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Best Poems From
C RICHARD MILES
(1961)
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113.
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After The Summer Fayre
Tattered bunting flutters in the breeze;
Balloons bobble limply on their strings
But milling masses only weakly wander
Idly squandering their last half hour.
Enervated by the tiresome trudge
From booth to booth, the hapless punters
Prowl like tired, uninterested lions
That have already hunted and fed.
One or two may pick at a morsel,
Price reduced, to clear a shabby stall
Whose bored stallholders stand there waiting
For permission to pack up, go home.
The fast-fading fete awaits its fate,
The clearing away of unsold junk
Dumped in a dustbin, skip or black bag
Or consigned to attics one more year.
And, as a solitary plastic bag
Drifts across the flattened, trodden grass
And the last car drives off, I hear sighs
From the field to claim it was not fair.
It had no choice, it remonstrates;
It wanted quiet rest beneath the gentle sun
To grow its green and ripen into grain;
It did not care for trampling, careless feet.
And yet it knows that it gave pleasure
For a few short hours to folk who came
And tasted summer, threw aside the world
In its green oasis in the citys desert whirl.
C Richard Miles
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114.
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And Another Light Flicked Off
And another light flicked off
And shone out no more, silent,
Its neurone circuits broken, bent,
Filigree filament failed and fused,
All electricity supply subdued and stopped,
Just a quiet, murmuring mains hum
Of bored, bewildered bypassers
Insulated, current-free, unshocked,
Who took no notice, rushing past,
Of swift, short-circuiting, cold killers knife
Which flashed and flickered for itself
As life paled, plunged in darkening death:
White light replaced by ruthless red
Then noiseless, ceaseless black.
C Richard Miles
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115.
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Badger Watching
We kept our appointment but someone had not told them,
The badgers, underground, still sleeping an extended siesta,
As lazy afternoon had drifted, undisturbed, into shadow,
Whilst, round the corner, nightfall tapped its black fingers,
Impatiently, in times waiting room. We waited, too, hushed.
Hushed by awed anticipation, Hushed by toils tiredness,
Hushed by boyish boredom, as evenings dull, washed-out greens
Faded, supplanted by subtle, solemn greys of tired twilight,
As Augusts exhausted artist preferred a plainer, pastel palette.
We kept our appointment but someone had not told them,
As sunsets semi-silence sang its lilting, languid lullaby,
Broken only by the plaintive sighs of grass-stuffed sheep,
Fat with contentment, on the distant, darkening hilltops;
Broken only by a cruder chorus from cud-chewing cattle
In the freshness of the field, behind the blackness of the byre,
Bovine breaths steaming through the still, sleepy nightfall
Enveloping us in its thick, muffling carpet of calm restfulness,
Echoing the lushness of grassblades on the dewy meadow floor.
We kept our appointment but someone had not told them,
But, eagerly hopeful, the first small grain of soft starlight
Peeped shyly round the theatre curtain of blue-black sky
But, awed by the awaiting audience, it vanished timidly, till
Encouraged by the cheerful charms of glimmering lamplight
Emanating from sturdy squares of faraway farmhouse windows,
White flock wallpaper on the greying whitewash of the walls,
It strode with surer step onto the stage-set of stark, dark sky
Accompanied by its winking, twinkling cold-white companions.
We kept our appointment and someone had now told them
That the scene was set, following the over-long, ornate overture
And, in accordance with the now-established, cold colour scheme
Of chalky, whispered whites, with dusky, grumbling greys
And matt, strident blacks, the padding, pawing protagonists
Nuzzled nervously out, nosing the night air in snuffling scrutiny,
Across the shifting, shale scree surrounding their scraped-out sett,
Hunting myopically for eyeless earthworms looking for leaves
To drag down to line their own, miniature replicas of the burrow.
We kept our appointment and someone had now told them,
Brock and Brockess, bumbling blindly before us, hesitating
Half-sensing, half-hearing, half-fearing our soundless presence
On the feathery, heathery hillside opposite, then rapidly retreating
But only for an instant, to collect their eager brocklings from below.
Untainted by experience, they emerged, to rumble and tumble,
Black and white bundles of enthusiasm, hurtling head over heels
In zebra-striped zigzags down the dropp to the depths of the dale
Before scuttling into the opaque obscurity of dense undergrowth.
We kept our appointment but someone had now told them,
That, reflecting the whiteness of the lamplit windows silhouetted
In negative against the ghostlike grey shadow of the farmstead,
Whitewash invisible in the gloom, they were as ghosts themselves,
Faint phantoms of white-streaked bristle, gleaming and glinting
As half-mirrored reflections of the silky, streaky starlight above.
So, darkness itself descending, extinguishing the straining eyesight
They faded, into nothingness, dragging all our disappointment away
As they had kept their appointment but someone had now told us, Go!
C Richard Miles
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116.
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Bathylith
Endungeoned deep beneath the gritstone countryside,
The bathylith, a vast concretion, bides its time.
Though much less ancient than age-hardened neighbours
It endures and means to establish firmer roots
And grows its polychromatic crystal tendrils tight
Enmeshing vice-like sloth-slow into solid stone.
It sleeps, perhaps a million millennia before some miner
Seeking to discover rich metal or fine gems
Unearths its sheer magnificence and splendour.
Until then, the massive rock rests quite contentedly
Yet underneath a sneaky supercilious streak seethes
For it conceals that diamond of untold worth in its depths
Hid close within its slumbering heart which it intends
To hold as long as all eternity, a precious treasure for itself.
C Richard Miles
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