Selected Poems by Tony Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

necklaces
    and caged red birds.
2. Fonte Luminosa
    Walking on the Great North Road
    with my back towards London
    through showers of watery sleet,
    my cracked rubber boot soles
    croak like African bullfrogs
    and the buses and lorries that swish
    like a whiplash laid on and on
    without intermission or backswing
    send a spray splashing over
    from squelching tyres skywards
    STOP red, GO green, CAUTION
    amber, and at the crossing
    where you had your legs crushed
    I remember the
fonte luminosa
,
    Brasilia’s musical geyser
    spurting a polychrome plumage,
    the fans of rich pashas,
    a dancer’s dyed ostriches,
    making parked Chevrolets
    glisten, people seem sweaty,
    and when yellowing, loppy Terezinha,
    the eldest, though your age,
    of the children all huddled
    under the fancy ramp entrance
    of the National Theatre,
    comes and scoops from the churned
    illuminated waters a tinful
    for drinking and cooking and goes
    gingerly to ingenious roads
    where cars need never once
    stop at Belishas or crossings,
    intersect, crash, or slow down,
    the drops that she scatters
    are not still orange or purple,
    still greenish or gorgeous
    in any way, or still gushing,
    but slightly clouded like quartz,
    and at once they’re sucked back
    into Brazil like a whelk
    retracting, like the tear
    that drains back into your eye
    as once more you start coming through
    the rainbowing spindrift and fountains
    of your seventh anaesthesia.
3. Isla de la Juventud
    The fireflies that women
    once fattened on sugar
    and wore in their hair
    or under the see-through
    parts of their blouses
    in Cuba’s
Oriente
,
    here seem to carry
    through the beam where they cluster
    a brief phosphorescence
    from each stiff corpse
    on the battlefields that look
    like the blown-up towel
    of a careless barber,
    its nap and its bloodflecks,
    and if you were to follow,
    at Santa Fe’s open-air
    cinema’s Russian
    version
War & Peace
,
    the line of the dead
    to the end, corpses,
    cannons and fetlocks,
    scuffing the red crust
    with your snowboots,
    or butt-end of your rifle,
    you would enter an air
    as warm as the blankets
    just left by a lover,
    yours, if you have one,
    an air full of fireflies,
    bright after-images,
    and scuffed Krasnoe snow
    like unmeltable stars.
4. On the Spot
    for Miroslav Holub,
    Havana, August 1969
    Watching the Soviet subs surface
    at the side of flagged battleships
    between Havana harbour and the USA
    I can’t help thinking how the sword
    has developed immensely,
    how only nomads in deserts
    still lop heads off with it,
    while the pen is still only
    a point, a free ink-flow
    and the witness it has to keep bearing.
    Miroslav, you must remember
    there’d be no rumba now,
    if the blacks who made Cuba
    had not somehow evolved
    either when shackled or pegged
    or grouped for a whiplash harangue
    or under the driver’s bluebottle eye
    following their own eyes flicking,
    flies dying in jam-jars
    jerking all over –
           
Think
    of those trapped pupils let loose,
    the offal they’d flock to,
    O have to, being so hungry,
    History inescapable, high,
    necessary, putrescent,
    unburied, still not picked over,
    only the balls of it gnawed at –
    had not evolved as I said,
    together, somehow, with slight spasms
    of only the nipples or haunches,
    a calf-muscle tugging the chain taut,
    the art of dancing on the spot
    without ever being seen to be moving,
    not a foot or a hand out of place.

Voortrekker
    A spoor from a kraal. Then grass
    greens the turd of the carnivore
    gone all gums. So the sick Boer
    lays on with the whip less.
    Panic in him and round him
    like a wind-flapped tilt –
    only the sable sons of Ham
    cram Death’s dark veld.
    Coupled together in God’s span,
    outnumbered many times over,
    ox, dog, Hottentot, Caffre,
    and just one Christian man.

The Bonebard Ballads
1. The Ballad of Babelabour
    ‘This Babylonian confusion of words results from their being the language of men who are going down.
    (Bertolt Brecht)
    What ur-Sprache did the labour