Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock Read Free Book Online Page A

before
    that moment with the firing-squad.
    Authorities let us down here.
    His final audience, the ‘crowd
    of notables’, might as well
    have been, as he was, blindfold.
    We are left with the empty cell
    like a film-set; the table
    where the man of action/dreamer
    made notes on his father’s bible
    in a litter of roses. Enter
    his faithful jailer, to record
    just this. The rest remains obscure
    like all that made a dictionary word
    of his name; like what he did it for.

Script
    ‘Wet the tea, Jinny, the men are back:
    I can hear them out there, talking, with the horses,’
    my mother’s grandmother said. They both heard it,
    she and her daughter – the wagon bumpily halted,
    a rattle of harness, two familiar voices
    in sentences to be identified later
    and quoted endlessly. But the tea was cold
    when the men came in. They’d been six miles away,
    pausing to rest on Manurewa Hill
    in a grove of trees – whence ‘Fetch the nosebags, Dickie’
    came clearly over. A freak wind, maybe:
    soundwaves carrying, their words lifted up
    and dropped on Drury. Eighty years ago,
    long before the wireless was invented,
    Grandma told us. It made a good story:
    baffling. But then, so was the real thing –
    radio.
                My father understood it.
    Out on the bush farm at Te Rau a Moa
    as a teenager he patiently constructed
    little fiddly devices, sat for hours
    every day adjusting a cat’s whisker,
    filtering morse through headphones. Later came
    loudspeakers, and the whole family could gather
    to hear the creaky music of 1YA.
    So my father’s people were technicians, is that it?
    And my mother’s were communicators, yes? –
    Who worked as a barber in the evenings
    for the talking’s sake? Who became a teacher –
    and who was in love with tractors? No prizes.
    Don’t classify. Leave the air-waves open.
    We each extract what we most need. My sons
    rig out their rooms with stereo equipment.
    I walk dozily through the house
    in the mornings with a neat black box,
    audible newspaper, time-keeper and saver,
    sufficient for days like that.
                                                  On days like this
    I sit in my own high borrowed grove
    and let the leafy air clear my mind
    for reception. The slow pigeon-flight,
    the scraped-wire pipping of some bird,
    the loamy scent, offer themselves to me
    as little presents, part of an exchange
    to be continued and continually
    (is this a rondo? that professor asked)
    perpetuated. It is not like music,
    though the effects can strike as music does:
    it is more like agriculture, a nourishing
    of the growth-mechanisms, a taking-in
    of food for what will flower and seed and sprout.
    On a path in the wood two white-haired women
    are marching arm in arm, singing a hymn.
    A girl stops me to ask where I bought my sandals.
    I say ‘In Italy, I think’ and we laugh.
    I am astonished several times a day.
    When I get home I shall make tea or coffee
    for whoever is there, talk and listen to talk,
    share food and living-space. There will always
    be time to reassemble the frail components
    of this afternoon, to winnow the scattered sounds
    dropped into my range, and rescue from them
    a seed-hoard for transmission. There will be
    always the taking-in and the sending-out. 

In Memoriam: James K. Baxter
    Dear Jim, I’m using a Shakespearian form
    to write you what I’ll call a farewell letter.
    Rhyming iambics have become the norm
    for verse epistles, and I’m no trendsetter.
    Perhaps you’ll think it’s going back a bit,
    but as a craftsman you’ll approve of it.
    What better model have we, after all?
    Dylan the Welshman, long your youthful passion,
    doesn’t quite do now, and the dying fall
    of Eliot was never in your fashion.
    Of North Americans the one you’d favour
    is Lowell. But his salt has the wrong savour:
    our ocean’s called Pacific, not Atlantic –
    which doesn’t mean to say Neruda meets
    the case. As for the classically