Jon Silkin
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Jon Silkin. All works are copyright and may not be reproduced or published
in any form without permission.]
'We were evacuated in the war'
'sinking below the level of himself
to mark the insides of his head, like glass'
1
We were evacuated in the war
not working with language, a dull shrift
of possibilities, and sprinkled our piss-pans
with fool's gold. By us, two mines rusted
with real gold, quartz churches the Romans
spilt — septuagints that enriched in small
heavy handfuls. A Queen's ring opened
a new mine, fifty feet under
unpumped glistening, a watery shaft
the eye retrieves. Invisibly air folds
round branches, delicate mainspring about
the sun, a sprocket that fliucks up dew
at the flower's lip, misting dull gradual curves
of pasture. Like sweat, itching drops
barb this flesh. — I'd stop the Welshman inspecting
our fool's gold — Judah's pyrites — grained
by fanged sawing. If I crush and pan
valueless sediment, smelt fool's gold,
pawn it, and run off, I'd saunter in
haphazard grass, bulbous blackberries,
wollen multi-eyed spit; even this house
dishevelled, I want; cursed, it is said,
to frizzle; on its flagstones blood speckles
in polish, where a master got knifed
balking a servant's marriage. For true gold,
authentic nature in dishevellment,
the hand abuses quartz to extract
fingers of gold, modest and noble,
splitting a Jew in Christian doubleness
of love for the community he serves.
Shy looks of England rust in the fool's gold.
2
So in dishevellment nature forms golds
neither as brutish as the other is.
3
I sniff gas —
carbide watered to light a dim house
where I am clean in a fee-paying school,
a pure scholarly, a large-kneed boy
whose brain squats, in its carbuncle made of adamant;
not kind, bullied as bullying; a Jew
paying for to be educated in
the Welshman's English — an inauthentic metal,
whose herring-bone lines where a fat saw cuts
the lesser pyrites, at spoil-heaps.
I crush a childhood's Welsh indignities
of self-hood and inauthenticities.
Their fighting, brave: my crudity, a dishevelled
outsideness, in large knees. Those boys
disarrayed merely, but yet authentic
in it with real gold, easy-natured
and brutal.
4
Oh, if the sun will arrive, top-hatted,
spangling each of us. Love lamps safety,
but I'd love genuinely, father or boy.
The woman's curve lunges at me, whose fruits
fasten my fingers to her.
I think this is the way the bush sings
at its growing.
[from The Ship's Pasture, 1986]