Mast Year

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

So many fell this year
They formed a levee
Down the road crown;
Skittish squirrels 
Drunk on the urgency 
Of boundless foraging
Bound and leap
In arching acrobatics
Over bark, along leaf,
Forcing the fruit into freefall
Dropping like stones
Tropical rain
Brushed off surprised shoulders.

And as the wind whips
Whorling through the laden canopy 
Boots below crush and crunch them
Kicking up a bow wave
Of desiccated oak fruit
Before
Caught in cleat, 
Lodged in a turn-up
Tramped down the path,
They turn up far away;
Dropped off-handedly
Between a rusty tango can 
And a lost, sodden mitten, 
To rise, rise anew.

Olive

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

Ten arms’ round the olive tree was;
Fifteen feet tall;
Hands down, the oldest wood
This wood would allow.

Knotted and knurled the bark was;
Creased and crimped,
Folded and furled,
Hidden eyes looking on, unblinking.

Silent and sentinel its watch was;
Tirelessly gazing, sensing
The ebb and flow of days
Passing, impassively.

Rich yet stolen the harvest was;
Blackest of birds,
Bitterest of fruit,
Taken whole, its future set.

Scorched and charred its crown was,
Wind-fired, flame-licked,
Blackened and smoked,
Yet, from ashes, new beginnings.




The Orange Train

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

They built it for the oranges,
Bulging with sun,
Dripping from the trees;
Small plots, tessellating up
The stony slopes
Tangy with lavender and thyme
Bright globes of colour,
Between the scrub olive
And holm oak drabs.

Ambling from the City,
Cars and carts clatter
Away, avoiding
The unblinking eyes
And plague bell, tolling;
Over the dust-bowl plain
Desiccated sleepers
Grip Spanish steel tight –
The wooden train
Grumbles its way slowly up
Under sparking gantry.

Breathless,
The escarpment squeezes in
And, as it does, remembered voices
Of tunnellers, wielding
Sweaty picks, barrows, chisels
Echoes through the cuttings; then
Darkness,
Before the bursting
Glare flares forth –
Down, over rock gardens,
Half-caught peeks at encircling peaks,
The shimmer of the azure port
And the orange-gold richly won.

Cape

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The road grips the hillside
With tortured fingers,
Chalky-dry, like a climber’s hands
Precipitously feeling for the hold;
Side-winder snaking,
Along the dragon’s
Spine, fossilised vertebrae not
The only thing petrified today

The road follows the ridge,
The eye follows the road;
Topping a miserly col
Then yawing off-angle
Around another vexed switchback –
An ants’ column seeking sugar
Slavishly following to its end
The dramatic rock-guarded fort;

The Cape.

Where the billowing swell
Beats the bass-drum rocks below;
Where the changing winds
Scream a mocking siren to doomed mariners;
Where the cliffs rage,
And fall mortally away
To the bullion-stacked holds
Of a hundred triremes.

Pines

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Bowing to their guests
These bristled old pines;
Their scruffy long beards
And gnarled old muscles,
Racked by a twitchless cramp
Ossified by dendro-arthritis,
They drop their heads
To the wind
As if in servitude,
Or, with great honour,
They greet the sou’wester.

From a wind-blown seed,
Whipped from the clutches of
Some long-lost ancestor,
Nuzzled down in the sand
And, through inhospitable grains,
Sank that first insistent tap-root.
Through storm and flooding tide,
Through blistering Sun across
Countless summers
It fought for life; between
Warring sides –
One the precious fresh,
The other desparate salinity.

Dappled, in their needle
Shade we walk,
Children squeal and play,
Cicada click their
Machine-gun anthem;
The pines, stand guard,
Gnurling and twisting
To the contours
Of the years
Washing over them,
As we walk through
Unnoticed.

Cathedral Jackdaws

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

‘The name comes from ‘chair’, he said
‘A comfy, lounging, chair, come to that… for ladies’
All very majestic, the cathedral ‘chair’,
Red, blocky sandstone,
Probably here for yonks,
Despite a rock-hard rock actually being soft –
Like, how does that work?
Before the Normans he reckons
Maybe, it was them Angled Saxons that built it first;
But it would have just been a church then;
Small and angled. Saxon, even.
And no chair for chicks neither.

Anyway, tell all that to the jackdaws,
‘cos they couldn’t give one for it
The buggers;
Romping round in sworls
Looping the gargoyles gleefully
Shitting on their heads
As the water pisses from their gobs;
Screaming up the tower
Daring one another not to pull out
From butting the flying buttresses.

God knows what it’s like
Behind the tower louvre boards
They scream from there –
Like lads leaving school,
Packing their bags, secretly
10 minutes before the end of lesson;
Scream out, like streamers –
Chaotically all-directioned,
Squabbling, chattering, shouting
At anyone who cares to listen,
But especially to the old man
Who, same time every day,
Feeds them titbits,
From his cathedra outside the gates.

Enceinte

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The Swan’s head stood proud
From the merchantman’s stern;
Lead painted, sharp eyes,
Sternly surveying their paths of trade:
The ship advanced
Up the swampy shoreline
Looking for the fort on the hill
With goods and provender
For people far from home

Deva Vitrix
Alea iactus est

Today, the bow in the river
Masks where the shore once stood;
Where the hooves of thoroughbreds pound,
Is once where avocets and oystercatchers
Pierced salty mudflats;
Ripairian acres, now reigned by swirling crows
Looping in vast arcs over the Circus below –
The cries of the crowd
Echoing through the ages
Like ripples in the river.

A full enceinte
Commands the heights;
Where once it ringed the Forum
And forts,
Bivouacs and bathhouses –
Where once a wooden stockade stood,
Today, a vertical stone horizon
Tells the stories of ages since,
Digging up through years;
Once, where many were worshipped,
Today it rings the home of heretics –
Broken only by engineers;
And eroded,
Only by the marching soles
Of latter-day invaders,
Capturing nothing more
Than images for remembrance.


Scree

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

What was it made them
Clamber up the mountain;
Risk their existence;
Mine the greensand?

How did they know
To search the summit,
Hunt the highest
Reaches of the sky?

Where was the value
Of axes chipped and polished;
Roughed out with granite
Knapped to a knife edge?

Who could imagine
Their travels from home,
In curragh or logboat
Fur boot or mule?

How did we discover
This hoard beyond value –
Amongst scree and rockfall
On the edge of the void?

On the Langdale hand axe site

Crater

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The rim of the void
Circled the vent hole
With aerated rock; light
From where sulphurous gas
Spewed out its toxic breath,
On goat herds and shielings,
Wharves and warehouses.

Ochre red slopes,
Where old sandstones
Melted and mixed
In slumped flows of puthering lava…
Layer on layer on layer,
Pillows and mounds, one on next
Candy floss striations.

Decades on, pilgrims
Step still tentatively;
Rough trails,
Snake above the abyss
Children shriek with
Pyroclastic fear, yet
The crater lies inert;

Erupting only with spurge and agave,
And rocks arranged
By the hardier explorer
Into timeless signs:
“Maria y Manu”
“Hot Stuff”
And a giant, lithic, cock.

Heron

~ David Preston ~ Leave a comment

Shaggy-coated, draped
Like a shabby student throw
Used as wall art; feather
Duster-ends to streaked wings
Folded in, double-backed,
Used but for balance.

Long-fringed; twitching eyes;
Articulate toes, grip the river-edge,
High-kneed, deliberate strides,
Avoid the trip wires; trigger alarms;
His reflection, his shadow;
Exist only in another plane.

Below, winding fish shoals
Edge closer to the bank,
Attracted by the briny aeration
Of a stream crackling down rocks;
They are observed,
With detached focus.

The spear-point head retracts;
The neck, curved yet taught;
The prey… oblivious.
He…

…strikes