Poems of Botany and Revolution

Townhall clock

clocktower shock flower, stray

moschatel can’t tell the hours

but may make your day

24.3.06

Breakthrough

The trees prevail, while

woodland plants survive as dark ideas of themselves

beneath the beech and holly and oaks,

beneath the leaf mould soaked in surface run off

and beneath the soil.

They bide their time.

Woodland is defined by a dominant autocracy,

but who could deny that some day, some year

the canopy might fail,

that soft silk-coated petals, white and yellow,

might master the forest floor with their brilliance?

On a given sign each spring the ground erupts

with the singleminded madness of their chemistry;

a brief flash flood of colour

washes out the greys and browns –

wood sorrel, celandine, anemone –

till the fresh olive green of  tree top leaves

poisons the petals with darkness.

But, what if ...

when the flowers break from cover the trees have

the sun in their eyes, not knowing who is for and against;

when they push in blindness to the surface

they have already planned the campaign;

what if they arrive with unity of purpose

and not in competition?

Could they then supersede the trees?

Spring flowers preserve their possibility unfailingly;

and each year dogs mercury comes and goes

in green obscurity,

ignominious, prepared.

21.7.93

Celandine

consider the quality of the celandine

like but unlike any yellow headed daub

on a green brown canvas:

star fingered

sheen wrapped for a while,

striking first for the sky

before woodland leaves,

first with their own light,

first of any buttercup to try,

first alive and first to die:

opportunist

in self sacrifice.

c1970

The names of trees 

Oak is open, round, hard leaved, defined.

Yew is definitive and true;

spruce is a usage that needs no excuses,

and larch is sparse, tall and solemn as Church.

Cedar and fir do not stir, but singly hold firm

as their silence returns to farthest purrs

in serried forest armies and hilltop stands.

Willow bends about to meet itself, silken,

unenclosed; the alder and osier more so.

Plane is plain and level flight

and pine is designed for take off,

powered by gentle detonation,

Birch and beech (one bleak, one deep)

are among the least secret of trees;

they burst like belishas on leafscapes

at once both bold and austere.

We claim what we name, so it’s simple to tell

that ash and elm lack the dash and consonant will

with which to resist the axe, or to match

the deadly facts that melt live cells;

the power is ours

when so much is heard in a word.

6.8.96

Rush 

“I’m in no rush,”

boasted the smug swamp water;

it paused in pools glazed

by glancing early sun,

and soothed away the solid root-clamped soil

to a soft enclosing velvet ooze.

Still and cool, the water

reckoned without osmotic pressure,

entertained no notion of root hair power

and its own dendritic destiny.

So in time came the xylem slide

upward to the sheathlike Juncus leaves.

When it hit the surface, sunlight blasted

its molecules to another state

of being, where, airborne and freefalling through

three dimensions, all semblance of control

evaporated, or so it transpired.

7.93

Dog’s mercury 

Everywhere it’s dogs mercury

that turns earth green, appears to be

a plant of continuity,

holding on all year, patiently.

But that spring thought’s a fallacy:

the more we look the less we see.

Then, March again, we’ll easily

dismiss its rediscovery. 

22.05.03

Primrose

Not the first to burst,

the primrose name refers to

light and earth, not words.

21.3.06

Snap 

An oak tree by the old canal has split in two;

the trunk has peeled apart from itself, almost to

the ground, revealing its heart, and branches weave

helpless gestures in the air. The cuneiform bark

is mossed, tangled rough and smooth, green and brown and black,

but inside the untoothed crack, in the bright clean rip

of drying wood, the sucrose surge survives; precious

tree life flows still, and grows somehow ridiculous.

You don’t see human beings splitting at the seams;

we’re far too flexible, too cunning, too untaut

to snap in two. Though we may grow stooped and crusted

we won’t stand still until we must – we are not exposed.

Though gruesome accidents and surgery may lop

our limbs, we don’t come apart; and though delving quacks

may laser-zap estranged cells which we cannot name,

you won’t see men and women let in wind and rain:

we’re more careful with intrusions, sooner with roofs,

we’re more aware of pain and wearing waterproofs.

Cities are for populations, places to stay

awake and safe in illumination, taking

work to survive in permanent daylight, stealing

each other in darkness for our recreation;

we don’t become dormant at the whim of seasons

we’ve surely no reason to store our years in rings,

we don’t need roots to stand, we’re free to dance and fly;

and we don’t hang around in the street when we die.

Hundreds pass by where the tree split, walking their dogs,

steering skips, dreaming or draining their loves away,

while the weather of experience stains the scar

and mosses come to soften broken surfaces,

cover its disaster, disguise the tree’s escape,

which so few of us could distinguish or explain.

27.10.97

Rock samphire

Office blocks soar like sheer sea cliffs.

traffic-waves wheel and wash about them;

while the crush of people piles and pulses,

crashing  at crossings with the undertow of cars.

We are rock samphire salad, scaling swaying heights,

clamped leech-like on ledges out of reach

defying dizzy depths – plants to die for.

4.4.02

Mushrooming

Autumn rain had come at last like revenge

after drought’s outrage, and the mountain took

its breath: this was the mushroom time of year

when they filed the hill-line searching the turf

together for its eerie fruit, and found none.

Where was the ragged dance of parasols

where were mind-melting red agarics?

Where would the pearls of oysters find their poise?

Had the long parching summer claimed the earth,

had the foetid air neutered every spore?

The woods yielded needles, the fields dry seeds

and knapweed brittle as parchment, despite

the rain. A quarry stabbed the valley side,

drawing red-grey rubble stains from the wound;

a distant reservoir shoved through the gloom,

narrower, browner now. Hidden in all

the usual places, mitochondria

made sly private plans, if they lived at all;

Beech trees were on the turn, their thin nuts fell;

a hairbell lingered, exposed and solitary;

foxglove flowers had all but turned to dust.

The mushroom party paced the pastureland

in edgy uncertainty, and still found none.

Was their search too early, was it too late?

How long should they stay? Was their job to wait?

A kestrel, killing doubt, swayed on the air

above them, holding out for vole and mouse;

and on every ancient surface meanwhile,

fungi are in fact consuming the world.

Might it be time to decide whether death

is better than the pain of survival?

must their purpose always be so much less

when there’s only fungus left to die for?

Spurge 

The spurge is a plant between

spurn and purge,

and not even either of these.

It sneaks its frequency into our lives

like fruit flies, moss and myth,

seemingly sexless, flowers

all the same as its leaves,

weak green till it wrinkles

and shrinks to winter’s nil.

Its strength is insignificance:

next year its seeds will

heave aside the earth and shoot these

fragile fleshy surfaces from

every unfilled vegetative space.

and when we least expect, this weed

of disturbance, ubiquitous, defiant,

will come again and then again,

all spur and surge. 

13.11.93 

Agrimony

little known

the flower

leans against hill air

holds nothing in its petals

but identity

dies slowly down without

decreasing

follows its seeds into

the earth

and goes again without name

10.9.68

Escape

the large evening primrose,

so called for its scent

late in the day,

frequently an escape:

comes like the seed of a tragic hero

to flower on wasteground

ignorant of docks and nettle –

the green flowers that face the autumn;

large evening primrose,

opening for something late in the day,

frequently an escape

7.69

Corporation daffodil

Judy by the riverside holds a corporation daffodil

lightly in her hand

as a gardening official rises from a nearby bed

to point an accusation at her

with a finger of his total unconcern;

her own suspicions of suspicion

pushes open morning guilt of things

against the river safety-fence

till Judy throws it all away.

Judy gazes longingly through her mind’s

preoccupation where it fell

and a daffodil lingers with her

decisive and helpless before it sinks

like any other illicit public plant

dropped into the stream –

something to be rid off, something she could keep.

Judy and the river toy with the hollow stem;

as naturally, she picked a blade of grass

a day ago sunbathing on her lawn

and broke its back with automatic fingers.

She senses petals softly

touching her imagination

but her hands are really empty

and lost yellow specks

widen across water,

and her hands really are empty

now that Judy finds

there’s something on her mind.

The theft-detected daffodil

disintegrates later as it floats away to meet

its private liquid microbes of decay;

but already with her thoughts

Judy tears the sepals from the unprotected flower head,

nakedly reveals the stigma,

obliterates the style,

while grains of pollen wrestle insensibly

to generate an embryonic understanding

of what she did last night. 

10.4.68

The examiner of grass

The examiner of grass

says it is all hard graft,

flounders in a lake of blades

and throws a glance behind his paunch

at the workaday monotony around.

Christ, do they know what it means

    to leave him alone!

He moves in a green sunsharpened glume,

close to the axil of his life,

specified, prominent, the smear on the slide –

awnless auricles, and exposed.

In the whole afternoon he moves only inches.

Jack-by-the-hedge

the shyness of wood sorrel isn’t sorrow;

it’s May, not “maybe” or dismay,

which lights the hedgerows here today;

it’s furze not cursed, and whin not lose,

when roadsides are alive with gorse;

the archangel’s not Gabriel but yellow.

the bulbs fill up with life to shine next year –

they’re daffodils, not death or ills,

which love the sun so much it spills,

and these are wood anemones –

not an enemy, not disease –

which seize the naked woodlands without fear.

flowers paint out the stains of earth’s decay:

it’s violets, not violence,

which colour hedgebanks with their scents,

then it’s heartsease, not a heart’s cease,

that catches our breath in the leas:

though we’ll still mourn, we will recall this day.

they’re bluebells, not church bells; the lady’s smock

and woodrush are too loose and fast

to mock; deadnettles are not past

when we come to pine by the stream’s edge

and find firm, strong jack-by-the-hedge,

with the spring which works the dandelion clock.

4.98

Refugees 

1: Migration

I’m not the first to travel north. Vagrants

came ten thousand years ago just behind

retreating ice, where outwash torrents gouged

out every crushed rock fragment, every grain,

and smeared the melted valleys with moraine,

The land was all abandonment behind,

an ice-scorched earth of broken bouldered plains,

bleached as bone and blistered in returning sun.

Then early moss and lichens climbed the chines,

till their chilled green and livid outlines milled

stark surfaces and crusted sand and stones.

Next, taking root in rock-flake lichen-rot,

the first frail alpine flowers cling-filmed the earth,

flat as slabs, their white-petalled power poised

to seed and survive. Sedges lodged in gravel;

spike roots staked down the docks and dandelions.

Pine, birch, juniper, willow, wilder trees,

all steered by warming air, by beak, by fur,

by foot, by gut now colonised the meres

and screes, a kilometre every year.

2: Invasion

They came as seeds or cattle feed, and spread

with trading ships, marched north on soldiers’ feet,

ranged strange as gypsies selling fragrances

or slaves on sun-baked Italian terraces.

These priceless spice racks and physician’s chests

filled cold damp Romano-British gardens –

with scents of marjoram and bay and balm,

mint to sooth after the pleasure of food,

fennel to calm, and midwife feverfew.

Their virtues and their bane were life and death,

as the gains of their benign invasion

inverted all the ordinary wars

and burned our browning territories green.

There is no context now, or history,

no Latin names, not even irony:

medicines can be made from plants, for free,

a scientist claims on daytime TV.

3. The spoils of war

They came north on naval ships, coasters, tramps

and merchantmen: leaves and seeds seized for crown

and country gents by Hooker, Wilson, Banks,

the hothouse Heroes of Herbaria

and all their hard plant-hunting hangers on.

No continent, no wilderness was meant

to go unplundered by these trainspotter

botanists and dumb name-swot collectors,

who thought they ought to pot the bloody lot,

and transport it home like pond-dipping kids

dripping on the floor, sure they’d be adored.

They spawned the so-called nurserymen, whose hauls

of mutant blooms loosed purses in suburban halls,

whose balsams, knotweeds, rhododendrons thralled

and then appalled a pliant gardening world –

plant-pimps who, like Frankensteins and Hydes, forced sex

on frail and innocent florescences.

Such science wasn’t mad enough for some:

meet Professor J Heslop Harrison

who, to be first to find new British plants,

dug up strange alpine rarities in France

and spliced them to unlikely crags on Rhum.

Today sane men are cleansing native weeds

with toxic sprays while splashing daffodils

too weird to be real down smart city streets.

We turn our backs and aliens attack –

defiant Himalayan balsam throws

it sneak hegemony up river banks

and outflanks us with tireless backward flows;

the caliphate of knotweed’s now so dire

brigades of landscape men are armed with fire.

Hampton Court and Chelsea stalk and taunt us

like spoiled and raucous brats who exalt us

to gawp and marvel at their ever dafter, crass

and inept shows, while what really sparks us

is springtime’s hedgerow rush of wild primrose.

4: Collateral damage

Few cold-blooded heroes of ice-age floes

resisted high on mountain peaks and grasped

at crevices of life above the snows:

these days of warming air may be their last.

Now we’re prepared to deal with climate change:

which desert xerophytes to put on show,

and who, when rivers flood, must take the blame.

Let’s hope catastrophe won’t come too slow.

Today ten million gardeners in cars

turn ecology on its pretty head

by cultivating town-edge shopping sheds

and importing plants from who-knows-how-far.

But in the unseen slipstream of our wheels,

the sweet warm carbon of our cars’ exhaust,

will enflame the thugs from overseas to feel

up native skirts and force fresh species north.

While borders flood with foreign DNA

migration’s not the cause but consequence

of what our landscapes and our gardens say:

“We despise your folly and your omnipotence.”

5. Reparations

I’m driving north again against the flow

while office girls and men of coal and steel

are sliding south since their jobs here have slipped

away on the nation’s tilted strata.

Down there the factories and houses slot

into a prefab land like Lego bricks;

here they are stones which hills and fields subsume 

and rivers probe, immovable, weighed down

by past certainties, outlasting markets. 

I’m travelling north through anaemic towns

where alien economies drain blood

and hope, where new synthetic marble malls,

in desperate pretence of southern health,

discount a scruffy end in car-free streets

of food banks, charities and boarded shops.

I’m unravelling northwards to crags and fells

on minor roads flushed and burnished

by rain, chasing down the swirling wake

of strangers – rosebay, ragwort, scurvygrass

– that hide in the back of traffic, pose threats                                          

to our history, and call in ancient debts.

It’s time we updated our strategies

for hating and creating refugees:

no one should take responsibility;

everyone will pay, but it won’t be me.

2015

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