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
poems 2 die for 