Limestone, Singing
We call it silence because it's out of our reach, our small senses
– the millennia of tiny dyings,
wave-crush, mute drifting of shell and bone; the sheer weight
of time, its sleeps and its convulsions.
Everything after that could be its dream,
folded under its blanket of mud; we find its fragments, waking:
blunt fist-sized nubs in the furrows,
scored by the plough, the ploughshares buckled and cursed,
or at the field's edge, heaped into cairns; bared on the slope
where capsized strata break through,
cracked and carted, rattled down the kiln's throat, born again
through fire, as quicklime; whole fields
stripped, grubbed up in a clanking
of buckets and chains, the tireless cough of diggers, tramway trucks,
conveyors, hoppers – we find their rust-
remnants in the brambles as the opencast returns to earth –
first lichens, then low things, wiry moor-grass, yellow tormentil
and silverweed, thorn-scrub-clumps,
one by one, and windblown seeds, bird droppings, our rich
neglect, and time, and there's lark song
scribbling its inscriptions on the sky
as if this was the only morning there had ever been or will be.
To Seed
Old seed-head, drooping
with the weight of generations,
give us a nod in passing.
We are the young ones here,
we once-onliers, we blurs
against the sun, we shadows
with no purchase on the grass
now a trick of the wind makes it flow,
makes it a tide race, baffled,
backwash counter-seething
into its disparate selves
at the moment of turn. Stand still,
we could deceive ourselves
this is much about us,
heads filled with explanations
till they rattle – the more so
the older we grow. We shake them,
mouths open so words
like seed-fluff lift into the wind.
Like now. As if you're listening,
stiff stooping grass-head, mown
for good, we’d think,
this year – the field harrowed,
kept, our desire lines closed,
and whether you're leaning askew
at the field's edge or deep
in the library stacks of the soil
looking up 'savannah' old friend,
spare us a nod as we go.
for Zélie
___________
Philip Gross’ Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. He is a keen collaborator, e.g. with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold In The River (2015), with Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (2018) and Welsh-language poet Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (2021)