.................................
Pull
.................................

It's happening more and more, I've found -
This tendency to stare
Away, into the deep background,
Into another, far somewhere.

Most recently, over summer-pie,
At a dinner-party table,
I felt the pull of the silent, night sky
And was, suddenly, unable

To sustain eye contact with my host,
My gaze drawn past his shoulder,
Through window-glass, thin air, the ghost
Of a quartered moon. An older

Impulse than the blood-pull of tides
Drew me to sparkling stars, out where -
Between their pulsing glitter - lies
Unending emptiness. Nowhere.

 
.................................
Chapel (1962)
.................................

blue slate bethel,
brimming with obedients,
where a bespectacled, shining man
orates from the witness-box,
slung high - like a crow's nest -
over Sunday shirts.

as the pouch is passed
hushedly from one to another,
like a whispered accusation,
and coin is dropped,
a sense of something odd -
they are paying this man to frighten them.

      I am 12 and on the lip of something,
      already clutching
      at the sparkling decade streaming towards me.

unnoticed light pours across ash pews
from stained glass prisms,
silence dutifully observed
until we stand for hymns
and a balding railway clerk
battles with the pumped organ,

the women's voices shrill, fragile,
the men's, low, harmonic -
the children do not know the words
and gaze about, abstractedly -
the pastor, in his raised chariot,
beams, bellows known sequences.

      I am released from the ritual
      by a rush of anticipation,
      by something almost within reach.

the children remove
to a cramped piano-room
where the railway-clerk's spinster daughter
speaks and sings of joy
while the children shuffle, shift,
in heat, on hard chairs.

back, now, inside the chantry
the flock sits with eyes downcast,
dust-motes drift through slow, yellow light;
the soothsayer descends to handshake.
the sheep are dipped,
the weekly inoculation complete.

      Untouched by it all,
      I sense things swelling,
      broadening into new growth
      and all that that will bring.

.................................
Trevor Hewett
.................................

 
Copyright © Trevor Hewett
November 2000

...a poem in this room by Ruth E. Foley...
here there be dragons
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