Barry Tebb Poems

You are my dream

Of the East

You are my life

In the West

Fused in one

You begin my day

And end each day

With a silent smile

When I die I will

Have only my love

To leave you.

You said I had written

No poems for you

And you had written

Only cheques.

I cannot go on loving

The empty air

No matter how many cheques

That air may bear.

I have a headache

And heartache

Remembering another love

Twenty years ago,

Living and loving and leaving

A city for a cottage

On the moors, the

Hyaline air, the silence

And the distant stars.

I am your poet

Officially or unofficially

You may not know it

But I am.

From the hilly north

I came and sang.

I found myself

At least half-a-swan.

Through all my rage

You see a man

Wanting love.

Through all your calm

I see a woman loving.
...

What ghosts haunt

These streets of perpetual night?

Riverbanks fractured with splinters of glass condominiums

For nouveam riche merchant bankers

Black-tied bouncers man clubland glitz casinos

Novotel, Valley Park Motel, the Hilton:

Hot tubs, saunas, swim spas, en suite

Satellite TV, conference rooms, disco dinners.

I knew Len, the tubby taxi man

With his retirement dreams of visiting

The world's great galleries:

‘Titian, Leonardo, Goya,

I've lived all my life in the house I was born in

All my life I've saved for this trip'

The same house he was done to death in

Tortured by three fourteen year olds,

Made headlines for one night, another

Murder to add to Beeston's five this year.

Yorkshire Forward advertises nation-wide

The north's attractions for business expansion

Nothing fits together any more

Addicts in doorways trying to score

The new Porsches and the new poor

Air-conditioned thirty-foot limos, fibre-optic lit,

Uniformed chauffeurs fully trained in close protection

And anti-hijack techniques, simply the best â€"

See for yourself in mirrored ceilings.

See for yourself the screaming youth

Soaring psychotic one Sunday afternoon

Staggering round the new coach station

'I'll beat him to death the day I see him next'





Fifty yards away Millgarth police station's

Fifty foot banner proclaims ‘Let's fight crime together'

I am no poet for this age

I cannot drain nostalgia from my blood
...

Richard Chessick, John Gedo, James Grotstein and Vamik Voltan



What darknesses have you lit up for me

What depths of infinite space plumbed

With your finely honed probes

What days of unending distress lightened

With your wisdom, skills and jouissance?

Conquistadores of the unconscious

For three decades how often have I come to you

And from your teachings gathered the manna

Of meaning eluding me alone in my northern eyrie?

Chance or God's guidance â€" being a poet I chose the latter â€"

Brought me to dip my ankle like an amah's blessing

Into the Holy Ganges of prelude and grosse fuge

Of ego and unconscious, wandering alone

In uncharted waters and faltering

Until I raised my hand and found it grasped

By your firm fingers pulling inexorably shoreward.

Did I know, how could I know, madness

Would descend on my family, first a sad grandfather

Who had wrought destruction on three generations

Including our children's?


I locked with the horns of madness,

Trusted my learning, won from you at whose feet I sat

Alone and in spirit; yet not once did you let me down,

In ward rounds, staying on after the other visitors â€"

How few and lost â€" had gone, chatting to a charge nurse

While together we made our case

To the well meaning but unenlightened psychiatrist,

Chair of the department no less, grumbling good-naturedly

At our fumbling formulations of splitting as a diagnostic aid.

When Cyril's nightmare vision of me in a white coat

Leading a posse of nurses chasing him round his flat

With a flotilla of ambulances on witches' brooms

Bringing his psychotic core to the fore and

The departmental chairman finally signing the form.



Cyril discharged on Largactil survived two years

To die on a dual carriageway ‘high on morphine'

And I learned healing is caring as much as knowing,

The slow hard lesson of a lifetime, the concentration

Of a chess master, the footwork of a dancer,

The patience of a scholar and a saint's humility,

While I have only a poet's quickness, a journalist's

Ability to speed-read and the clumsiness

Of a circus clown.
...

At ten she came to me, three years ago,

There was ‘something between us' even then;

Watching her write like Eliot every day,

Turn prose into haiku in ten minutes flat,

Write a poem in Greek three weeks from learning the alphabet;

Then translate it as ‘Sun on a tomb, gold place, small sacred horse'.

I never got over having her in the room, though

Every day she was impossible in a new way,

Stamping her foot like a naughty Enid Blyton child,

Shouting 'Poets don't do arithmetic!'

Or drawing caricatures of me in her book.

Then there were the ‘moments of vision', her eyes

Dissolving the blank walls and made-up faces,

Genius painfully going through her paces,

The skull she drew, the withered chrysanthemum

And scarlet rose, ‘Descensus averno', like Virgil,

I supposed.

Now three years later, in nylons and tight skirt,

She returns from grammar school to make a chaos of my room;

Plaiting a rose in her hair, I remember the words of her poem -

‘For love is wrong/in word, in deed/But you will be mine'

And now her promise to come the last two days of term,

'But not tell them', the diamond bomb exploding

In her eyes, the key left ‘Accidentally' on my desk

And the faint surprise.
...

Shell-shocked from Korea

A grenade that left him

The platoon's only survivor,

Put him in Stanley Royd

For thirty years.

He tailored there

And out on weekend leaves

He made and mended

Everybody's clothes,

Crying copiously

While he sewed.

When they cleared out

The chronic cases

Uncle Bob came home,

Shopping for Edna,

Doing the garden;

When the lodger left

Without a word, the police

Searched his room,

The garden shed,

Even the chest freezer.

Oesophageal cancer

Is very final.

John, his son, waiting

To take the house,

Departed for a month's fishing

Until it was all over.



As a last rite

They put him in the LGI

But I spoke to the houseman privately,

Pulling together the bits of a life

Wholly given over to others,

Fallen comrades, Edna,

The grandchildren

His pension went on.

The houseman agreed to speak

To the surgeon privately.

Edna went first and

At her funeral John,

In frustrated fury,

Hit him over the head

With an empty fish tank.

When secondaries started

I was not told

And in the hospice

He barely lasted

His first weekend.
...

Just a family get-together in a terrace house in Bradford

High tea with a few stuffy aunts I hadn't seen for years

Their husbands in tow like lost dogs sniffing round for food

But she came all the same, ushered in politely as a friend

Of a friend or somebody's cousin twice removed though

Everybody was a bit put out at first except me so I got

Sat down next to her and started to chat but people would

Keep chipping in, especially the young men, definitely upper-class

Gate-crashers who kept scowling at her and she kept snapping

Back at them and I said, 'There seems to be a problem to do

With suppressed anger, I feel' and even my own son, somewhat

Unrelaxed but a genuine Old Etonian nonetheless, looked a bit

Embarrassed at the kerfuffle, but he kept standing by me wearing

His tails and perhaps it was this that finally sent the young

Men on their way and I managed to get her out for a breath

Of fresh air in the street and eventually we found our way to

Peel Park. Nobody seemed to notice who she was or perhaps they

Were too polite to say or they thought she was another Diana

Lookalike anyway we had some peace at last and forgetting

Protocol I put my arm round her and said, 'You're just ordinary.

Like everyone, even the Emperor of China, that's the secret of life.

If there is one' and she started to cry softly and still nobody

Noticed and then the people and the park and even Bradford itself

Melted away in her tears.
...

I stood there in front of forty-five faces

The first day of term, not especially fancying

'Exercises in Mechanical Arithmetic' and so instead

I read a poem from Kirkup in Japan, about Nijinsky,

Hand-written on a fan of rice-paper.

Thirty years later, taking a Sri Lankan girl

In search of her first job around London schools,

A Head-of-English announced 'You wouldn't get away

With that now!' as though I had committed

A crime-against-society.

I remember sending the boys out to change for P.T.

While the girls changed in front of me,

Was it some kind of incipient voyeurism?

And Sheila, my genius-child-poet, about whom

Redgrove said, 'Of course you are in love!'

Or was it the poetry, some kind of anarchy,

'He's quite mad about it and teaches nothing else',

The barely literate student teacher said.

Wittgenstein alternated between junior school teaching

And philosophy

Leavis ranted but read poetry inspirationally;

Twenty years later a stranger on a bus tapped my shoulder,

'What you taught me at nine got me two O'Levels,

That was all I ever got.'
...

For Barbara

I step off the pavement

like a precipice

Engage the darting sunshafts

in a duel

In the wall's shadow I web

my prints to pattern

The moist stone virgins.

The lawns are white-coated

their throats red

With berries and bird-song;

in petrified gardens

Hyacinth tongues lip the wall.

Leaf mould muffles my heel-taps

the enormous trees totter

In the hyaline air; I hear the

Sunday strollers in their

Mist-making walks, pressing through them

like some voiceless ghost.
...

I struggled through streets of

Bricked-up, boarded-up houses,

Mostly burned-out, keeping

To the middle of the road,

Watching the abandoned gardens

With here and there a house

Still lived in, curtained

Against the daylight and distantly

I saw the iron railings of the school

I'd taught in thirty years before.

The same brick buildings, hop scotch

Squares and rounders posts

And the sign, ‘Welcome to Wyther Park

Primary School'. The wooden prefabs

Where I taught poetry nine till four

Replaced by newer prefabs of I don't

Know what, hidden in trees with

Thirty years more growth, one playground

Grassed over, with benches and tables

Like a pub garden, yet there was the same

Innocence still, my inner sense declared.

I sat on a stone seat by the bridge

Over the canal, watching the pylons

Stretching away to Kirkstall Forge,

By the steps to the railway where

Once the station stood that took us

Every year to Flamborough Head.
...

The grain of the exposed boards

Speaks through the wall of the years

We are back in our cottage

On the wind-swathed hills

Watching late winter dawns

Gather like kindled flame.

We are back with those winter dusks, -

The hyaline air hung in darkness

And a vale of stars, waking in blankets

Laid on bare boards, making a fire

From our dreams.

We are walking through mist

On snow-skirled roads, taking turns

On a swing in a deserted park,

Hearing the rhythmic clank

Of dripping links.

Again I see your smile

I have missed the long years since

Touching your fingertips

Before our exhausted sleep.
...