___________________________________________________________________________
CAUGHT IN THE NET 102 - POETRY BY
GEOFFREY HEPTONSTALL
Series Editor - Jim Bennett for The Poetry Kit -
www.poetrykit.org
___________________________________________________________________________
You can join the CITN mailing list at
-
http://www.poetrykit.org/pkl/index.htm
and following the links for Caught in the Net.
Submissions for this series of Featured poets is open, please
see instruction in afterword at the foot of this mail.
_________________________________________________________________
|
In a healthy state They learn another language Where every word is critical. Now consider Roman laughter. The Neapolitan face is cautious. Venetians calculate. Florentines avoid a gawper’s gaze. Sorrentinos sing proudly Among their own.
from; Answered Prayers by Geoffrey Heptonstall |
________________________________________________________________
CONTENTS
1 - BIOGRAPHY
2 – POETRY
OCEAN WAVES
LA BELLE ET LA BETE
RECREATION GROUND
VERTICAL EXPRESSIONS
SEA AND
SIREN WATER
ANSWERED PRAYERS
A
LATE MEMORIAL
3 - AFTERWORD
___________________________________________________________________________
1 – BIOGRAPHY: Geoffrey Heptonstall
A Contributing Writer at Contemporary Review, in 2011 I also published stories in Cerise Press, Litro and Sunk Island Review. Poetry has recently appeared, or is about to appear, in Adirondack Review, The Bow Wow Shop, Decanto, Enigma, Incandescent, Inclement, International Literary Quarterly, Living Poets, London Grip, The London Magazine, The Pen, 10x10, Turbulence, The Third Way and The Write Place at the Write Time. Essays and reviews have also been published recently in The Bow Wow Shop, Cerise Press, The London Magazine, Prole, and The Tablet. A poetry reading I did in July is available as a podcast from 105fm.
______________________________________________________________
2 - POETRY
OCEAN WAVES
Ocean waves
Are broken
Where she walks
In shimmering silver.
The channel waters flow
In relentless rhythm,
The infinite spirit of asking:
Who hears among the angels
The music of the stones
That stand before the tide,
And of the stars
That guide her homeward?
.
LA BELLE ET LA BETE
Her innocence he found enveloping:
He did not want her revealed
As another naked woman
For the world to see.
Beauty was to be his private pleasure,
In silken adornment
Her presence invited him,
More than the fruit itself
That he could take at any time,
Devour, and so be alone again.
He woke from dreams in disappointment,
For love had made him imagine
That he might sleep again,
And wake in him another.
In his nights she was high born,
An African princess
Adorned in ivory
Cool against her charcoal skin.
Her dreams were of hunters
With weathered faces before the fire
In forest depths where cascading water
Flowed in perpetual torrent.
Every shadow was a stranger
To be stilled by sweet sounds.
He called out her name
In the wild, entangled in thorns.
Something was seeking him.
One word alone was spoken.
When the silence was broken
In the clear light of morning
The door of her chamber opened
At the gasp she gave of love.
RECREATION
GROUND
The tall ships sail past all conjecture.
Soon they shall be horizon,
And no more.
As for the clouds,
We shall pass through them
When at last we make our leap.
By the nettled grass with brambles
An awkward child – still and smiling –
Is looking upward,
Arms outstretched.
Somewhere in him is a memory
Of the games he plays with the moon.
We fly with balloons in the park
A blind man sells from the shade.
Perfect days are rare, he says.
But he will not stand in the sun.
His world is vague, almost shapeless.
Only the closest things exist.
Wishing him well from the sky,
We dream in sunlight of summer things.
And for sure the monstrous mouth opens
To devour all it sees of innocence.
VERTICAL
EXPRESSIONS
Of the things I have abandoned
May be included cities –
Small ones of a kind
A mind may easily outgrow.
There are people of a kind
Never to be met again.
They have passed by,
Smiling at my memory lack.
Recognition comes at a cost
That shall ask why?
And I must answer
What makes the world change?
Interesting cities we discover
On the margin,
At a border,
By an ocean.
Island cities.
Somewhere in history,
Forested ruins,
Serpentine cities.
Alligator places.
There they live many lives,
Enabling survival.
Fear and shame can hide away.
Every day another persona
Walks the same side street.
No-one notices what they see.
Some distance from my mind
The rising city’s horizons:
Pale silhouette.
Celestial.
Abstract.
This real city.
And walled within the civilized difference
The descant of choristers,
Preserved in patterns of stone
So that histories speak
In several tongues,
Each thinking the others barbarous.
There are old incantations
Of wounds that words never heal.
This is a city of conflicts
Made quaint by time alone.
Though something serious is here
With the years inside revealed.
The rumours pass from hand to hand.
The streets of a city are whispers.
Consider the hope of the hanged man,
Or a traveller on whom the fragments fall.
SEA AND
The mariner in him is awake.
There is a Moon
Cradling his memory
Of the other island.
His thoughts are flying
Silently while she sleeps.
The Western sky is velvet –
He thinks of lichened stones.
At home lamps are lit
In darkened windows.
Dust gathers daily,
Waiting for the rain.
Fishermen sail on the calm,
Hoping the wind will change.
Out there many things happen
While we are held in dreams.
At dawn the traveller
Is ready to sail elsewhere.
The sea expects no less from him.
From the shore she wades to the rock.
The current is strong
In the deepening water.
She is sure to drown
Unless he wakes her.
But on this morning
She is an island.
He stirs beside her.
A hand is reaching
Toward her waking
To the child who became
The man who sails away,
Returning for certain each dawn.
SIREN WATER
The fourth part was water
where no venturer had dared,
or none returned to tell.
There was a paradise drowned.
The ancient books give hint
of maps consumed by fire,
or lost at sea -
he more likely course.
In his dreams of redemption
the admiral had found
And here especially,
but there also,
the blind watchman passes.
On winding steps he taps
the rhythm of uncharted tides.
No Odysseus can evade for ever
the echo of everything
imagined in history.
The siren sounds safe haven.
A mutiny averted by sight of paradise.
The flowers that fall in the flood,
then drown in the deep
are sure to wake, recalled
as garlands for beguiled sailors.
An island is defined by water.
These rocks are as they are
because the sea surrounds them.
They are never silent.
Oceans have seen empires interred
by another enchantment.
‘Yet be assured
what we have found
is our dominion
of everything under heaven.
We are the ships that sail
on God-given water.’
Towards the shore he stumbles,
the better to hear her singing.
‘Seigneurs,’ he says,
‘I am enchanted.’
The city tremors before the truth:
We imagine elegance in the making.
Elegance is artifice,
Though the artifice tremors
Because down lies the disordered
Before all that is water.
Beneath the stone is water.
And the city is a ruin,
And the beauty is a ruin
In the making.
Beauty is disordered.
The stone beneath will survive.
Truth lies down,
Though these stones will survive
Because these stones happened.
All that we imagine happened.
ANSWERED
PRAYERS
Before the revolution
There came a year of silences
After dictators had stolen away.
The streets were clear
Of constant alarm.
An entire army disappeared.
The revellers found sleep
Beneath weeping statues
Of magnificent kings
Mourning the many martyrs.
Now there are to be none
Dying before their time.
When the people found their mouths
They were smiling like window panes,
And laughter was opening doors.
*
According to Pessoa
We are shadows.
Thinking of his city,
Surely he was mindful
Of the way
In and out of history,
An expectant traveller
In a vacant museum.
A cruel legacy
Eve n now weighs down,
Bred in the bone
Of a deference defining
A beggar’s glance
At a velvet gown.
*
In Holub’s world we are symptoms:
The poet doctors a disease,
A common condition
No-one dare mention,
For no cure is found
Before the physician dies.
In a healthy state
They learn another language
Where every word is critical.
Now consider Roman laughter.
The Neapolitan face is cautious.
Venetians calculate.
Florentines avoid a gawper’s gaze.
Sorrentinos sing proudly
Among their own.
But Romans are in carnival,
Always prepared for excess.
Behind a sacred smile
Is a citizen’s laughter,
Unmasked, fat-faced,
In good heart and rude health.
Before the revolution
Are the silken intrigues
Of inquisitions
And other mysteries.
Before the revolution
Is an absence.
Poetasters praise
All that never is.
Nothing will be
Without harmony.
A LATE
MEMORIAL
Those dreams were sung by everyone
Drinking metaphor as spoken
By several personae,
Each with his name.
Later in the early hours
He confesses the ice
Complements a bourbon dawn,
Smiling at the thought of everything
Waking to hear the well remembered.
Let us whisper
The proper tea values
Of English princes
Shakespeared by a Harvard man
So far from dream demons,
Knowing those neighbours:
They had a common source.
Approaching them, he died.
_____________________________________________
3 - Afterword
Email Poetry Kit -
info@poetrykit.org - if you would like
to tell us what you think.
We are looking for other poets to feature in
this series, and are open to submissions. Please send one poem and a short
bio to - info@poetrykit.org
Thank you for taking the time to read Caught in the Net. Our other magazine s
are Transparent Words ands Poetry Kit Magazine, which are webzines on the Poetry Kit site and this can be found at -
http://www.poetrykit.org/