Laurie Lee Selected Poems Read online

  Through every sun I hear

  The chiming aconite.

  By husk and darkness fed

  My appetite grows keen,

  By buried lusts made lean

  Child-tongued I suck sweet bread

  And kiss the virgin green.

  I, from the well new-drawn,

  With root and flower am crowned -

  Drowsed, but not drowned.

  The Easter-father blesses with a lamb;

  The son is not disowned.

  So shall I know, come fall,

  Come flesh returning frail,

  This shriving shall not fail:

  The green blood flushing at the heart

  Anoints the prodigal.

  Sunken Evening

  The green light floods the city square –

  A sea of fowl and feathered fish,

  Where squalls of rainbirds dive and splash

  And gusty sparrows chop the air.

  Submerged, the prawn-blue pigeons feed

  In sandy grottoes round the Mall,

  And crusted lobster-buses crawl

  Among the fountain’s silver weed.

  There, like a wreck, with mast and bell,

  The torn church settles by the bow,

  While phosphorescent starlings stow

  Their mussel shells along the hull.

  The oyster-poet, drowned but dry,

  Rolls a black pearl between his bones;

  The typist, trapped by telephones,

  Gazes in bubbles at the sky.

  Till, with the dark, the shallows run,

  And homeward surges tide and fret –

  The slow night trawls its heavy net

  And hauls the clerk to Surbiton.

  The Pollard Beech

  Blue-pencil knife, to keep it brief,

  Edits the sprawled loquacious beech,

  And clips each hyperbolic leaf

  To fit the city’s stumpy speech.

  Till, like a slogan, trim and terse,

  It stands and sums up in a word

  The gist of that once epic verse

  Whose every branch rhymed with a bird.

  Song by the Sea

  Girl of green waters, liquid as lies,

  Cool as the calloused snow,

  From my attic brain and prisoned eyes

  Draw me and drown me now.

  O suck me down to your weeds and fates,

  Green horizontal girl,

  And in your salt-bright body breed

  My death’s dream-centred pearl.

  For locked alive in the brutal bone

  I feel my lust of love

  Rolling her porpoise thighs alone

  Where the tropic channels move.

  Her smooth mouth moons among the tides

  Sipping the milky fishes,

  Her fallow, shallow breasts pile up

  Tight with my secret wishes.

  Girl of green waters, liquid as light,

  Beneath your skin of suns

  My frights and frenzies moan asleep,

  My deeds are skeletons.

  So suck me down to your bed of sand,

  Dilute my serpent blood,

  Then lift the stain from my crimson hand

  And sink it in your flood.

  Long Summer

  Gold as an infant’s humming dream,

  Stamped with its timeless, tropic blush,

  The steady sun stands in the air

  And burns like Moses’ holy bush.

  And burns while nothing it consumes;

  The smoking branch but greener grows,

  The crackling briar, from budded lips,

  A floating stream of blossom blows.

  A daze of hours, a blaze of noons,

  Licks my cold shadow from the ground;

  A flaming trident rears each dawn

  To stir the blood of earth around.

  Unsinged beneath the furnace sky

  The frenzied beetle runs reborn,

  The ant his antic mountain moves,

  The rampant ram rewinds his horn.

  I see the crazy bees drop fat

  From tulips ten times gorged and dry;

  I see the sated swallow plunge

  To drink the dazzled waterfly.

  A halo flares around my head,

  A sunflower flares across the sun,

  While down the summer’s seamless haze

  Such feasts of milk and honey run

  That lying with my orchid love,

  Whose kiss no frost of age can sever,

  I cannot doubt the cold is dead,

  The gold earth turned to good – forever.

  Scot in the Desert

  All day the sand, like golden chains,

  The desert distance binds;

  All day the crouching camels groan,

  Whipped by the gritty winds.

  The mountain, flayed by sun, reveals

  Red muscles, wounds of stone,

  While on its face the black goats swarm

  And bite it to the bone.

  Here light is death; on every rock

  It stretches like a cry,

  Its fever burns up every bush,

  It drinks each river dry.

  It cracks with thirst the creviced lip,

  It fattens black the tongue,

  It turns the storm cloud into dust,

  The morning dew to dung.

  Men were not made to flourish here,

  They shroud their heads and fly -

  Save one, who stares into the sun

  With sky-blue British eye.

  Who stares into the zenith sun

  And smiles and feels no pain,

  Blood-cooled by Calvin, mist and bog,

  And summers in the rain.

  To Matthew Smith

  Fused with the minerals of sun and earth,

  spurting with smoke of flowers,

  oil is incendiary on your moving brush;

  your hands are jets

  that crack the landscape’s clinker and draw forth

  its buried incandescence.

  These molten moments brazed in field and flesh

  burn out for us,

  but you can stand and nail within a frame

  the fire we mourn,

  can catch the pitchpine hour and keep its flame

  pinned at the point of heat.

  Our summer’s noon you pour into a mould,

  a rose its furnace;

  through green and blue its burning seeds unfold,

  through night and day:

  raked by your eyes the paint has never cooled.

  Cock-Pheasant

  Gilded with leaf-thick paint; a steady

  Eye fixed like a ruby rock;

  Across the cidrous banks of autumn

  Swaggers the stamping pheasant-cock.

  The thrusting nut and bursting apple

  Accompany his jointed walk,

  The creviced pumpkin and the marrow

  Bend to his path on melting stalk.

  Sure as an Inca priest or devil,

  Feathers stroking down the corn,

  He blinks the lively dust of daylight,

  Blind to the hunter’s powder-horn.

  For me, alike, this flushed October –

  Ripe, and round-fleshed, and bellyfull –

  Fevers me fast but cannot fright, though

  Each dropped leaf shows the winter’s skull.

  T
own Owl

  On eves of cold, when slow coal fires,

  rooted in basements, burn and branch,

  brushing with smoke the city air;

  When quartered moons pale in the sky,

  and neons glow along the dark

  like deadly nightshade on a briar;

  Above the muffled traffic then

  I hear the owl, and at his note

  I shudder in my private chair.

  For like an augur he has come

  to roost among our crumbling walls,

  his blooded talons sheathed in fur.

  Some secret lure of time it seems

  has called him from his country wastes

  to hunt a newer wasteland here.

  And where the candelabra swung,

  bright with the dancers’ thousand eyes,

  now his black, hooded pupils stare.

  And where the silk-shoed lovers ran

  with dust of diamonds in their hair,

  he opens now his silent wing,

  And, like a stroke of doom, drops down,

  and swoops across the empty hall,

  and plucks a quick mouse off the stair...

  Home From Abroad

  Far-fetched with tales of other worlds and ways,

  My skin well-oiled with wines of the Levant,

  I set my face into a filial smile

  To greet the pale, domestic kiss of Kent.

  But shall I never learn? That gawky girl,

  Recalled so primly in my foreign thoughts,

  Becomes again the green-haired queen of love

  Whose wanton form dilates as it delights.

  Her rolling tidal landscape floods the eye

  And drowns Chianti in a dusky stream;

  The flower-flecked grasses swim with simple horses,

  The hedges choke with roses fat as cream.

  So do I breathe the hayblown airs of home,

  And watch the sea-green elms drip birds and shadows,

  And as the twilight nets the plunging sun

  My heart’s keel slides to rest among the meadows.

  Apples

  Behold the apples’ rounded worlds:

  juice-green of July rain,

  the black polestar of flowers, the rind

  mapped with its crimson stain.

  The russet, crab and cottage red

  burn to the sun’s hot brass,

  then drop like sweat from every branch

  and bubble in the grass.

  They lie as wanton as they fall,

  and where they fall and break,

  the stallion clamps his crunching jaws,

  the starling stabs his beak.

  In each plump gourd the cidery bite

  of boys’ teeth tears the skin;

  the waltzing wasp consumes his share,

  the bent worm enters in.

  I, with as easy hunger, take

  entire my season’s dole;

  welcome the ripe, the sweet, the sour,

  the hollow and the whole.

  The Abandoned Shade

  Walking the abandoned shade

  of childhood’s habitations,

  my ears remembering chime,

  hearing their buried voices.

  Hearing original summer,

  the birdlit banks of dawn,

  the yellow-hammer beat of blood

  gilding my cradle eyes.

  Hearing the tin-moon rise

  and the sunset’s penny fall,

  the creep of frost and weep of thaw

  and bells of winter robins.

  Hearing again the talking house

  and the four vowels of the wind,

  and midnight monsters whispering

  in the white throat of my room.

  Season and landscape’s liturgy,

  badger and sneeze of rain,

  the bleat of bats, and bounce of rabbits

  bubbling under the hill:

  Each old and echo-salted tongue

  sings to my backward glance;

  but the voice of the boy, the boy I seek,

  within my mouth is dumb.

  Bombay Arrival

  Slow-hooved across the carrion sea,

  Smeared by the betel-spitting sun,

  Like cows the Bombay islands come

  Dragging the mainland into view.

  The loose flank loops the rocky bone,

  The light beats thin on horn and hill;

  Still breeds the flesh for hawks, and still

  The Hindu heart drips on a stone.

  Around the wide dawn-ridden bay

  The waters move their daggered wings;

  The dhow upon its shadow clings –

  A dark moth pinioned to the day.

  False in the morning, screened with silk,

  Neat as an egg the Town draws near,

  False as a map her streets appear

  Ambling, and odourless as milk.

  Until she holds us face to face –

  A crumbling mask with bullet pores,

  A nakedness of jewels and sores

  Clutched with our guilt in her embrace.

  On Beacon Hill

  Now as we lie beneath the sky,

  Prone and knotted, you and I,

  Visible at last we are

  To each nebula and star.

  Here as we kiss, the bloodless moon

  Stirs to our rustling breath; Saturn

  Leans us a heavy-lidded glance

  And knows us for his revenants.

  Arching, our bodies gather light

  From suns long lost to human sight,

  Our lips contain a dust of heat

  Drawn from the burnt-out infinite.

  The speechless conflict of our hands

  Ruffles the red Mars’ desert sands

  While coupled in our doubled eyes

  Jupiter dishevelled lies.

  Now as we loose the knots of love,

  Earth at our back and sky above,

  Visible at last we gather

  All that is, except each other.

  Shot Fox

  He lay in April

  like a shaft of autumn

  reddening the leaves,

  his tail a brush-fire or

  a meteor burning

  the white-starred wood.

  Choked he had fallen

  in mid-thrust of air,

  taking the brittle asteroids across his shoulders

  – space-hot, a leaden shower –

  cutting him down.

  Stark as a painted board

  the checked limbs wrote

  his leaping epitaph,

  where he, all power, had made

  his last free race –

  stopped by the gun.

  Now stretched, an arc of fur,

  death drinks his lungs,

  and in his eyes,

  arrowed towards his den,

  a blunted light…

  The child first found him –

  dropping her hot-held flowers

  for better things;

  fell on one knee and stroked

  his bitter teeth,

  glad of her luck.

  Girl Under Fig-Tree

  Slim girl, slow burning

  quick to run

  under the fig-tree’s

  loaded fruits.

  Skin-cold like them

  your wet teeth spread,

  parting pink


  effervescent lips.

  When I hold you here

  valleys of fruit and flesh

  bind me

  now wet, now dry.

  While on your eyes, the cool

  green-shaded lids

  close on the

  wells of summer.

  Slim girl, slow burning

  quick to rise

  between question

  and loaded promise.

  If I take you, peel you

  against the noonday dark,

  blind wasps

  drill my hands like stars.

  Night Speech

  (for a Shakespeare Festival)

  The bright day is done

  and we are for the dark;

  but not for death.

  We are, as eyelids fall

  and night’s silk rises,

  stalled in our sleep

  to watch the written dark,

  brighter than day,

  rephrase our stuttered past.

  This fur-lined hour

  makes princes of each wretch

  whose day-bed wasted,

  points each lax tongue

  to daggered brightness,

  says what we could not say.

  Awake, we stumbled; now

  dream-darting truth

  homes to each flying wish;

  and love replays its hand,

  aims its dark pinions nobly,

  even its treacheries…

  Night, that renews, re-orders

  day’s scattered dust,

  shake now from sleep’s long lips

  all we have lost and done,

  stars, pearls and leaded tears

  on our closed eyes;

  and we are for the dark

  Stork in Jerez

  White arched, in loops of silence, the bodega

  Lies drowsed in spices, where the antique woods,

  Piled in solera, dripping years of flavour,

  Distil their golden fumes among the shades.

  In from the yard - where barrels under figtrees

  Split staves of sunlight from the noon’s hot glare –

  The tall stork comes; black-stilted, sagely-witted,

  Wiping his careful beak upon the air.

  He is a priestlike presence, he inscribes

  Sharp as a pen his staid and written dance,