Kent Poppy Field by Curtis Tappenden


A Poppy Garland for the Centenary of the First World War

Jim Newcombe

Farmed out to garrison towns, the incredible
men to whom you owe leisure waited in barracks
to entrench England’s liberty – the syntax
of the avant guard breaking as they fell.

To march on, suffering gangrene and sepsis
and see their mates mown down. Some for disposal’s sake
upended as from a kiddies’ dumping truck
dispersing a cromlech of shovelled corpses.

These rocks are eggs the weasel smashed, burst boulders
that incubate no growth, wounds that will not heal
nor ever speak, as burst wallets reveal
the importance of sweethearts to young soldiers.

The lads straight out of school, son, lover, soldier,
in whom so many roles were played, now lie dead
where blowflies frenzy in the webs of blood
there to lust like harpies the carrion aura.

Ploughed into ruck and loam, where poppy flames
are blood become the viaticum of Christ,
their sacrifice has saved you, whose spirits were released
like bullets into graves that bear no names.

If the temporal contains eternity
then assuredly hell is here, for here heaves
the stench of the damned cooking in their graves.
No fresh May sprigs deodorize such history.

Gorging the blood of tyrants will not appease
the earth or refresh the crops. Blood will spill
and atone for nothing. The tyrants will
rise again, among other flames than these.

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Winter Serenade

Jim Newcombe

It is true, I tried to meet her in dreams
at some appointed tryst.

One night, in winter’s killing cold,
I was a bird
in a labyrinth of tangles.

There I sang to her lit window
with a bird’s unblinking vigilance,

my song like weightless, airborne wings,
pinions rowing a river of thermals.

Perched on a budless twig,
my favourite post,
my every note was a preened plume.

My songs were such
they would have pierced the heart
of any human.

And so I flew up, to sing on her sill

and she, hearing my song
looked out, alight with surprise,
as if she had never seen a man
become a bird.

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The Passion of Admiral Puggy Booth

Jim Newcombe

 

“I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did.”
(J.M.W. Turner, on painting ‘Snowstorm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth’)

Under spittled, blown, obliterated foam
he was trussed to the mast so he could witness
stormy kaleidoscopes of hackle and plume
at his own bidding, to paint and encompass
oceanic visions. Picture him there
in the dance of the lurching tide, buffeted
and scuffed by snow-laced lashes of swept air,
his gibbet the crossbar of the masthead,
the tilting steamboat like a toy ship tossed
on whale-heavy waves, the painter’s wincing limbs
fastened there like Odysseus to the mast
before the fatal persuasion of the sirens.

How did the mind then compress, translate, transfuse
the sun-thrilled seething of the wuthering flakes,
the husky clamour of tunnelweb waves
wefting in guffs? How did the hand remake
the unassailable riot, framing the flux
of water-pelt, wind-flex, the flinch and blanch
of weathered flesh, the sail in the focal vortex
reflecting the nuclear sun? The avalanche
of glassy shatterings, the whole world’s form,
spun from the mazy hollows of a seashell,
is a mere drop of water in a storm
that smoulders in the furnace of his will.

The sun enflames the tidal concertina.
Luminous fumes, glacial exhalations,
seraphic in the nebulous atmosphere,
exalt the common man. Great affirmations
of the spirit hoisted high. Chaos seems serene
as if pigment smeared on canvas could suffice
to make the cosmic order reconvene.
The sun’s holocaust upon the ice
a blinding clarity of disbodied nature
where all things that come into his sight
entranced in each obliterated feature,
nettled with hail, lacquered with burning light.

Say then the true bearing of the artist’s mind
is a reflex to rouse and contradict
as a cyclone that runs contrary to the wind,
eliding concepts of scale and impact
in a brushstroke, the bright invincible
energy of life brought to light again
with palette knife impasto, welter of scumble,
the bristle-flick of spindrift like spat phlegm,
the volcanic will erupting and collapsing
in art of intense resistance that receives,
with immense vigour and panache, the gathering
crescendo of the warring, lawless waves.

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