Barry Tebb Poems

Rivers, tow paths, caravan parks

From Kirkstall to Keighley

The track's ribbon flaps

Like Margaret's whirling and twirling

At ten with her pink-tied hair

And blue-check patterned frock

O my lost beloved



Mills fall like doomed fortresses

Their domes topple, stopped clocks

Chime midnight forever and ever

Amen to the lost hegemony of mill girls

Flocking through dawn fog, their clogs clacking,

Their beauty, only Vermeer could capture

O my lost beloved

In a field one foal tries to mount another,

The mare nibbling April grass;

The train dawdles on this country track

As an old man settles to his paperback.

The chatter of market stalls soothes me

More than the armoury of medication

I keep with me. Woodyards, scrapyards,

The stone glories of Yorkshire spring-

How many more winters must I endure

O my lost beloved?
...

Yellow rapeseed

Fields of vision

Whiter than

A shade of pale.
...

Yellow rapeseed

Fields of vision

Whiter than

A shade of pale.
...

Leeds this silent solemn Sunday

Tempest Road is clear of all

But wistful birds, parked cars

And vagrant trees.

The surgery and pharmacy are shuttered tight

'Get your medication straight into your bag',

The friendly GP gravely warned, 'The junks

Lay in wait to grab and run from those no longer young

The building site's scaffolding of bone

Masks pristine piles of bricks where

May winds mourn and moan among

The gaping frames beneath a bannered

Street-wide invitation to a 'Housing Consultation Initiative'

Flapping desultory and unread

Where last year ‘Beeston in Bloom' was up instead.
...

When Blunkett starts to talk like Enoch Powell

I think of Harold Wilson's statue in Huddersfield Station

Caught striding forward, gripping his pipe in his pocket,

Hair blowing in the wind.

could we but turn that bronze

To flesh I would have asked him to meet the two

Asylum-seekers I met in Huddersfield's main street

And asked directions from. 'We are Iranian refugees',

They stammered apologetically. 'Then welcome to this country.'

I said as we shook hands, their smiles like the sun.
...

Mornings like this I awaken and wonder

How I have moved so far, how I have moved so little

And yet in essence stayed the same

Always passionate for the unattainable

For Joan Baez to make me her analyst,

To tour Ireland with Eddie and Finbar Furey

To be made a Chevalier des Palmes for translating Milosz.

I remember one road, many roads I did not take

And my heart lurches and my stomach turns

At the vertigo of mystery

At the simplicity of childhood

And its melancholy

At the silence of the moors

Beckoning, unreachable, tormenting me

As I lie helpless at the border of infirmity

With my soul burning and brimming over

With adolescent passion.

Only analysis with its symmetries and asymmetries

Exactness and paradox, scientific as Heisenberg's

Principle of Uncertainty, yet various as the shades of Monet,

Eases me.

I think of those I have known and know no longer,

Who have died needlessly, disappeared irrevocably

Or changed beyond recognition.

I think of the bridge, river and streets

Of my Montmartre, gone under and made over

Into the grey utilities of trade, the empty road,

Sad as telegraph poles, my Sacrй Coeur silent and boarded up.

My Seine empty of the barges of Dйrain

My Sorbonne absorbed, its students gone

Mornings like this, I awaken and wonder.
...

From the French of Andrй Frйnaud



France was born there and it is from there she sings

Of Joan of Ark and Varlin both.

We must dig deep, o motherland,

Beneath those heavy cobbles.

Country of the Commune, so dear to me,

My very own which make my blood burn

And that same blood will one day flow again

Between those very stones.

It is there when I see people dance

Beneath the veined clouds under the May sun

Especially when the notes of the accordion

Pied-piped them away from the urgencies of the day.

It is the people's special gift beneath the waving banner

To have such gentle hearts. Mine beats still

At the kindness of strangers.

After the Night of the Long Knives

That same heart still beats

At the goodwill of those souls buried

Beneath stones laughing and weeping even now.
...

Dawn's my Mr Right, already

Cocks have crowed, birds flown from nests,

The neon lights of Leeds last night still

Sovereign in my sights, limousines and

Pink baloons, tee shirts with green stencilled

Dates of wedding days to come, the worn dance floor,

Jingling arcades where chrome fendered fruit machines

Rest on plush carpets like the ghosts of fifties Chevies,

Dreams for sale on boulevards where forget-me-nots

Are flowing through the hyaline summer air.

I stood with you in Kings Cross on Thursday night

Waiting for a bus we saw the lighthouse on top

Of a triangle of empty shops and seedy bedsits,

Some relic of a nineteenth century's eccentric's dream come true.

But posing now the question 'What to do with a listed building

And the Channel Tunnel coming through?' Its welded slats,

Timber frame and listing broken windows blew our minds-

Like discovering a Tintoretto in a gallery of fakes.

Leeds takes away the steely glare of Sutton

Weighing down on me like breeze-blocks by the ton,

When all I want to do is run away and make a home

In Keighley, catch a bus to Haworth and walk and walk

Till human talk is silenced by the sun.
...

Memories bursting like tears or waves

On some lonely Adriatic shore

Beating again and again

Threshings of green sea foam

Flecked like the marble Leonardo

Chipped for his ‘Moses'.

And my tears came as suddenly

In that dream, criss-crossed

With memory and desire.

Grandad Nicky had worked

Down the pits for a pittance

To bring up his six children

But nothing left over for more

Than a few nuts and an orange

For six Christmas stockings

So hopefully hung, weighted by pennies,

Stretched across the black mantle.

So Lawrence-like and yet not, grandad

A strict Methodist who read only a vast Bible

Hunched in his fireside chair insisting

On chapel three times on Sundays.

Only in retirement did joy and wisdom

Enter him, abandoning chapel he took

To the Friends or Quakers as they called them then

And somehow at seventy the inner light

Consumed him.

Gruff but kind was my impression:

He would take me for walks

Along abandoned railways to the shutdown

Pipeworks where my three uncles

Worked their early manhood through.

It would have delighted Auden and perhaps

That was the bridge between us

Though we were of different generations

And by the time I began to write he had died.

All are gone except some few who may live still

But in their dotage.After my mother's funeral

None wanted contact: I had been judged in my absence

And found wanting.

Durham was not my county,

Hardly my country, memories from childhood

Of Hunwick Village with its single cobbled street

Of squat stone cottages and paved yards

With earth closets and stacks of sawn logs

Perfuming the air with their sap

In a way only French poets could say

And that is why we have no word but clichй

‘Reflect' or ‘make come alive' or other earthbound

Anglicanisms; yet it is there in Valery Larbaud

‘J'ai senti pour la premiere fois toute la douceur de vivre'-

I experienced for the first time all the joy of living.

I quote of their plenitude to mock the absurdity

Of English poets who have no time for Francophiles

Better the ‘O altitudo' of earlier generations â€"

Wallace Stevens' 'French and English

Are one language indivisible.'

That scent of sawdust, the milkcart the pony pulled

Each morning over the cobbles, the earthenware jug

I carried to be filled, ladle by shining ladle,

From the great churns and there were birds singing

In the still blue over the fields beyond the village

But because I was city-bred I could not name them.

I write to please myself: ‘Only other poets read poems'
...

Sorry, I almost forgot, but I don't think

Its worth the effort to become a Carcanet poet

With my mug-shot on art gloss paper

In your catalogue as big as Mont Blanc

Easier to imagine, as Benjamin Peret did,

A wind that would unscrew the mountain

Or stars like apricot tarts strolling

Aimlessly along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
...