Selected Poems

D W Myatt

In The Night

A bright quarter moon
As I ran alone in the cold hours
Along the sunken road that twists
Between hill-valley and stream:

There was a dream, in the night
That woke me - a sadness
To make me sit by the fire
Then take me out, moon-seeing
And running, to hear only my feet
My breath - to smell only the coldness
Of the still, silent air:

But no spell, no wish
Brought my distant lover to me
And I was left to run slowly
Back
And wait the long hours
To Dawn.

By the fire, I think of nothing
Except the warmth of my love
No longer needed.

A Cathedral Grave Near the Sea

Erected by Alexander and Helen

In Memory of their Children:

James, who died aged 2 years. Buried Here.

Alexander, Mariner, who died at Batavia

8^th Dec. 1830 aged 25.

John, Capt. Of the Ship Erin-Co-Bragh

of Cork, who died near Panama

22^nd April 1852 aged 32.

Andrew, Engineer, who died 9^th Dec. 1856

aged 32

A warm October sun
And I sense, standing here among the graves,
That hidden meaning of life:
"This is all that there is" -
Peace, brought by warmth
Because there is a freedom from
Desiring desires.

I am here, where sky meets sea
And where rocks descend into surf.
I am at peace, at last -
Able to remember to love
Those forgotten gods who allowed me my birth.

There is no noise, here,
No modern music -
Only the slow silent passing of a Time,
Almost forgotten now,
Which perhaps only War, a death,
Some natural disaster can remind.

Nearby, a young woman walks
Shedding her beauty as the cold wind sheds
The hot breath:
And I am pained, stung bodily
Not by desire but by a feeling
Far beyond my possibility of words.
I do not belong, as she and others belong
As they cling to the passions of Earth.

It is not that I am detached or have transcended emotion:
Rather, I am sad - burdened
By a deep naked knowledge of myself.
So I am alone,
A monk of a dead religion
With neither monastery nor home.

Travelling

A hot day in Summer as I walk
Slowly
But fastly sweating
Down this road
While speeding traffic passes
As speeding traffic does:
The drivers seem unaware or careless
Of my slowness
And grimly swerve to almost
Touch me
Here where a town - ten miles distant - creeps
Over a river to spread across
A narrow greening plain.

There is food in the town,
A path's beginning to take me upward
And turning through a forest
To the sheep-sided hills
Beyond.

Slowly, my world passes -
I cannot comprehend the rush
And sit in the hot sun on a low wall
Having passing through the breathless body
Of this town.

Even my water is warm
And suspicious faces watch me
As their owners in gardens surround themselves
With sound:
There seems a rushing in the seeping loud
Music, a barrier
To keep my slow moving solitary travelling world
Away -
I smile, but my beard, my worn clothes -
Perhaps my eyes - mark me.

A few hours
And it is good to be alone again
Among the peace of hills
Where my walking slowness seems to frame
Each slowly passing world:

Above - clouds
To herald some future rain.

A Summer Sun

Crows calling while sheep cry
By the road that shall take them
To their death:

I sit, while sun lasts
And bleeds my body dry
In this last hour before dark
On a day when a warm wind
Carried the rain that washed
A little of this valley
Like the stream washes
My rock:

There are no trees to soften
This sun - only heather and fern
To break the sides of the hill;

I cannot keep this peace
I have found -
It seems unformed like water
Becomes unformed without a vessel
A channel or some stream:
It cannot be contained
As I contain my passion and my dreams.

There are no answers I can find
Only the vessel of walks in hills
Alone
Whereby I who seek
Am brought toward the magick peak
That keeps this hidden world
Alive:

It does not last
But like the cirrus cloud
Is blown by breeze to free
A summer sun.

Wine

Stale
I once drank you
Knowing no difference because of herbs.

She held me, her cunning hands
That did not wish
Nor offer the warmth that snared my soul:
The wine was
Intoxicating our senses
But only I was drunk:
She laughed.

I needed rest
Dreaming marriage under sun -
Until bright morning came
When she, alas, changed
Her form in the reality of the room
And I was left to walk with my sack
Down the dusty track
Past a grove of sun-burnt trees
Toward those distant hills:

And yet the white-washed house was only
One step
Along my Way.

Meanings

She sleeps,
Dreaming
Of days past, journeys done
While, within, her liver
Slowly dies:

I'm so sorry
The Consultant said.
It is very serious ...

Three weeks to dream
As life ebbs as a life ebbs.
I'm glad we went to Egypt -
Her first words
Following that fatal verdict.

Now, forward four weeks,
Her strength mostly gone,
She sleeps as I remembering
Watch
Almost crying
And yearning for times past
Like those Summer days
We remembered yesterday
When we had sat together
Amid the heat in our colourful garden
At peace beneath a sky of blue.

Now
What to say? What to do?
Except strive not to forget
These precious hours before that final sleep.

There is, of course, the complex question -
Why?
Having harmed no one, and forty years in age,
She dies.
From such suffering, perhaps an insight gained:
Civilizations formed, kept alive
By memories and meanings being born of this?

Becoming

Let us observe, still, the sun-shadows
Falling upon warming Winter's frost:
Let us, quivering, hear
As once perhaps many times in childhood we heard
When our senses were not distracted
And only the leaf that we found
Had meaning - torn for a question.

Let us free ourselves from ourselves
So that we no longer look
For reflexions
But capture light like that breath,
Hot, of a woman remembere
Still haunting the dreaming and leading us
To Hel.

Let us not toil, burning ourselves
Like a candle toward its end,
But become sharp like a sword
And a hoar frost spread by dark night.
Let us not read
But become instead the book
That future governments will ban.....