Ken Smith

Being the third song of Urias

Lives ago, years past generations

perhaps nowhere I dreamed it:

the foggy ploughland of wind

and hoofprints, my father

off in the mist topping beets.

Where I was eight, I knew nothing,

the world a cold winter light

on half a dozen fields, then

all the winking blether of stars.

Before like a fool I began

explaining the key in its lost locked box

adding words to the words to the sum

that never works out.

                                Where I was

distracted again by the lapwing,

the damp morning air of my father’s

gregarious plainchant cursing

all that his masters deserved

and had paid for.

          Sure I was

then for the world’s mere being

in the white rime on weeds

among the wet hawthorn berries

at the field’s edge darkened by frost,

and none of these damned words to say it.

I began trailing out there in voices,

friends, women, my children,

my father’s tetherless anger, some

like him who are dead who are

part of the rain now.

*

My father fading out

Each time I recall him he’s grown

thinner and paler, am I

making myself clear he shouts

from the hearthstone, already

I see almost through him

asleep at the fire, exhausted

evening by evening, his crossed feet

pink and opaque at the open oven door.

If he slams out now it will be

fainter and shake the house less,

less curl to his lip for his bosses –

Reggie Rat, Charlie Woods, Wallace Dixon.

For them he went topping and tailing

bent through the frozen turnips,

or stocking in summer pitched his fork

high in the air in blind sudden anger.

Now he fades out, the wireless

plays him to sleep, he wakes, asks news,

sees in the coals the black flag of a stranger,

dozes again, then is gone completely.

*

Family group

He also was a stormy day: a squat mountain man

smelling of sheep and the high pasture, stumping

through pinewoods, hunched and small, feeling

the weather on him. Work angled him.

Fingers were crooked with frost, stiffened.

Ploughing he would fix his eye on the hawthorn,

walking firm-booted, concerned for the furrow.

Horse and man in motion together, deliberate,

one foot put before the other, treading cut clay.

He would not see the bird perched on the plough.

He would not chase the plover limping over stubble.

He was my father who brought in wood and lit

the hissing lamp. And he would sit, quiet

as moor before the fire. She drew him

slowly out of silence. She had a coat

made from a blanket and wore boys’ shoes.

She was small and had red hands, firm-boned,

and her hair was greying. The house was stone

and slate. It was her house, his home,

and their family, and they quarrelled often.

She churned butter, baked, and scrubbed floors,

and for forty years he laboured the raw earth

and rough weather. In winter we made mats

from rags with pegs. We guarded ourselves

and were close. We were poor and poorer banking

each pound saved. Each year passed slowly.

Now he lives in the glass world of his shop,

and time is grudged. Ham and tinned meat

and vegetables are his breathing day.

He works harder and is unhappy. She too

stoops through the labouring year, is greyer

and grumbles. Nothing gets made any more

but money that cannot be made. Nothing

means happiness. The light comes down wires,

water through tubes. All is expensive, paid.

Silence is gone from their lives, the city

has taken that poised energy. Violence

is articulate. The deliberate motion is gone

and he moves with pain through time that is work

that is cash. He will not notice the crashed

gull fallen in the storm, the grabbing sparrows.

She cannot ease him into speech, or be content

before the broody fire. She is in fashion now.

But seasons pass them without touching.

They will not feel the winter when it comes.

*

Valley

Pale grass

a long flag

striped once by the river,

the one

wandering blue star

of the heron.

In the light’s early silence

the farmers crank the old box Ford

full of chickens. The cock croaks,

he has counted his wives,

some are missing,

plucked and stiffening

under the market awning. Nothing else

but a pheasant’s stuttering,

a distant bell sound. I see

in the starry river

the keel mark.

Tightened into the bank’s

wooded side under the steep

hill’s stone shadow

a Viking boat

is still vanishing.

*

Playing field observations

In the light before rain

counting the hard little

yellows of the dayseyes I went

down the sea-opened valley –

a neat country it’s said

of parkland and flood plain

squared like the blind man’s garden

between the waters.

Sang goodbye to the elms,

glimpsed by the canal

blue smokey lift of a heron,

accepting my birthday.

How the shadows move in

at such news and are strange

in the light. This feather

left for his marker my brother

the crow had dropped by the goalpost

seems a dead man’s finger

keeping his page

in the unfinished biography.

From a recording made at Ken Smith's home in London (on 29 July 1998) drawing on poems from both The Poet Reclining and Shed originally released on cassette on The Poetry Quartets 3 (Bloodaxe Books/The British Council, 1998). See page for Shed for the other poems.

Five poems by Ken Smith: 'Being the third song of Urias', 'My father with two knives', 'My father fading out', 'Years go by', 'The Donegal Liar' (from the Bloodaxe collections The Poet Reclining and Shed). First transmission: BBC Radio 3, 4 August 2002.