Ham House Poem by Barry Van Asten

Ham House

Rating: 5.0


Death in Tunbridge Wells - 1682;
Its unbolted memory has never left these walls.
And its iron ghost climbs down the centuries, and walks,
To rattle, blundering through our thoughtless days now.

This is a house of dignity, a sombre war horse
Poised on the edge of its stately decline:
A mummified relic of the seventeenth century,
Swallowing modern age; force fed with our time.

Autumn has bludgeoned in, finding its way
Between the locked gates and the rusted rails;
Unfolding before me in this strange light,
Hidden from searching eyes, lost in the maze;
Unattended and overgrown behind the gateway,
Forgotten and spiralling out beyond control.

Yet in the moonlight, chambers grind
To their passion-filled decline.
And through panelled rooms, she'll walk tonight
And enter the Great Hall in her phantom glide;
Winding towards the Great Stair and the chapel door
That's thick with each season's remembrance that dies.

Misshapen trees slant from the house, listening
For the sledgehammer thud of Victorian whispers
Among the flower beds and spread boughs that
Still harbour the thumping crimes of yesteryear.

An aeroplane breaks the still and desperate air
And a seated girl springs to her feet again,
To push her lawn mower over the wide sweep
Of tree-shadowed expansive ruin before her.

The carved busts in the brick walls groan and grin
Over the East Front's low shrubs and hedgerows,
Listening to the barbarous hum of twentieth-century:
A whirring mower; a plane in the distance that fades,
Where perhaps once a strummed lute was the only
Sound heard to the faint crackle of fireplaces in rooms!

Clocks for ever ticking - guests talking...
While all around is the slow crumbling and
Shutting down and boarding up of interiors.
Here, some suicide has scratched his name
On the library window pane: John...tun 1780,
(He jumped to his death at the age of seventeen) .

A gentle breeze blows between the boughs;
A wheel barrow is pushed by a girl in overalls.
The sun behind a cloud, white and grey,
Looks towards the horror of the house again
Kept from its natural decay; clambering
And stuttering through present time
And sad for the sleep of eternity.

[South Front Terrace]

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Barry Van Asten

Barry Van Asten

Birmingham, England
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