Dandelion Clocks             

 

New Arrival

​

Thoughts from a Caravan, After an Autumn Gale

 

Music Box

 

 

Dandelion Clocks

 

“How easy it is to make a ghost.”

                      Keith Douglas.

 

While dandelions tell their feathered time,

Tired soldiers cross the meadow under heat.

The youth in the gun-sight cannot be aware

How light has turned his hair to shining down.

He sees his girl back home,—her naked lips

Are only naked now, because they blow.

Her lips are shining red, yet so exposed,

He has to turn his head. The sniper swears,

But softly. No one hears. The head turns back,

The mind turns back… “Three days ago, no more,

She wore her dreaming eyes and that white dress.

She blew until the grey smoke formed a drift,

And counted time away with naked lips.”

 

Gary Bills

in collection The Ridiculous Nests of the Heart, 2003,

bluechrome, ISBN 1-904781-03-9;

published in Orbis, 126 (winner of readers' popularity poll, issue 127)

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New Arrival

 

When, from sleep, your fingers close on air,

What image from the day is held so surely?

Perhaps you see a swallow tilt and turn

Above your cot, as herons curse in wonder,

And you catch it, with a gesture and a thought.

No matter that we count your months on fingers,

Those eyes express the confidence of wisdom,

As if the deal is flowing through your mind

And all you find, you study in your dreams.

 

Of course, there’s much to grasp and much to love:

Your parents’ voices; laughter from our table,

And river talk outside the pub at evening.

Already damp is rising from those fields

And even scent may have corrupted breath.

The moon is old; a fox will cough beneath it;

But you must rest, not troubled by these things,

As one who travels far from Adam’s garden,

Out of silence, to a word. One word will do.

 

Gary Bills

in collection The Echo and the Breath, 2001,

Peterloo, ISBN 1871471869

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Thoughts from a Caravan, After an Autumn Gale

 

Sometimes, I swear the landscape walks by night.

That hill,—a road-kill dog with fur of frost;

And barrow serpents, coiled round bones, awake

Together, to party with the giants.

Then boats are nudged from moorings, and caravans

Are shaken to creaks by club-callused hands.

Outside, the stomp-stomp-stomp of great bare feet.

When morning dares to light the heaving Malverns,

The sun is a poor artist, who struggles

To fix pigments on the dragon’s grey back,

Only leaving map-like splodges here and there

The colour of dried blood, Arthurian wounds,

In dips, on curves, as shadows move across;

And cows kneel down in fields, before such rain.

 

Gary Bills

Winner, ex aequo, Poetry on the Lake "Bill Winter Award”, 2003,

and published in the Festival’s anthology, Hic Et Nunc.

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Music Box

 

All lives are wounded by the pins of air

Because the earth, in spinning, rolls us on

Towards the hidden point in every wind.

We cry alone, as part of one great song,

And God is dancing,—somewhere God is dancing,

Because the notes together make him drunk.

The tune he wrote, the world he wound to turn,

The silent people, standing to be hurt,

Are pieces in a pastime, not a plan.

He worships the mechanics, not the outcome,

He sets the bars and takes away all choice,

He hears the orchestration, not the pain.

Without him, tongues could shape no shrieking truth.

His complex, pricking tortures give us voice.

 

Gary Bills

published in HQ Poetry Magazine, joint issue, nos. 31 and 32