Laurie Lee Selected Poems Read online

  Title Page

  Laurie Lee

  Selected Poems

  Publisher Information

  First published in 2014 by

  Unicorn Press Ltd

  66 Charlotte Street

  London

  W1T 4QE

  www.unicornpress.org

  Digital edition converted and distributed by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Copyright in text © The Laurie Lee Estate.

  www.laurielee.org

  Cover artwork reproduced with kind permission by Jessy Lee.

  All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright holder and the above publisher of this book.

  Designed by Felicity Price-Smith

  Dedication

  To Jessy

  Note

  Most of these verses were originally published in three separate volumes - spanning perhaps a decade or so - and for this selection I have cut them down by about half.

  They were written by someone I once was and who is so distant to me now that I scarcely recognise him anymore. They speak for a time and a feeling which of course has gone from me, but for which I still have close affection and kinship.

  L.L.

  Invasion Summer

  The evening, the heather,

  the unsecretive cuckoo

  and butterflies in their disorder,

  not a word of war as we lie

  our mouths in a hot nest

  and the flowers advancing.

  Does a hill defend itself,

  does a river run to earth

  to hide its quaint neutrality?

  A boy is shot with England in his brain,

  but she lies brazen yet beneath the sun,

  she has no honour and she has no fear.

  A Moment of War

  It is night like a red rag

  drawn across the eyes

  the flesh is bitterly pinned

  to desperate vigilance

  the blood is stuttering with fear.

  O praise the security of worms

  in cool crumbs of soil

  flatter the hidden sap

  and the lost unfertilized spawn of fish!

  The hands melt with weakness

  into the gun’s hot iron

  the body melts with pity

  the face is braced for wounds

  the odour and the kiss of final pain.

  O envy the peace of women

  giving birth and love like toys

  into the hands of men!

  The mouth chatters with pale curses

  the bowels struggle like a nest of rats

  the feet wish they were grass

  spaced quietly.

  O Christ and Mother!

  But darkness opens like a knife for you

  and you are marked down by your pulsing brain

  and isolated

  and your breathing,

  your breathing is the blast, the bullet,

  and the final sky.

  Spanish frontier, 1937

  Words Asleep

  Now I am still and spent

  and lie in a whited sepulchre

  breathing dead

  but there will be

  no lifting of the damp swathes

  no return of blood

  no rolling away the stone

  till the cocks carve sharp

  gold scars in the morning

  and carry the stirring sun

  and early dust to my ears.

  Andalucía

  Music in a Spanish Town

  In the street I take my stand

  with my fiddle like a gun against my shoulder,

  and the hot strings under my trigger hand

  shooting an old dance at the evening walls.

  Each saltwhite house is a numbered tomb

  each silent window crossed with blood;

  my notes explode everywhere like bombs

  when I should whisper in fear of the dead.

  So my fingers falter, and run in the sun

  like the limbs of a bird that is slain,

  as my music searches the street in vain.

  Suddenly there is a quick flutter of feet

  and children crowd about me,

  listening with sores and infected ears,

  watching with lovely eyes and vacant lips.

  Cordoba, 1936

  Juniper

  Juniper holds to the moon

  a girl adoring a bracelet;

  as the hills draw up their knees

  they throw off their jasmine girdles.

  You are a forest of game,

  a thought of nights in procession,

  you tread through the bitter fires

  of the nasturtium.

  I decorate you to a smell of apples,

  I divide you among the voices

  of owls and cavaliering cocks

  and woodpigeons monotonously dry.

  I hang lanterns on your mouth

  and candles from your passionate crucifix,

  and bloody leaves of the virginia

  drip with their scarlet oil.

  There is a pike in the lake

  whose blue teeth eat the midnight stars

  piercing the water’s velvet skin

  and puncturing your sleep.

  I am the pike in your breast,

  my eyes of clay revolve the waves

  while cirrus roots and lilies grow

  between our banks of steep embraces.

  At Night

  I think at night my hands are mad,

  for they follow the irritant texture of darkness

  continually carving the sad leaf of your mouth

  in the thick black bark of sleep.

  And my finger-joints are quick with insanity,

  springing with lost amazement

  through a vast waste of dreams

  and forming frames of desire

  around the thought of your eyes.

  By day, the print of your body

  is like a stroke of sun on my hands,

  and the choir of your blood

  goes chanting incessantly

  through the echoing channels of my wrists.

  But I am lost in my hut

  when the stars are out,

  for my palms have a catlike faculty of sight,

  and the surface of every minute

  is a swinging image of you.

  Landscape

  The season does not leave your limbs,

  like a covered field you lie,

  and remembering the exultant plough

  your sheltered bosom stirs

  and whispers warm with rain.

  Waiting does not leave your eyes,

  your belly is as bright as snow

  and there your naked fingers

  are spread over the dark flowers

  shaking out their roots.

  My kiss has not yet left your blood

  but slumbers in a stream

  within your quie
t caves:

  listening to the sun it will cry forth,

  and burst with leaves, and blossom with a name.

  The Armoured Valley

  Across the armoured valley trenched with light,

  cuckoos pump forth their salvoes at the lark,

  and blackbirds loud with nervous song and flight

  shudder beneath the hawk’s reconnaissance:

  Spring is upon us, and our hopes are dark.

  For as the petal and the painted cheek

  issue their tactless beauties to the hour,

  we must ignore the budding sun and seek

  to camouflage compassion and ourselves

  against the wretched icicles of war.

  No festival of love will turn our bones

  to flutes of frolic in this month of May,

  but tools of hate shall make them into guns

  and bore them for the piercing bullet’s shout

  and through their pipes drain all our blood away.

  Yet though by sullen violence we are torn

  from violet couches as the air grows sweet,

  and by the brutal bugles of retreat

  recalled to snows of death, yet Spring, repeat

  your annual attack, pour through the breach

  of some new heart your future victories.

  Larch Tree

  Oh, larch tree with scarlet berries

  sharpen the morning slender sun

  sharpen the thin taste of September

  with your aroma of sweet wax and powder delicate.

  Fruit is falling in the valley

  breaking on the snouts of foxes

  breaking on the wooden crosses

  where children bury the shattered bird.

  Fruit is falling in the city

  blowing a woman’s eyes and fingers

  across the street among the bones

  of boys who could not speak their love.

  I watch a starling cut the sky

  a dagger through the blood of cold,

  and grasses bound by strings of wind

  stockade the sobbing fruit among the bees.

  Oh, larch tree, with icy hair

  your needles thread the thoughts of snow,

  while in the fields a shivering girl

  takes to her breasts the sad ripe apples.

  The Three Winds

  The hard blue winds of March

  shake the young sheep

  and flake the long stone walls;

  now from the gusty grass

  comes the homed music of rams,

  and plovers fall out of the sky

  filling their wings with snow.

  Tired of this northern tune

  the winds turn soft

  blowing white butterflies

  out of the dog-rose hedges,

  and schoolroom songs are full

  of boys’ green cuckoos

  piping the summer round

  Till August sends at last

  its brick-red breath

  over the baking wheat and blistered poppy,

  brushing with feathered hands

  the skies of brass,

  with dreams of river moss

  my thirst’s delirium.

  Interval

  All day the purple battle of love

  as scented mouths position

  soft fields of contesting langour

  or jealous peaks of suspicion.

  All day the trumpeting of fingers,

  the endless march of desire

  across the continent of an eyelid

  or the desert of a hair.

  How long we roam these territories

  trailing our twin successes,

  till the bending sun collapses

  and I escape your kisses.

  Then I drink the night like a coconut

  and earth regains its shape;

  at last the eunuch’s neutral dream

  and the beardless touch of sleep.

  Equinox

  Now tilts the sun his monument,

  now sags his raw unwritten stone

  deep in October’s diamond clay.

  And oozy sloes like flies are hung

  malignant on the shrivelled stem,

  too late to ripen, or to grow

  Now is the time the wasp forsakes

  the rose born like a weakly child

  of earth-bed’s pallor, death-bed’s flush.

  Time when the gourd upon the ground

  cracks open kernel or decay

  indifferent to man or worm.

  Time of no violence, when at last

  the shocked eye clears the battlefield

  and burns down black the roots of grass.

  And finds the prize of all its pain,

  bedded in smoke, on leaves of blood -

  love’s charcoal cross, unlost, unwon.

  Milkmaid

  The girl’s far treble, muted to the heat,

  calls like a fainting bird across the fields

  to where her flock lies panting for her voice,

  their black horns buried deep in marigolds.

  They climbed awake, like drowsy butterflies,

  and press their red flanks through the tall branched grass,

  and as they go their wandering tongues embrace

  the vacant summer mirrored in their eyes.

  Led to the limestone shadows of a barn

  they snuff their past embalmèd in the hay,

  while her cool hand, cupped to the udder’s fount,

  distils the brimming harvest of their day.

  Look what a cloudy cream the earth gives out,

  fat juice of buttercups and meadow-rye;

  the girl dreams milk within her body’s field

  and hears, far off, her muted children cry.

  Village of Winter Carols

  Village of winter carols

  and gawdy spinning tops,

  of green-handed walnuts

  and games in the moon.

  You were adventure’s web,

  the flag of fear I flew

  riding black stallions

  through the rocky streets.

  You were the first faint map

  of the mysterious sun,

  chart of my island flesh

  and the mushroom-tasting kiss.

  But no longer do I join

  your children’s sharp banditti,

  nor seek the glamour of

  your ravished apples.

  Your hillocks build no more

  their whales and pyramids,

  nor howl across the night

  their springing wolves.

  For crouching in my brain

  the crafty thigh of love

  twists your old landscape

  with a new device.

  and every field has grown

  a strange and flowering pit

  where I must try the blind

  and final trick of youth.

  Guadalquivir

  Here on this desert plain

  the fields are dust,

  strangled by wind,

  burnt by the quicklime sun.

  But where the river’s tongue

  scoops out its channel deep

  across the iron land

  trees grow, and leaves

  of vivid green

  force back the baking air.

  Fish and small birds

  do strike with diamond mouths

&n
bsp; the windows of the water,

  while memories of song

  and flowers flow

  along the slender cables

  of the mud.

  So to the wires of love

  do my limbs leap,

  so does your finger draw

  across my arid breast

  torrents of melting snow

  on threads of seed.

  The Wild Trees

  O the wild trees of my home,

  forests of blue dividing the pink moon,

  the iron blue of those ancient branches

  with their berries of vermilion stars.

  In that place of steep meadows

  the stacked sheaves are roasting,

  and the sun-torn tulips

  are tinders of scented ashes.

  But here I have lost

  the dialect of your hills,

  my tongue has gone blind

  far from their limestone roots.

  Through trunks of black elder

  runs a fox like a lantern,

  and the hot grasses sing

  with the slumber of larks.

  But here there are thickets

  of many different gestures,

  torn branches of brick and steel

  frozen against the sky.

  O the wild trees of home

  with their sounding dresses,

  locks powdered with butterflies

  and cheeks of blue moss.

  I want to see you rise

  from my brain’s dry river,

  I want your lips of wet roses

  laid over my eyes.

  O fountains of earth and rock,

  gardens perfumed with cucumber,

  home of secret valleys

  where the wild trees grow.

  Let me return at last

  to your fertile wilderness

  to sleep with the coiled fernleaves

  in your heart’s live stone.

  Christmas Landscape

  Tonight the wind gnaws

  with teeth of glass,

  the jackdaw shivers

  in caged branches of iron,

  the stars have talons.