By JEREMY HILTON.
THERE ARE BEAUTIFUL places on earth where
nobody is spared - the
boundary, the high crossing
unmet ambition
downwind of the mountain
no trembling fountain that
does not stretch the chasm
fling from its rim a river
that must start somewhere
only to merge in the salt destiny
of mankind that
water goes nowhere
underground holes black in
the geomorphic plates Kom
Peak, mountain of phantoms mists on the
summit always
mist on the camera lens
the photographer’s retina there is no
poetics without ethos only cold
constellations and distant barking dogs
♦
THERE IS A need to mourn Marielle Franco
felled by a 9mm hired assassin’s bullet she
fought for the favela dwellers in Rio
for women’s rights, for gays and for
black men, young and poor, targeted
by the local militia in a city
seeming more and more like
a militarised police state praise Marielle
then heed the coffins of yourselves, heed
the unspoken mists of daylight
fulmars following trawlers flatiron
clouds that seem to mourn the earth
which tips to overheating
like cracks in dry mud
widening
♦
SLANT OF SUN on a slate sea a thousand gulls on a field spread with manure are put to flight with their raucous calls, red clay slopes the land drains slowly arthritic rootlets veining back up through grit from the earth hour and its dark candle-lit we reach forward into the light forward beyond oceans’ reaches we scan for cedar mountain the dripping understory times a span of coast both directions but no sightline to the shore below ghost cliffs to west eastwards crumbling bluffs and the long line of amber shingle ♦ WEEKS OF GALEWASH, fields turned to marshes hard-paths puddled deep smoky water, cave art dated further back into pre-history, across a boggy heath two dartford warblers flit the higher sprigs, the density of gorse heavy-laden our nature when crowned crowned with obsidian that cutting spark that shard which the meso-Americans treasured for tools aligning their giant avenues towards the Pleiades night’s smoky lake obscure tenancy skyward, caravanserai streams strong along the Silk Road crossing the Oxus, smoky river that plunging from Pamirs, parts the plains of all Asia no we saw no hawfinches nor lone cattle egret ♦
THIS IDYLL OF afternoon prescience where
gulls glide following fulmars the long bass
of ocean breaking to foam and later rain
patters the windows cleaved meanders of
water through sliding shade, as the new
rivers carved across the Argentine pampas
when forests and grassland give way to
soil too loosed and impoverished by soya
by quick profit by greed – with the
emigrants through those hemlocks through
the thorny and inhospitable marsh where
the winding Pilcomayo floods shallow as
the tide over moonlit shingle
♦ A RAGGED WINDOW in dark cumulus heaped up like granite like foam reveals bright pale cloud behind, a sliver of silver, and departing sun painting the rims golden this place stitching wonders through the terrible – April’s faint sunlight diffusing misty white cloud everywhere godwits both species swishing and prodding shallow estuary river past the map’s border, on banks fogged, crumbling, back upriver to Thebes this place of weather and night switching its town-lights on, the tug of the harbour, the tug of the border was strong among the river dragonflies the ocean ravaging the geology of cliffs, jackdaws writing on the sky in black ♦ A RAINY MIST, a grainy light not quite darkness or light shrouding the everywhere birds, gearing up for nest-time for sex chasing spectres or each other, herring -gulls on roof ridges magpies into the tallest tree blackbirds – but both are males! – across grass in the era of the swollen and spreading they have led the watchers to shadows and bare earth, timber through fake tunnels two different wildernesses overseen by the same light woman at the cusp of history standing in a portal, now ghost now mortal ravens swooping low through coastal scrub ♦ GIRAFFES TALL in a truck ferried in groups of seven across the river Nile two wheatears rest on a lonely hilltop a crossroads appears twice in the mythical mind waterlogged ground drying fulmars gliding grey, straight-winged – water that doesn’t change, oil discoveries threatening traditional habitats of giraffes in Uganda, ground east of the Nile loosened by storm and chainsaw, poachers with AK-49s shooting at helicopters at elephants no hiding-place in last year’s dead brake spindles territory into maps ♦ ALBATROSS CHICKS ON Crozet weeks waiting the return, sailing on the wind many many miles above an angry ocean the seabird’s cry comes from the beginning of the world Percy Kelly painting the pitheads and harbour walls in the core-blue coals, the hoarding of a life-time’s work concussion on no one’s clock, the generosity of risk, of now two little owls, spotted pots on a rock ledge dark patterns from the outside ♦
THEY STALK THE narrow ways of nether heaths
to the low stream with carp, it is not our
moon, nor stolen from the sky’s
cumulus, the haste of hail-showers
shooting through a burn of heavy heart
lays low the pulse silken white tendrils
thrown across our sky shy prods on mud
or margin the call
of curlews or the whimbrels’ scatter winging
to northern outposts numbers falling a mark
on the marsh of this shore
this harbour vast and
silent, islanded, tide ripple rolling
moon glaze
♦
MUTE SISTER THIS one finest lost thing
in the long trail-blister of the
river-crossings, the girls snatched
for the greedy gods a
sprung and beautiful thing
like a singer’s held note as the
foraging seabirds stray further
from their nests when warming seas send
sand-eels toward the pole
cedars spindling mist-drift through
some infant ice-age there is
no beauty but gold
tarnished to industrial rust
across the thieving container-ports
gluttony of nations, breakout from
metalled malice and tornado famines borders of
hard-wire and high cameras the filmy sun
banding
to mud-red day’s end
♦
THE PRODDING WHIMBREL on the pebbly
shore
retreat of the tide to cloud’s curtain
the undercurrent
of oceans overheats red-valleyed,
magnetised oasis of the whimbrel nomadding
north to
polar ice-melt
always there is some shift of air always
there are rivers flooding from
deluge, tsunami seas encroaching on cliffs
on lowlands the world wishing to hold firm
against that instant misreading
Author’s note
These poems borrow extensively from other writers, always in a spirit of homage, most notably from Cantilena by John Peck and The Magic Door by Chris Torrance; also, from Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams) and Kapka Kassabova (Border). My thanks and appreciation to the writers concerned. —JH
♦
Jeremy Hilton is the author of twelve books, most recently Lighting Up Time: Selected Poems 1991 – 2004. The full sequence of Fulmar’s Wings (75 poems) is due from Knives Forks & Spoons Press in 2021. A novel, A Sound Like Angels Weeping was published by Brimstone Press in 2012. Hilton was born near Manchester in 1945 and has degrees in English Literature and in Social Work. From 1972 until 1998 he served as a social worker, mostly in Worcestershire. Between 2007 and 2017, he studied music composition, and completed a number of contemporary chamber music pieces, some of which have been performed. In 2017, he moved to Bridport in Dorset with his partner, the writer Kim Taplin.
