Author Archives: Damian Garside

THE LEAVES BEGIN TO TURN BROWN

the blackberries jostling
fighting for suptemacy
in your milk bottle

threatening to come
alive mess
up my examination
spill onto the page

but here I am
self on the line, risking everything

trapped in the test venue
putting pen to paper, brain
set to
   automatic, racing against
time
straining against my naivete
and battling with
my limited vocabulary
                           vaguely recalling
I did read something
with matching
intensity

         there in that book of
modern British poetry
I had hastily perused
    this poem, and others just
as haunting
and there
     in a basic nutshell of
a biography, your
iconic status,
your tragic history

and yes, that unfaithful one,
Yurkshire laureate,
crow poet of
Cambridge,
who I did hear read in
a Gothic Victorian
hall in
   Manchester
a
  half
century ago
(just short of)

and
   here, so much
older, wiser
will stick to the heresy,
aside from
    fact never
remotely deserved you
was never in
your league

later I would imagine myself
presented with
a machine
   technology to

talk to what
     having ploughed through
your data
has convinced itself
it can
   speak
for you

exchanging words and poems
thinking a relationship through

but
    here we
are
at the beginning, not
agonizing over the reality
of such
surreal tech developments

me taxed to the max
exploding under the pressure
believing somehow
can
  kill this analysis

one of this few hundred
strong cohort of eager
young first
years

desperately grappling with
what this poet
has thrown at
              them
hidden
in the woods, amongst
the brambles, incognito
behind the scenes

all
   this everything
to deal with: everything
tortured, everything
beautiful
   every shade and modulation
between these
two extremes

and me
knowing these, blackberries whose
  red blood staining my
fingers, clothes,
stained
    my memory too

but then
   in the follow up tutorial
giving my spiel my
tutor
   went total
thumbs down, angrily
accusing me of
projection, having
wandered
totally off beam, reading
my own
    pain and inner turmoil, bad
pseudo psychology
into a
  simple Nature poem
as sweet and
tranquil as
   Nature can be

none
so blind as
will not see

and he
    a poet too, did once
see a poem that
somehow got
published

a simple poem
   devoid of
any of
that reprehensible intensity

and so
   I accepted for three days
my absolute failure as
a reader,
  total pointlessness of
ever progressing
in this discipline

until
   scanning the marklist upwards
through hundreds of names
from bad fail to
pass

and then (feeling a crazy hope
that I might
not be a waste
       that I might know
something)

scanned the list
     until found

yes, Sylvia, hard
to believe isn’t it
a single
    name, my name lurking
high
   up that tree

the very top