Vernon Scannell Poems

The bar he went inside was not
A place he often visited;
He welcomed anonymity;
No one to switch inquisitive
...

Silver Wedding

The party is over and I sit among
The flotsam that its passing leaves,
...

The naked hunter's fist, bunched round his spear,
Was tight and wet inside with sweat of fear;
He heard behind him what the hunted hear.
...

It is a curious experience
And one you"re bound to know, though probably
In other realms than that of literature,
Though I speak of poems now, assuming
...

He killed his wife at night.
He had tried once or twice in the daylight
But she refused to die.
...

The appetite which leads him to her bed
Is not unlike the lust of boys for cake
Except he knows that after he has fed
He'll suffer more than simple belly-ache.
...

My son aged three fell in the nettle bed.
'Bed' seemed a curious name for those green spears,
That regiment of spite behind the shed:
It was no place for rest. With sobs and tears
The boy came seeking comfort and I saw
White blisters beaded on his tender skin.
We soothed him till his pain was not so raw.
At last he offered us a watery grin,
And then I took my billhook, honed the blade
And went outside and slashed in fury with it
Till not a nettle in that fierce parade
Stood upright any more. And then I lit
A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead,
But in two weeks the busy sun and rain
Had called up tall recruits behind the shed:
My son would often feel sharp wounds again.
...

The soil is savoury with their bones' lost marrow;
Down among dark roots their polished knuckles lie,
And no one could tell one peeled head from another;
Earth packs each crater that once gleamed with eye.

Colonel and batman, emperor and assassin,
Democratized by silence and corruption,
Defy identification with identical grin:
The joke is long, will brook no interruption.

At night the imagination walks like a ghoul
Among the stone lozenges and counterpanes of turf
Tumescent under cypresses; the long, rueful call
Of the owl soars high and then wheels back to earth.

And brooding over the enormous dormitory
The mind grows shrill at those nothings in lead rooms
Who were beautiful once or dull and ordinary,
But loved, all loved, all called to sheltering arms.

Many I grieve with a grave, deep love
Who are deep in the grave, whose faces I never saw:
Poets who died of alcohol, bullets, or birthdays
Doss in the damp house, forbidden now to snore.

And in a French orchard lies whatever is left
Of my friend, Gordon Rennie, whose courage would toughen
The muscle of resolution; he laughed
At death's serious face, but once too often.

On summer evenings when the religious sun stains
The gloom in the bar and the glasses surrender demurely
I think of Donovan whose surrender was unconditional,
That great thirst swallowed entirely.

And often some small thing will summon the memory
Of my small son, Benjamin. A smile is his sweet ghost.
But behind, in the dark, the white twigs of his bones
Form a pattern of guilt and waste.

I am in mourning for the dull, the heroic and the mad;
In the haunted nursery the child lies dead.
I mourn the hangman and his bulging complement;
I mourn the cadaver in the egg.

The one-eyed rider aims, shoots death into the womb;
Blood on the sheet of snow, the maiden dead.
The dagger has a double blade and meaning,
So has the double bed.

Imagination swaggers in the sensual sun
But night will find it at the usual mossy gate;
The whisper from the mouldering darkness comes:
'I am the one you love and fear and hate.'

I know my grieving is made thick by terror;
The bones of those I loved aren't fleshed by sorrow.
I mourn the deaths I've died and go on dying;
I fear the long, implacable tomorrow.
...

Compelled by their black hum
And accidental mischief, I
Distracted from my pompous play
With words that twist and tease,
Rolled myself a paper club
And stalked my quick tormentors round
The room until they settled on
The wall, their mortuary slab.
Three I translated with one swipe
From busy bodies into dark
Smudges on my wall
Before I knew my action wrong
And guiltily let fall
The paper truncheon and went back
To where my words like insects bled
And dried upon their paper shroud,
All dead, unquestionably dead.
...

The bronze sun blew a long and shimmering call
Over the waves of Brighton and Southend,
Over slapped and patted pyramids of sand,
Paper Union Jacks and cockle stalls;
A pierrot aimed his banjo at the gulls;
Small spades dug trenches to let the channel in
As nimble donkeys followed their huge heads
And charged. In the navy sky the loud white birds
Lolled on no wind, then, swinging breathless, skimmed
The somersaulting waves; a military band
Thumped and brayed, brass pump of sentiment;
And far from the beach, inland, lace curtains stirred,
A girl played Chopin while her sister pored
Over her careful sewing; faint green scent
Of grass was sharpened by a gleam of mint,
And, farther off, in London, horses pulled
Their rumbling drays and vans along the Strand
Or trundled down High Holborn and beyond
The Stadium Club, where, in the wounded world
Of five years later, Georges Carpentier felled
Bulldog Joe Beckett in a single round.
And all is history; its pages smell
Faintly of camphor and dead pimpernel
Coffined in leaves, and something of the sand
And salt of holiday. But dead. The end
Of something never to be lived again.
...