UNITED KINGDOM

robert_j_berry@yahoo.co.uk

SHAME

When my mind was in pieces
I watched half-men in their wrath
Punch through glass

Men tied to their iron-framed beds
Laying glass-eyed hours in the
Appalling wrack of their selves.

Others toddled the eccentric circles
Of their own prisons. We all
Had our hell, individual, unto us,

Our minds inhumed inside
Burning sepulchres.

In humiliation you rattled the padlocked grille of the
sky,
Counted the bars of green light printed across
The bile-green ceiling

And each day the fan writhed in its socket
You were numb to the orderlies who
Thrashed weak old men for sport.

You just lay, lay the other way, on your bed,
Your rack of shame.

WATER MUSIC

In the eely entrails of this kingdom
There’s always water.

Riddling through marches
Into reedy culverts,
Gravelly-tongued, iron-brown.

Where the fens grow like a dark-age curse
Water becomes river,
Loud like the wild swans over these great Broads.

Then water widens into estuary, a slow silty Mother

And there is the Sea, vast beyond Gods.

THE HIGH WEALD

Where the gravelly anger of our first fathers settled
The land cedes into infinity.

Saxon successions that moved like a
Levelling beast through the boroughs
Until hate was a river in spate:

Time cannot expunge all that spent blood.
Or the bullying ways of thanes
Who imposed their will.

Thus when gales hurl mediaeval obscenities
Or the sea’s stink leagues off
Recalls their visceral tongues

The past is thrust back down our throats.

This land may be tilled and obedient now
But it remembers more vicious times.

WAR MUSIC

Across the backs of the years
Kings break like reeds

Ascendant, vanquished,
In a chronicle of implacable feuding.

This war butchery never abates.
Lust for dominion is infinite.

Sanctified men have blood-drenched these parishes,

The centuries planted a raven battle flag
On these monster-haunted fens,

Till history tells of two rage-blind soldiers
Whacking each other with shovels.

Such times do not fade.
The sun still spills in the sky
With the gore of conquest

Until on every page of our annals
There is blood, ash.
Such brutal war music.

THE KING

Helmet, mailcoat, sword, spears,

His death ship drawn up from the river
Hauled over the embankment
Then sunk in a dug trench.

The King and his treasure,
Proper obsequies done.

The boat settled in its grave
Earth moulded over it

His mound shall stand on the horizon
A summons to afterlife.

For he was buried with his great gold buckle
And beaked helmet of a king,

The nose and mouth gilt bronze,
The eyebrows inlaid with silver.

A ring giver in the famous timbered halls,
His was a dragonslayer’s face.

Though the clinkers of a great fire
Have gone out

His burial hoard at the world’s wet edge
Will be everlasting.

THE WHIRLPOOL

Between the stern-faced breakwaters
And the rock-fanged sea

A hive of crosses
Hangs to drowning rocks.

Higher up, the Virgin Mary
Chaste, serene
In white

Presides over the whirling swell

Her lean stone finger
Toward the becalmed distance,
The unseen sun.

© All Copyright, Robert James Berry.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.