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ISBN-13: | 9781846945809 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Collective Ink |
Publication date: | 11/25/2016 |
Pages: | 400 |
Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
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Life Cycle and Other New Poems 2006â"2016
Collected Poems Volumes 31â"34
By Nicholas Hagger
John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Nicholas HaggerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84694-580-9
CHAPTER 1
31
LIFE CYCLE 2014
Life Cycle
"At the start of the mid-year break [in Baghdad], on 18 January 1962, we flew to Basra. In the air above Ur, sitting with my eyes closed, I received the words 'Life Cycle' and scribbled down headings for a work on a whole life and its cycle."
Nicholas Hagger, My Double Life 1: This Dark Wood, p.142
I. Garden
I sit in my garden in autumn sun
Above a dozen curved, perfumed rose-beds
Whose flagstone paths present a Union flag –
That still holds in our dwindling, fractured time –
Around a fountain plashing to a bowl
And gaze past oaks and fields to the dark wood
That inspired my view of my double life
On this rim of the crater round seven hills,
And muse upon the ages of my life
And on the stages all lives pass through from 10
Their hatching and larvae to winged flight.
In the arbour near a camellia bush
I look beyond the pool at buttercups
Like those that filled my childhood fields and muse
On my twelve seven-year ages that grew me
And the twelve cycles that propel all growth:
Twelve cycles like medieval labours.
II. Reflection: Twelve Seven-Year Ages
Birth, infancy and childhood spring and strain.
Species, once born from womb or hatched from eggs,
Transmogrify into their final form. 20
Animals' life cycles metamorphose
Through three or four stages and life cycles:
Fish, mammals, reptiles and birds are born from
Mothers or hatch from eggs, are young, then grow
Into adults; amphibians like frogs,
Which hatch from spawn into wriggling tadpoles,
And newts metamorphose from gills to lungs,
Breathe under water and then air on land;
From eggs insects become wormy larvae,
Inactive pupae, then adults that fly; 30
Dragonflies, grasshoppers and cockroaches
Pass from eggs into nymphs and then grow wings
In three stages, not four; spiders have three;
Reptilian snakes hatch from eggs as snakelets;
Birds hatch from eggs to chicks, fish and brown bats
Are born as pups as are all great white sharks.
Transforming paths of metamorphosis
Take species from three to seventy years.
Humans waul and grow towards adulthood
Through families and schools, strict pedagogues. 40
I bang my high-chair tray, map on the wall
Of Europe showing front lines in the war,
At peace as my mother moves like a giant.
I sit among buttercups and acorns
In a gold field and bask in gold sunshine
In harmony with the blue universe,
Under the dome of the One-sheltering sky.
But at night I cower within my bed
As the sky fills with droning doodle-bugs
And my father sits and reassures me 50
And then limps off from childhood polio,
And I shudder at transitoriness
Beneath the enduring, sheltering heavens.
My forebears dug, pruned trees or vines, sowed seed
Under Aries, the ram, in the night sky,
Symbol of Amon-Ra shown with ram's horns,
At the start of the zodiacal year,
The Great Year whose labours begin in March,
And cycle of existence, spirit's birth.
Amid my memories of lopping lime-trees 60
And forking beds and making piles of weeds
To prepare for growing and sprouting seeds,
The Wheel of Life shows One revolves many.
The Wheel of Life shows One becomes many.
Youth, school-days. First in short trousers, then long,
A child of the socialist Welfare State,
I grew away from Nature under rules,
Nightly homework and organised ball games.
I caught tadpoles in the Strawberry Hill pond.
I studied newts and spotted butterflies, 70
And alone in a dark garden I gazed
In wonder at a night sky full of stars
And felt I was one with the universe.
But school work closed round me, I ceased to see.
Textbooks intruded on the mystery.
I munched meals at the high nursery table
In my family, worked and went to bed
And now my path was through my school's classrooms
And playing-fields, and not the universe.
I had three sisters who did not survive 80
Post-war infancy, and I lamented
The transitory, fleeting lives we have
Beneath the sunshine and the cloudless blue
And the faint breeze from an eternal source.
My ancestors planted, picked flowers, hunted
And I recall the zodiacal bull
As I hoed in the garden of my soul.
Adolescence brought me my destiny.
Nature still warmed me like a summer's day.
I relive long grass below the first tee 90
And clacking grasshoppers and warm sunshine
And again blend into the universe
And live above the buzzing of the bees.
I see Eden sitting beside Churchill,
Stand up for our Empire, speak on Suez
And watch bemused as he withdraws our troops.
And sitting on a seat on lower field
On a spring day at school, at seventeen,
I read The Faber Book of English Verse
And know I will one day be a poet. 100
A month on I bend by Horace's spring
And scoop its limpid water in cupped hands
And know that I will pen odes of my own.
I was in harmony with a great power
I glimpsed in moments, as when at college
One early March morning, a cloudless sky
Torn between two guides like heavenly twins,
I took my father's letter to the lake,
Walked through an arch and sat on a stone seat
And read that I could change to Literature, 110
Griffins and sphinxes round me on the stone,
Fabulous imaginary creatures.
I had escaped the Law and, rising, stood
Beside the lake, my shadow before me,
And gazed at the reflection of the sun,
The bending trees and sky, and blended in
With what I saw. And now the universe
Was one, including me, and I the breeze
Within the surface of the sunlit lake
And knew a oneness behind all I saw 120
That pulsed through me and rippled through the leaves.
I am transported to that sunny lake's
Weeping willows and relive that morning
That changed my course and shaped who I am now.
A shield with martlets and a spiral stair
Up to the library, I worked all night
And now my path veered from legal cases
To great works by past writers and poets,
Away from lawyers' fees to deft phrases,
Quests for the One and skewering vices. 130
But back whence the letter came, a sadness:
A brother diagnosed diabetic,
Syringing twice daily and weighing food.
The future beckoned but the transience
Of our home life weighed heavily on me
Amid my studies of my ancestors'
Hawking and dallying in courtly love.
Early manhood. A lover and husband,
I sweltered in the Baghdad desert heat.
Above Iraq, flying high over Ur, 140
Sitting eyes closed I received 'Life Cycle'
And wrote it down, not sure of what it meant.
In years to come I probed the life cycle
Of civilizations, and then of all
The flowering, creeping, prowling, flying forms
Of Nature's ordered scheme, all births and deaths,
And now, fifty-two years on, I apply
These words to the progression of all lives.
I grew to my full size and fatherhood
And learned how my father had cared for me. 150
I lived in a Japanese bungalow
With bamboo round my study window-panes
And sat among Zen seekers with closed eyes
And peeped for Light near sawing cicadas
And glimpsed a shaft amid my early drafts
And saw the oneness in raked, swirling stones.
I walked in horseshoe valleys by the sea,
Pinned snakes in forked sticks beneath swooping shrikes
And found a whelk shell on the empty beach.
In China, talking with a sick student 160
I spied the Cultural Revolution
Which was too startling to be believed,
And in Saigon I heard guns thump at night.
And back in my forest I saw a pond
Blend sky and mud into a universe
That blazed with dazzling harmony in sun.
My family gave me a new meaning
And I was on a path of fulfilment
Between our walks, my work, my study desk.
But I thought back with sorrow to the months 170
When my father was ill in heart and brain
And told me "This is the end" and then died
And I mourned the frailty of fragile
Closeness that seems as if it will endure
But fades away, leaving just memories.
I was a smart young man among roses
And my praised faith in art procured my pain.
All round me as I burrowed like a crab
I saw barefooted peasants cutting rice
And thought of the hay harvest on home farms 180
And all the mowing and shearing of sheep
Our medieval ancestors once did.
Adulthood, and a secret grieving time.
In desert heat I met my controller
And was driven down Tripoli's waterfront
And debriefed under palms and crescent moon,
And in harm's way I lost my family,
Watched them fly off to safety and new life,
Leaving me alone near the Sahara
Where between a great sweep of sand and sky 190
I saw a lone Tuareg stand in oneness
With Nature and sizzled with harmony.
Amid the bougainvillaea and palm trees
I loved the silver light of evening sea.
Like Orpheus I went to the netherworld
And, looking back, lost my Eurydice.
And back among London's surveillance squads
When streets become a nightmare of footfalls,
Fighting in the Cold War for Africa,
I opened to the Light which flooded in 200
And filled me with purgation's energy.
My fingers glowed from influxes of Fire
And I was on a path of inner growth
That would lead to projects I had in me
Like seeds hidden under a spruce cone's scales.
But I was still forlorn as I had lost
A marriage that seemed strong but, swept away,
Now seemed transitory, an illusion.
Now on Cold-War business, followed by groups,
I strutted and prowled the streets like a lion, 210
My mind on reaping and the wheat harvest
But having to flail facts for my masters.
Manhood, and new marriage and family
And new responsibility as I
Marshal, organise and administrate
As Head of Department in a large school
And move into a large Victorian house,
A former vicarage where at bedtime
I tuck up two young boys and read stories
And make a snowman in our walled garden. 220
I gaze at the red Virginia creeper
Cascading down a wall, and a pear-tree,
And feel a peace among these garden fronds.
And my path leads through my new family,
Through leafy works and Light, and more visions.
I am settled and fertile, but lament
The transitoriness of this great house
Which will be sold to a well-known actor.
We will leave its permanent solidness.
In Virgo I dream of my ancestors 230
Who threshed the grain in fields and lived quiet lives
Close to the seasons and twilit fireside.
Early middle age and financial growth
As I take over my old school and stand
By the old oak-tree amid buttercups
Where I lay in the sun among acorns.
I mow the fields in decreasing circles,
Pass harvest mice swinging in grass and chug
Past prehistoric plants beyond railings,
At one with my cradle ringed round with trees, 240
Oaklands! ever dear, a benign nanny,
Who trained me as a child and nurtures me
Now I am her curator and her guide.
I am in harmony with her hawthorns
And with the breeze that swishes through the leaves,
And also with the sea that washes in
Round the small harbour where we holiday,
Which I look down on from our seaside house
And across to the Black Head promontory.
I built a house by the blue acacia 250
Cedar, a stone's throw from the Wren door I
Installed by where the Nature table stood
When as a boy I watched newts paw the glass
Of the aquarium filled with pondweed
And now my path will lead through schools and words
For I will have leisure to write my work
And block Communist imperial designs.
But I mourn the passing of my mother
From heart attacks and strokes, and her transience.
She seemed so permanent but now she's gone. 260
In Libra I recall my ancestors
Who hunted and harvested and trod grapes
As I read Peter Rabbit to my boys.
Middle age and further financial growth.
I found a school and gaze at a holm-oak
Planted (it is said) by the Virgin Queen.
I wander in the walled garden and cross
The stream among old trees and in the Hall
Find the room where Churchill came to succeed
Lord Liell as MP, and his wartime room 270
Where he slept nearby wounded officers
In the now requisitioned stately home.
I drive up its lane each morning, and write
My books under Oaklands' blue acacia
Cedar, pour Light into their moulds like bowls
In harmony with all that warm summer
When the Berlin Wall fell and East joined West,
My path now running schools and writing books,
The first two of which were launched in London
By three 'elder statesmen' who were so warm 280
And seemed enduring but were transient.
Two died and one grew old, all receded.
I found the pattern of world history:
All civilizations pass through stages
Which individuals battle or bring in:
One man, like Churchill, cannot on his own
Rescue an empire whose loss he laments;
One man, like Lenin, brings a new stage in.
History has a pattern of progression.
Alongside my forest, in Scorpio, 290
I got words in my head down on paper,
I grew my businesses where ancestors
Ploughed fields and sowed their seeds for next year's crop.
Late middle age and new maturer works.
I travel round Europe and stand before
Hitler's home and recall the flying bombs
That terrorised my childhood and made me
Aware of imminent death in the nights.
I retell the story of Churchill's war
And pen poems and stories, and 'think' books, 300
And revive a historic Tudor Hall
Moated and unchanged amid time's cruel winds.
I stand under roosting peacocks and walk
Round the knot-and-herb garden with actors.
I was rooted in seven centuries
Of bricks and beams, nooks and crannies that leaked
Memories of America's founding.
My path took me past faces of the dead
Who spoke to me as if they were alive.
It seemed I would live there until I died 310
But, a third school crowding, it proved transient –
Hall, actors, history and their visitors –
And now is just a memory like gone mist.
Now I think of the archer with his bow
And of my ancestors' hunt for acorns
They scooped into held aprons for their pigs,
And sigh for Tudor dreams that are no more.
Early old age, and now at this great house
I toil long hours and collect all my works,
Bent near a screen, bundles in plastic box, 320
Sifting, sorting, preserving a life's work.
9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq –
I stood up to fundamental Islam.
I write on terror and world government,
Retired from schools which a strapping son runs,
And dandle my new grandson on my knee
Aware how transient is his infancy.
With a banking crisis looming, alert, I sell
Properties by the sea and Essex farms,
Bought as investments, to fund new building. 330
They seemed so enduring, were transient.
I have come to rest within my forest
Which nurtured my boyhood, whose tossing trees
Measure unseen wind like the inspired breeze
That wafts words to my head and down cramped hand.
I wander to my pool to feed my carp
And muse at the lily rooted in mud
That glows above the pictured trees and cloud
And as I fling handfuls of feed that float
I feel in harmony with fish and sun 340
And the long line of trees that sweeps the sky
And reflect I'm near the end of my life.
My path now leads backwards through my old works
And then forward with offerings I've found.
I recall the goat now firmly tethered
And how my ancestors killed pigs and baked
For a feast at this time of the Great Year.
I live with memories on a forest heath.
Old age and forty books all round my head
And I have not slowed down or got ill, yet. 350
But I'm slower, don't dash around as much
Though still go to the gym every Friday,
Don't drink, eat vegetables and bowls of fruit.
In my garden hang a dozen bird-feeds
Where comes the woodpecker, nuthatch, goldfinch
And flit a host of blue tits and small birds
Watched from beneath by magpies and jackdaws
Waiting to peck dropped seeds, while on the lawn
Green woodpeckers hunt worms and tap on trunks
And ten green parakeets flash between trees. 360
I sit and watch their toings and froings
As the sun climbs and sundial's shadow creeps,
My shadow still before me in cold sun,
In harmony with flittings and swoopings
Against the blue sky and the red sunset
As the blood sun sinks and black bats cavort.
And in this Paradise in which I toil
A flow of projects overbrims my mind
And plashes into my fountain's still bowl
Amid the roses in Union-flag beds. 370
All round secularism challenges
As does the Arab civilization.
My grandchildren are wide-eyed as they play,
Hunting for conkers to put in pockets,
As sun shines, rain squalls, winds gust round the oak
Before the field that shields this house from gales.
I stand and watch them absorbed in the now.
My path is onward as I make an end,
Go through my papers, label them in piles
And prise remaining works out of my skull. 380
For forty years my wife has kept my house
And now after two new hips and a knee
She is less mobile, and I have to face
The transience of the long walks that she made
In four continents, as when, clambering
Over boulders, we found albatrosses.
Water gushes down into my fish-pool.
Thinking of the water-pourer who poured
Two too truthful views of my double life,
I recall how my ancestors carried 390
Wood for their fires, hunted and then feasted
Towards the end of their Great Year and life.
The final seven-year cycle is ahead:
Advanced old age and attendant complaints.
I see myself sitting in a wheelchair
Beside the twelve beds of the rose garden
Whose paths describe a Union flag, and then,
Rug on my knees, a nurse not far behind
Under the apple-trees, and looking down
Beyond the arbour to field and meadow 400
Where rabbits scamper and a lone fox prowls
And glimpsing Death the Reaper with sickle
And knowing I still have time left before
He reaches where I sit in harmony
With the twilit universe and swallows
That skim the waves of grass and sweeping bats,
In last serenity and contentment,
In quiet happiness after struggle.
Back in my study I sit at my desk
And see in alcoves – Rodin's 'Thinker', busts 410
Of Milton, Homer – and the human skull
I bought at a school's closing-down auction,
A memento mori, a reminder
Of the fate that awaits when I am done,
When my work's finished, when I've reached an end.
I calmly face approaching death and bless
The essence of a well-led, rounded life
That has sought wisdom and understanding,
Good knowledge of life and humanity,
Transcendence of my experiences 420
And the elegiac tone of my youth.
Time that has creased my face wastes my body
But my soul, my universal being
Beneath my ego, follows timelessness.
I know with Einstein, time's an illusion:
The past and future are like north and south,
Everything's happened simultaneously
And so the future already exists
And the universe can supply all needs,
Obeys commands and sends 'future' events 430
From 'south' rather than 'north', gives what we want.
The eternal world wears the cladding of time,
And so my death has already happened.
My path leads onwards to this peaceful skull
And, in my memories, which slowly flick
Across my mind like moving screensavers,
Photos drawn from scanned-in places I've been,
I am aware of transitoriness,
The transience of all the images
Of my life, of all I saw, thought and did, 440
Which I reflected in my mirroring
Of our Age and left behind to a new
Generation, the distilled truth I found,
Evidence for my quest and life's follies,
My probing of its vices and my work
In letters, philosophy and history.
I reconcile time's transitoriness
And the eternal, ringing infinite.
A -A = zero,
Time the eternal = the One. 450
I think of my fish and in Pisces smile
At my ancestors sitting by their fire,
Their caught fish being cooked and heart twanging,
Wood cut, ditches cleared and new-born lambs fed,
Warming their hands beside the leaping hearth
And warming their souls at their Great Year's end.
I am in harmony with the great One
In the face of coming death and stillness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Life Cycle and Other New Poems 2006â"2016 by Nicholas Hagger. Copyright © 2016 Nicholas Hagger. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface xv
Volume 31 Life Cycle
Life Cycle 1
Volume 32 In Harmony with the Universe
In Harmony with the Universe 19
The Ghadames Spring: Bubbles 22
Daisies 23
Crystals 24
Nightingale 24
Fragment: Question 25
Further Undated Unused Fragments for Overlord 26
Unused Draft for Overlord 36
Quarry 38
Terrorist 39
Two in One 39
Six-spot Burnets 40
House Martins 40
House Martins in the Eaves 40
Undated Unused Fragments for Armageddon 41
A Breathless Calm 43
Gigs, Insects 43
Daisies, Mower 43
At Great Milton Manor House: On Life and Death 44
Storm 47
Dripping Stars at Midnight 47
Leaves Falling 1 47
Skimming Stones 48
Concorde 48
Oak 48
A Wish for my Granddaughter 49
Snails 52
Grace 53
Bone 53
Near Teignmouth 54
Splashes of Light 54
Bronze Age 55
River, Headlong 56
Sky 56
Fragment: Rain 57
The Wheel of Creation 57
Fragment: Gold 61
Sunlight 61
Robin 62
Fragment, Where are my Friends 62
Magpie in Snow 62
Song Thrush Piping 63
Ladybird 64
Owl 65
Honey-bees 65
Spruce Cone 66
Song Thrush Dead 67
Skull 68
Gulls 68
Smile 69
Sun and Snow 69
Time 1 70
Time 2 70
Smiling Buttercups 70
Wind: Change 71
Buddleia: From Nothing to Form 71
Olympian 72
Sea, Sky: Whole View 72
Mist over the Sea 73
Downpour 73
Storm II 74
Squirrel 74
Squirrel's Reply 74
Drowned 75
At Beverley Minster 75
Marble 77
Pirates: Question Mark 78
Looking Down: Not Bestriding 79
The Seven Hills of Loughton 79
Savage 80
Sun 80
Taking Wing 81
One's Reflection 81
Unaware 82
Moonlight 82
Rain Hisses 82
Sea Bird 83
The Old in the Cold 83
Ruby 83
Discovery of Inflation: At One with the First Cause 84
Spring 86
Fadine 86
White Hawthorn Blossom 87
The Wind's Whistling 87
Discord: Humans who Drop 88
The Mild Wind's Blow 88
A Blackbird's Clear Piping 89
A Family Like Vases 89
Song Thrush 90
Mouse 91
Time, in Tiers 91
Parakeets 91
Poppies 92
Green Woodpecker 93
Brilliant Stars, Snapped Gravity 93
Founder's Song 94
Blue Tit Chirping 95
Hooting Owl 95
Daffodils, Sunlight 96
Full Moon 96
Sheep 97
Horses 97
Dancing Light 98
Rainbow 98
Blackbird 99
Ridging Waves 99
Blushing Sky 99
Helsingor 100
Crown Prince's Palace 100
Vikings 101
Ghost 101
At the Van Gogh Museum: Obscurity 102
Long-legged Fly 103
House Martins Darting 104
House Martins and Carnival 105
Storm, Surge 105
Force 105
Shooting Star 106
Meteorite 106
Heron 107
Spider 107
Bat 107
Moth 108
Stag 108
Carp, Goldfish 109
Box-Leaf Caterpillars 109
Red Moon 110
Blue Tit 111
Snowfields 112
Bay in Sun 112
Planetary Trio 113
Wind Whistles, Force 113
Golden Rose 114
Scudding Stars 114
In Gerard's Herball: Snake's-Head Fritillary 114
Sea Lights 118
Mist 118
At Connaught House: Weather-vane 119
Leaves Falling 2 121
Leaves Flutter 121
Return to Suffolk 122
Birds and Beasts: The Lament of Orpheus 124
Snake (Orpheus to Eurydice and Hades) 124
Ferris Wheel: Life Cycle 125
Muntjac 126
Stars, Waves 126
Rain 126
Sea Surges 127
Vein 127
Pied Wagtail 128
Time like the Sea 1 128
Time like the Sea 2 129
Goldfinch 129
Nuthatch 130
House Spider 130
Fox 131
Stag, Trapped 131
Epistle to King Harold II of Waltham Abbey and Loughton 132
Volume 33 An Unsung Laureate
Pastoral Ode: Landslide, The End of Great Britain 137
Second Pastoral Ode: Landslide Unchanged, The End of England 145
In Westminster: The Passing of an Era 151
The Conquest of England 154
Lisbon Treaty: The End of Great Britain, Demise of a Nation-State 165
Zeus's Emperor (A Mock-Heroic Poem) 169
Royal Wedding 190
Epistle to Gaddafi 197
Changelessness like a Fanfare: Trumpeting a Jubilee 200
Isles of Wonder 203
Ceremonial: On the End of a National Era, The Funeral of Margaret Thatcher 207
Reflections by the Mary Rose 211
The Lion and the Unicorn: Plebiscite in Scotland 216
Caliphate 221
Churchill 50 Years On: Great Briton 227
On Richard III: The Last Plantagenet 231
On Thomas Cromwell's Ruthlessness 235
Enigma 236
Stability: On an Unlikely Conservative Election Victory 242
In St Petersburg: Thoughts in Hermitage 245
In Tallinn: Premonitions of War 250
Chaos in Iraq 252
Watcher and Two Carts 255
Oxford Bait 257
Symposium: Averting a Nuclear Winter 259
The Sorrows of Allah, The Nameless One 263
Thoughts on Syria: Rush to War 263
At Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church 266
Collapse of the Old Order 267
Epistle to the Chancellor of the Exchequer 270
Volume 34 Adventures in Paradise
In Iran: Persian and Shiite Empires 277
In the Galapagos Islands: The Purpose of Evolution 281
In Peru: The Sun of the Incas 286
In Antarctica: In the Southern Ocean and our Ice Age 291
In North Norway: Arctic Circle and Northern Lights, Among Vikings and Altaics 296
The Way to Rome 299
On Hadrian's Wall 310
India: Revisiting the British Raj 315
Delhi's Red Fort Revisited: Paradise 338
Reflections in Arabia 340
Verses on the Death of Mr Nicholas Hagger 344
Indexes:
Chronological Order of Poems 351
Chronological Order within Volumes 361
Index of Titles 371