Fen Boats
A Poem After John Cage
Sestina for Must Farm/Flag Fen
Fen Boats In 2012 eight Bronze Age boats were discovered at Must Farm in Cambridgeshire. Your shadows drift by in their wooden craft, where we walk in heavens above your heads; where you once sculled your boats and laid your traps, to feed your families and warm your beds. We walk where birds once circled overhead, Heedless of the peace you've lain down to seek; Resting in the boats carved to earn your bread – Themselves now resting in congested creek. We drive these roads; your islands are long gone, Made one by hand of time and seaborne silt; Your waterways, now dry and paved with stone, carry wheeled craft where blood and sweat were spilt. Your secrets, slipped into these beds of clay, Lay waiting for the scalpel light of day. Copyright © 2013 Colin Whyles
A Poem After John Cage John Cage wrote 4'33"" in 1952 As per John Cage, I offer a poem of silence; two minutes 38 seconds: I wish to be original. Sometimes my poem will be a sonnet, with perfect rhymes. Sometimes it will be verse libre. You may choose its form. My poem will take as its subject the environment in which it is read. You will be its central character. If you do not like its matter change is within yourself. If the material at hand does not fill two minutes 38 seconds, then you must look deeper into yourself. My poem has not yet begun. It begins now. Copyright © 2014 Colin Whyles
Sestina for Must Farm/Flag Fen Must Farm and Flag Fen, just East of Peterborough, have been the source of many remarkable finds giving an insight into Bronze Age Britain. It is too late now to rescue your homes, But you have gifted a treasure to our lives; Though uninvited, we enter your walls and sift through your worldly goods; your deep skills intrigue us. You tamed the marshes, the fens, farmed cattle and sheep, fished the rich waters that have now run dry, exhausted by waters cut straight to the sea. Now we lift your homes from their hidden graves beneath the fens to discover the richness of your lives: small, wooden boxes; wheels shaped through your skills; cooking pots, axes; what were once proud walls protecting from storms that beat on those walls but added fresh vigour to the waters. And yet, showing gratitude for your skills, you thanked the gods with offerings for your homes, humbly asking for safety in your lives: threw your broken, bronze swords into the fens. But fire that raged one day to light the fens baked, crumbled and shattered your fragile walls, changing the course of your idyllic lives. Your wooden transom boats tamed the waters; you fished, raised your family and new homes. Trees felled and shaped to demonstrate your skills, not only boats, but you learned the skills to build a causeway stretched across the fens to reach a platform that dwarfed your homes, extensive, high and wide but without walls — for those with courage to cross the waters. And so you worked, played and sustained your lives in this enriched environment. Your lives would change with climate and evolving skills with metals. You sank your boats in the waters for us to find, buried in our dried fens. We guess at how to build your earthen walls; we find wonder in your circular homes. We try to picture your lives in these homes; we admire your skills, rebuild your broken walls, regret the lost waters, the drained, dead fens. Copyright © 2016 Colin Whyles