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Best Poems From
ERIC RATCLIFFE
(Aug 8,1918)
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25.
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The Throw
Barefoot on granite wait I,
who threw a silver javelin
into the shimmering land of whispers,
and watched the wraiths divide
as though a chime had ended Hallowe'en.
Somewhere beyond the dawn a mermaid died;
the sea sent her comb to me,
with a wisp of her poor green hair
and a sigh for the savage who speared for fish
where white immortals moved.
Eric Ratcliffe
Read more: fish poems, silver poems, hair poems, green poems, sea poems, fishing poems
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26.
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Unlucky Seven
An Editor I met gave me the hump:
I asked if he would publish Seven rhymes
And offered him my camel Seven times
- But Seven times he doused me in his pump.
Eric Ratcliffe
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27.
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Wellington in India I
Calcutta nights, light memories:
claret and billiards, games of dice,
ladies of elegance, trivia and muslin,
but keen esprit de corps, training,
time for drinking. Calcutta nights,
the races, officers' parties,
fraternal mess dinners and social graces
of the King's Thirty-Third for the colonel.
But ever the knife, external
in bandit darkness, the smell of excrement
beyond the fort along the Hooghly.
Fighting confined to fever's strife,
quick summer movement to Penang,
quit for Company's safety.
Ever alertness for Tipu, French advisers,
never peace at Cornwallis's price
achieved; Haidar's Mysore
reduced but a treacherous fang
of Tipu in fortressed Seringapatam,
buttressed by Mogul succession.
The truce broken. No longer friends,
Mahratta confederates. once made
supporters of Clive at Arcot. Seen
to do nothing, protect nothing
meant eclipse of Empire after its dawn,
with the French keen at the door,
Company losses, failure of trade,
renewal of piracy off the Malabar coast.
Mangalore. Would they land, the French?
make treaties with princes sealed with sugared lips,
array at Hyderabad under the tricolour,
buttons impressed with the Cap of Liberty?
Already 'Citizen Tipu' was on tongue tips
from the Western Ghats to the coast.
Not long before another Dupleix!
Masses of men of the Little Corporal,
from Europe to Egypt, then to India
were at least quite possible. Josephine,
survivor of the sharpness of the Terror,
would need to number her nights
if her Corsican's needle point
compassed to east!
Eric Ratcliffe
Read more: light poems, memory poems
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28.
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Advent III
Shuffling shadows of fire fingers
torchlit, scribing picture magic on stone pages;
caveborn children, naked, squatting,
watching the advent of wall-sacred art
eager on the limestone, wall-enshrined.
Rockline forms of ibex, bison, bear
and bird-headed men in a mine of galleries;
shapes of wing, tusk, fur-form and fang,
antler, horn. mammoth, reindeer,
cave-lion and the Quaternary charger
caught in the memory of green-frame mornings
at Pech-Merle, Lascaux, Altimira,
Champs-Blanc snd Les Combarelles.
What messages from canyon consciousness
twelve thousand years beside the shale?
What messages beyond moraines,
vertical toolmaker, primary hunter
and hominid of the riding flame?
Oracles, maze-dances, ground-pits,
dene holes, burial mounds, shrines
denied, destroyed, all hearthwords silenced;
high life in evergreens exchanged
for concrete markets, cities;
lunar magic polarised to madness,
solar love reviled, except by hill-folk
- all interglacial wonders in museums!
Super-Ape, what messages?
Eric Ratcliffe
Read more: magic poems, fire poems
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