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FANTASIA ON BRADGATE PARK.

Scrawls of bats carve gothic runes
Upon the tablet of the moon
In whispered curves of timeless doom.

Through the castles' pallid walls
They flick like shadows in a storm
In silent films of furtive thoughts.

The crooked rook that barks and croaks
Is but a languished lover's soul
Cursed in a spell made long ago.

Across the ivy-mantled gloom
Where used to be the banquet room
The moonlight trails her yellow broom.

The black rats scratch across the floor
With bony tails and fists of claws
And faces sharp as princes' swords.

Where torn and fallen ivy blows
In corners strewn with rodents' bones
The deadly nightshade slays the rose.

The snowdrops light her sombre tomb
Of petrol-cans and rain-damp shoes
Like candles in a soundless fugue.

The cobwebs drape a mildewed pall
Around her like a muslin shawl
Where all her flaxen petals fall.

The pond is dull and sick and slow
With years of heaving heavy robes
Of leaf-clogged water dead and old.

A white-winged spectre hooked and cruel
Whose breast runs black with blood of shrews
Lifts blinkless eyes where waters move.

She watches as the water trawls
Her reedy silks, her furs and shawls
In weary waltze of rise and fall.

She watches black swans curved and bold
With necks like script of parchment scrolls
Inscibing where the waters fold.

She listens through the creeping gloom
To nightingales like mistrels' flutes
That sing in woodlands damp and mute.

And once she sounds a plaintive call
Bewildered as a spirit torn
Between the dying and the born.

And now, as white as virgins' throats
Celestial as a god invoked
She sweeps through fangs of splintered stone.

 

 

 

NOCTURNE.

The half-moon flicks her thumb-nail
Through the Bible of the night
She traces silhouettes of angels
Where the breeze beats wings of roses
Where the moths in haloes waver
Round the dusk's departing shoulders
As He kneels below the sky.
She listens to the psalms of rivers
Through the scented aisles of hedges
Where the pheasants' plainchant quivers
Through the dusty woodland meadow
In its ghostly whispered choir.
She traces turrets spiked and jagged
Where the pine-trees rise like towers
Where, round poplar-spires unkempt and jagged
Dark villages of moonless bowers
Sleep clustered in the falling light
And from the many-steepled skyline
Rings the rusty chimes of ravens
And rooks as grave as priests stand silent
For the crimson-hooded Lady
Who lies weeping and contrite.
Her tear-damp breath of night-earth sorrow
Bathes the feet of day with healing
And in the blood-sky wakes the morrow
Where the path of dawn is cleaving
Bitter darkness from sweet light.
And through the sinewed hands of morning
Nails of stars will pierce their rivets
And cruel, mocking shadows swarming
Through his heart, they run two rivers,
One of darkness, one of light.

 

 

OUR LOVE, WHOSE LIPS ARE SEALED.

Our love was as the fox alert,
An orange flame across the fields
And mist the breath of God is sighing
Over all the world.
With parted lips, the Heavens wait
Until our Time returns
And mildew creeps across the gate
Where lovers' lips in Death are sealed
Where hands unclasped from sinewed striving
Lie in griefless peace uncurled
And twined in knotted briars pining
Weeps the songless bird.

 

 

The Old Asylum.

The mad wind shrieks through corridors
Through keyless latch-locks old and sore
Where rusted hinges croak and mourn
Through straight-jacket of weeds and thorns
Whose green ropes bind her to the floor,
Oh let the madhouse fall !

Like shadowed hands unclenched and frail
The spiders limply grasp and flail
Along the alabaster rails
Where plaster-chips and broken nails
All languish in their mildewed graves,
Oh, let the madhouse fade !

Against the walls of seasick green
The ghostly patients beat and scream
What silent, senseless lives were these
That twitched in agitated dreams,
Their dim lives clamped in bars of steel,
Oh let the madhouse speak !

Oh they who raged in murky wars
Against their voices and their thoughts
Where are they now, their lost ghosts call
The curtains rot, the posters fall
The dust-moths whisper in the hall,
Oh let the madhouse fall !

The tangled cobwebs stretched and strained
Are knotted as a galleon's sails
Across the paint-chipped window frames
And through the ripped-out window-panes
The night wind billows through her veils
Oh, let the madhouse fade !

And by the crumbling mausoleum
Where chiselled lovers curl and dream
That never in this world found peace
Some black-lipped orchids gape with grief
And sometimes mutter in the breeze,
"Oh let the madhouse sleep."

 

Hymn For The Fin De Siecle.

Past the poster-boards that crumble from the skies
To where litter blows through fields where curlews cry
Past the sunken streams the village brookes run high
Though the wasted world is waning in our eyes.

By the backbone of the broken railway line
Black skeletons of shattered railings lie
For the flesh is torn from the carcass of our times
And the wasted world is waning in our eyes.

Past the wastelands where the rusted cars expire
To where orchards fall beneath the concrete blight
Under new estates the woodland counties die
And the wasted world is waning in our eyes.

Through perspex windows where on tainted skies
The striplight sickness seeps its jaundiced light
There's an illness in the spirit of our times
And the wasted world is waning in our eyes.

Past the tower blocks that hide the old church spires
To where rushless plains steal smoke from brushwood fires
In the harvest songs of late September's choirs
The wasted world is waning in our eyes.

The ravens drape their shadows on the skies
Over fields of broken meadow stiles
They guard our gates like omens of our times
And the wasted world is waning in their eyes.

 

 

 

 

 
The divine Ms. Wood is the author of these poems and herself. For reproduction of these poems and images permission of the author MUST BE SOUGHT. Interlopers will be liable for legal persecution.

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