In Memory Of Ted Hughes Om - 1930 -1998 Poem by joop Berse

I

The dropping tied carried him
On a raft of tree trunks.
A frayed, white flag hanging limp
Beneath the fringe of a tree on the beach,
Pale twigs burning the night.
A black curtain burning.
Two silver coins covered the foundered eyes,


Two silver moons.
The journey towards the potters' wheel had begun,
Between anvil and evil of landscape.
Away from the pursuing dogs on the moor.
Explosives buried deep inside
The safety of their rib-cages.

II

The shouldered box travelled twice,
Nail-heads and showroom polished wood,
Through the sombre aisle,
The hatch for good, death of Time.
Black Shoe, horizontal descent.
Starless plot with its harsh,
Rocky, Devon winter, pale
Thoughts caught in a morass.
Prism of dreams.
The astonishment at the news
Of your emptied crawl to peace.
The frozen star in the north
Fell into an open ear. Drips from
Monuments of seed and soil.

III

Ushered into this Druid of ground,
Bottom of the revolving well.
Tonight is our first night.
Your feet in the soil.



Before sunrise this world spinning
Has forgotten all about it.
The world drowns gently,
Fingers exploring your inside out,
Every inch of grin, constellation.
Mother earth rinses her pearls
In the vastness of her mist,
The opened vagrant receiving.

IV

A man in his grave,
In the crack beside the hedge,
The sheep, the fat maggots.
Death became flesh.
Carcass of soil.
Ambush of Time.



The decades of unearthing, carving,
Until your own ship bogged down.
Figure-head first into the mud.
The first winter will white cover tracks,
Dark mascara of hollow eyes.

Spring, clothed in lamb, the smell of blood and
Back-end, thawed church steeples,
Will return, you in its stride.
Every season.
Row of bone pale rings.
A row of rusty rings drips
Slowly into the mound.
Secret, poisonous rivers swallow dark
Gurgling oily waters. The skin turns sour,
Anatomy turns to sticks. And it is just hands at
The bottom of the well, the sky
Pins and needles at night,
Illiterate, flickering dots of ice.
His face depletes into nightmare,
Two dimensional.

V

Earth voices whisper dying cut flowers.
Warm rumours rain out of the black,



Drip down my shoulders,
Comforting.

VI

He lies deep into my idea of moon,
High up in my head, motionless prayer.
Hibernating in the dead of winter.

He adds to bricks of ancient buildings.
Remains. Boulders. Stonehenge seems fair.
But its bones have been suckled dry, infertile.

You are still on the graveyard wall,
Being supple, contemplating, skimming
The new surface. Touching my blood vessels.

You have linked with our Devon dreamland,
Two spacecraft docking, the pulsating
Spines on my bookshelves. Headstones.