Poems

Timothy Chappell

The Exiles

Still the blood is strong

There every foot of field-end matters,

each river-pool is itself;

every stone is a sacred standing stone,

every hill a sith of the old ones;

here each street is the same

for mile after mile.

It only feels like what they had cannot be lost.

It only feels abiding unchanging home.

The bulldozer and the eviction writ,

north and south, work the same.

They walked into London’s sameness

with heather-stalks still in their socks,

the plough-callus still on the insides of their thumbs,

the mark of the sheep-tick still fading behind the knee.

Kincardine O’Neil, Aberdeenshire, 7 July 2008

Sophocles, Trachiniae 1264-1278

Attendants, take him up. And pity on me,
Pity and compassion on my plight,

All while the unpitying gods indifferently
Watch these things unfold under their sight.
They make us and they claim the name of fathers
Then stand afar and watch our suffering.

No one knows what the future time will offer;
The present time, for us, means suffering,
And for the gods means shame;
It means worse than any human suffering
For him on whom this doom of anguish came.

Girl, come away, and leave this house behind.
New shapes of enormous death now fill your mind,
Novelties of agony, pain beyond all use—

And nothing in all this that is not Zeus.

26.6.08

Sunday Evening, Dundee Law

In dusk-glow at the War Memorial

dazed smokers lean on churning lurid cars,

review the week.

Beyond the huddled smirr-grey tenements,

amid the ancient chaos of the sea,

the Bell Rock starts its blink.

The Chinese lantern of a rain-fat cumulus

mirrored in still River

flows on by.

Always comes the rainbow, always, after storms,

the washed-clear and forgiven

cloud-lit sky.

9.3.08

Boxing Day Morning

Yesterday the feast

today the penance

yesterday the spree

today the dearth

yesterday reunions—ex-wife, ex-child, ex-brother—

today we lick new hurts,

old lovers who know too well where to wound each other.

The hint-gift tracksuit waits, but it’s too wet to bother.

A sea of wrapping-paper stretches door to hearth.

But lift your wine-furred eyes above the earth,

above our lost cold dawn, chill-drizzle-dim,

see Christ enthroned among the golden seraphim.

26.12.07

Christmas Wishes

By popular request

Captain Hook will replace his hook with a tickly feather duster

and pass around the gobstoppers with the Lost Boys.

As a seasonal gesture

the Daleks will change their war-cry to “Have a nice day”

and The Joker will actually tell one.

By popular request

global warming will global cool

and the beef-farms of the Amazon will be turned back into rain-forests.

As a seasonal gesture

entropy will take a holiday in St Tropez

and dropped toast will consistently fall butter side up.

By popular request

and as a seasonal gesture

lost children will be found

and brutal feuds be ended;

the inconsolable will be consoled,

the outcast and downcast be welcomed in,

and something unthinkably and invisibly vast

will pass into a space

invisibly small.

If you only make one wish this Christmastide

make sure it’s for something impossible.

18.12.07

The desire of all nations shall come

Haggai 2.7

Buskers, Buchanan Street, Glasgow

To grey-suit minds set on trains

in grey-suit business streets

silky jazz unfolds from the sheets

in shimmering scarlet skeins.

Jumping the bars of the notes

transgressing performance space

a wee girl hides her face

as she donates.

14.12.07

Dundee September Haiku

The echoing choirs of the geese

unseen in a weeping sky

return announcing autumn.

18.12.07

The Box

My love met me within a darkened wood

where no light was: I knew her by her hand:

but my grip slipped, her presence vanished, and

till dripping dawn I waited where I stood.

I saw my love upon a city street,

amid a thousand others gave her chase:

I found her longed-for look in many a face,

ten-score half-echoes, but not one complete.

I woke and washed and worried at my error,

a looking-glass behind me and before me;

ninety-nine times repeated there I saw me—

and then her image in the hundredth mirror.

But my quest and her trail alike turned cold.

I’ve put my memories of her in a box

to hide inside a drawerful of socks

and finger through when all grows stale and old,

and I have lost the living patterns of

her stance, her grace, her glance so once adored;

have settled for sure less not dubious more,

have lived as if I was not made for love.

When I began so filled with venturous fire

how comes my world to dust and grit and sweat?

Is real-but-paltry really all we get?

How can we live so wide of heart’s desire?

9.12.07

The king is dead

Another day, another execution,

another round of routine suffering.

What could a corpse solve by its dissolution?

How could a tortured dying mean a king?

The priest-king who fought off, in Nemi wood,

eternally recurrent suffering

kept memory of his predecessor’s blood

just till another killed him and was king.

The Roman road once forested with crosses

where rebel slaves hung parched and suffering.

Did that world stop to register their losses,

or when one died, cry out “Long live the king”?

Each day we take another paper’s weight

of crushing slow unspecial suffering,

nor will our tired old sun discriminate

an ordinary dying from a king’s.

Yet still today we bless one who, accursed

for hanging on a cross by hell enringed,

by dying once all dying has reversed.

The King of Kings is dead; long live the King.

Easter Sunday 2007

Keep away from Buses

Given the overlapping

of our living that has happened,

Given there’s no reshaping

the once-only we’re still making,

Given all my bearings

would swing lost without your northing,

Here is what I’m asking

you’re not gambling or risking:

Save the lives of spiders

Don’t walk under ladders

Don’t change plugged-in fuses

Keep away from buses.

22.7.06

The Children’s Cemetery, Balgay

Parents’ sentences on marble;

mildewed dolls beneath grown trees:

O you who mark the sparrow’s fall,

did you not notice these?

25.8.06

Glen Living

A river can run a thousand years through rock

not altering its course but only deepening it:

not so on the aimless free-meandering plain.

A farmer can lose a decade on one slope,

sink in one gorse-choked scarp a half-century's sweat,

yet not grudge the son who left all his random gain.

Think then how deep this glen goes in those who home here,

whose thought's this forest, this skyline their subconscious,

whose dream is this buzzard's wheel on this heathered moraine.

Tarfside, Glen Esk, 14.9.03

News

The change comes on so suddenly

the moment of transition

the phone or letter butts into

the same old stale position

you pick it up quite casually

not knowing what is in it

while clock-hands drag and dust-motes float

life changes in one minute

8.4.06

Allt a’ Mhuillin, April

For the first time, the birchwood not by night,

path-bogs not sealed by corrugated ice;

for the first time, pied wagtails in the corries.

Pink sunshine slants through innocuous sleet-flurries.

Here on the Hut’s rock-seats, snow-stripped, sun-warmed—

was it here we half-froze in the January storm?

Where the crampon drives through slush to brown-baked scree—

was that our icefall-route in February?

Did we tread here a snow that none had trod?

Did we glimpse here the hidden face of God?

8/4/06

The Vision

Do not expect it in the green of May.

No cleanness in that growth that parturition

as pure as clean as death.

Nor in the bland and flyblown August sun,

in hot banality upon a balding lawn,

in non-event of sweltering desiccation.

Ignore October’s blustering warm winds,

rain-rotted fruit let clog the orchard paths;

it brings no insight eaten.

But when the bloodline’s thin as mercury

when ice flowers white on wood and stars the stream

then head up through the beeswarm of the snow

then climb the Hill of Vision.

8.1.00

Sidlaws Benediction

Blessed be God

Blessed be God for ever.

Blessed be God on the burnsides and on the braesides

Blessed be God on the bramble-track, and at the ruined tower

Blest be the God of old kirks and of older abbeys

Blest be the God of hill-forts and stones of power

Blessed be God for ever.

Blessed be God with the incense of resinous woodsmoke

Blessed be God when the sun makes the wet gorse steam

Blessed be God in the silence of fox and buzzard

Blessed be God in the silly pheasant’s scream

Blessed be God for ever.

Blessed be God from heath-hills to barley-fields

Blessed be God for wild strawberries in half-tame gardens

Blessed be God in byres and dung-misted farmyards

Blessed be God at the firesides glimpsed through curtains

Blessed be God for ever.

Blessed be God for the airs that are over the Sidlaws

Blessed be God for the waters that run through the Sidlaws

Blessed be God for the rocks that lie under the Sidlaws

Blessed be God for the land and for those who love it

Blessed be God for ever.

Blessed be God in Eassie and in Nevay

Blessed be God in Auchterhouse and Flocklones

Blessed be God in Kincaldrum and Tullybaccart

Blessed be God while the light lightens Black Hill’s stones

Blessed be God for ever.

Blessed be God for the sacrifice of creation

Enormity of subtraction from Himself

Rending away, as a rib, from His fullness of being—

Self-gift, self-abnegation foresigning Eucharist—

By his own null-black absence making Space

That grace and savagery, danger and delight

Might co-engender World:

The gift of Him Who Is

This something not Him

He who is all in all

And will re-call at last this Other Side

Immortal Bride.

Now, in this one time and this one place,

Break pace:

Breathe in, and know yourself

Immensely loved.

Blessed be God for ever.

15.1.2006

I am a mirror

faced towards the wall

I bounce no sight

I am a mirror

angled into earth

I give no light

I am a mirror

stained and cracked and smeared

my glance is dim

I am a mirror

point me at my source

and I blaze Him.

This is the famous glass

that turneth all.

16.1.06

Carse of Stirling

For a moment of roadside relief just past Thornhill

you clunk from the car and you hope nothing else goes by:

and there on the verge, as the first frosty inklings of dawn

grope at the giant flat fields and the stands of Scots pine,

you watch as the curlews sweep and the lapwings spiral

out of the night-chill’s thigh-mists into the sky.

Then you jump back in and you blow on your trembling hands;

you slam in a Waterboys tape and you make the car fly,

shooting the corners like rapids to where Ben Ledi—

brindled by snow-melt, pastelled by soft morning rain—

comes sudden a gift of vision to the eye.

And so you keep going.

You have been heading, you are heading still,

towards these very same hills

for all of your life.

1.2.04

Faith

Not the comfort of fantasy

but the stinging salt of the true:

not what you would have asked for

but answers that question you:

not the armchair's complacence

but the tightrope's uncomfortable view:

exactly what you wanted

and yet you never quite knew:

the utterly unexpected

Who has always expected you.

11.01.04

Haiku: Christmas Tree

Through the winter house

seeps from where the presents hide

scent of cut spring sap

10.01.04
Leaving Dundee

We build lives where we can: in factory towns

or willow-hollows on the dusty Downs,

in sandstone's gold or brick's suburban browns.

Roots anywhere are preferable to none:

your roots grew best beneath a late-night sun.

Mountains on one side and multis on the other,

harsh in its welcoming yet brusquely kind—

home of the friend sticks closer than a brother,

town of the tunes stick longest in your mind—

this is where you were kicked down, then recovered,

hope-enticed on, then tripped up from behind.

You know the line's first bend will end the scene,

your River and your wooded hills be gone,

your living places turn to what has been.

The diminutions of the South

are coming on.

19 December 2003

Prayer at Baldowrie Symbol Stone

The Holy being still with us though unknown,

To keep your ever watching listening care

Over indifferent lives and living air

Set a strong good angel in this stone.

Baldowrie, Strathmore, 27.12.03

Handy Christmas Tip

Dogs can't see in colour,

So for Fido's Christmas gift

Buy him a black and white TV;

He won't resent your thrift.

23 December, 2003

Parenting skills

Bad parenting:

you go out of the house

so you can ignore your children.

Good parenting:

you stay in the house

so your children can ignore you.

11.11.03

Highland Envoi

Before you sleep for good, remember this:

the moss-soft bridge within the dripping wood,

the wild catch of sea air blown on high;

night-climbing up, through ice-storm, to the cornices,

the starlit snow-peak shining in night sky;

the slopes you charged, when young, because you could;

the summer’s sunlight on your hills of bliss.

2 April 2002

Beethoven, Opus 69

The dim church was unwontedly full:

with the chess-precise step of a piano,

with the ballet-hard glide of a cello:

with the secret unspeakable movements

of a mind from the year 1800;

with the hushed and attentive longing

of a hundred quite secular listeners.

Is then the truest religion

nothing but silence and music?

1.11.02