucked
    Out of British or