Sutton Hoo Sequence
Women of Nepal
Burial
Sutton Hoo Sequence I therefore regard a ship burial as just as much a poem as Beowulf.. Martin Carver, Sutton Hoo, 1998. p.173 1 Not the obvious place for a ship if it was meant to travel – a mound on a hill of gravel. Well? Was archaeopteryx aiming to fly when it hopped a little and hung there in the suddenly solid air? Either way, it reached us. 2 We all make hoards thirty-seven gold coins from thirty-seven Merovingian mints, a scramasax baptismal spoons a coronation mug six unused trout flies a Brownie camera a stick of chalk Poet, archaeologist, make up some stories. 3 A hundred iron strands twisted tight and welded, wrapped like a pupa, seeming dead it was lethal in the hand. Red garnets, blue glass and ivory, a fistful of butterflies around the blazing steel. 4 The bodies are just the earth's idea of bodies. They heave into anagrams of resurrection. Said to be gallows folk, they populate this shoreline Golgotha, grotesqueries in a recovered codex. 5 The old man leant his Christened ear to the wall of the mound, he recalled the roystering of warrior kings: he heard the drip, drip of rainwater eroding the great bronze cauldron, the creak of decaying timbers, the snap of a lyre string as the gut failed. Copyright © 2010 Cameron Hawke Smith
Women of Nepal Villanelle From level palm of foot to the straight eyes as if to walk were the heart of keeping still straightness is where the womanʼs beauty lies. As she who under Himalayan skies daily makes a mountain of her will from level palm of foot to the straight eyes to bear her bodyweight of necessities, gas, water, petrol, or a potholeʼs fill, straightness is where the womanʼs beauty lies; or she who ladles out the bowls of rice, like a squatting buddha rocking on a heel from level palm of foot to the straight eyes; or dazzling teacher whose fingers flick and rise dancing to the words of a nursery drill, straightness is where the womanʼs beauty lies. Like trees seeking the light of paradise their grain hardened, and made unbendable; from level palm of foot to the straight eyes straightness is where the womanʼs beauty lies. Copyright © 2010 Cameron Hawke Smith
Burial Browngrey chalk clay the earth, bare the fields the fieldfare breast fleetingly, as they fare forward north. A labouring man on his father's ground this was the browngrey soil he tilled before he died the first time round, on an unnamed field of war that became a black hot diagram of death, ineradicable in his brain the disgrace that drove him to hide his shame, what he thought his shame at the local asylum, inside, inside himself where no-one could find him. And then he died the second time round, slowly year by year they consigned him – his family, my people – to convenient oblivion. He gardened he kept the lawns, the roses, the lenient ranks of vegetables, and died the third time round, a name only, Irish and Fen, alongside his people, who will say at last perhaps there was no shame or if there was let it lie where it belongs – in our laps. Irvine Finch b Shelford, Cambridge 1884 d. Fulbourn Hospital 1965 Commended, Fakenham Open Poetry Competition 2012: Comments by the Judge, Michael Laskey: "The suggestively titled Burial is family history, an act of contrition, the moving account of presumably a shell-shocked first world war soldier locked away for life and forgotten. The verse form suits his three 'deaths' and he is properly valued at last by the poet's skilful rhyming. Showing the growing moral complexities of a nine-year old child". Published in Being Mindful, A Shed Poetry Publication 2012 Copyright © 2012 Cameron Hawke Smith