Shining Cliff
In December 2006 my daughter held her 30th birthday in an isolated hostel in Shining Cliff Wood, near Ambergate, Derbyshire, among twenty of her friends. A few months later I wrote these reminiscences of the woods, and of the sense of hopefulness that can emanate from young people.
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Forfeit world and gain
the shred of earth that spells true
wills itself through common need.
Keep it for ever if you can. When you are 80
meet here again and take the same oath
in each others’ eyes
As the robin hesitating on the gate
the blackbird peering into the grass.
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Crossing the small wooded valley
knowing the world’s instability, learning
the colour of its fade, to keep a record
For ever if you can, meeting
and passing signs to the future
long after any of your birthdays
A different robin on the gate,
blackbird on the young elder.
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Meet across the world’s divides
and there is your shining,
where it has always been
Through the night closure (cunning world)
and the future when you will move slowly
supported on frames
With birds to cheer your way then as
now calling under the brittle leaves.
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Hope engendered in traverse
sorrow’s picture staring down
the long song against despair
Secure your beautiful white hair
we shall not always linger here, scooping
fluff from the machines. Listen
The thrush at its limit, the totally
unreasonable wren, piping through the gates of death
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The long high song echoing
over the trees down the slope
the leaves flicker a world picture
A tempered wish a tied purpose
slices the air, our failing
falling ecstasy, our fair trade.
The caged goldfinch, a memory of Baghdad,
robin and blackbird suddenly flown.
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The ring in the air, the green mottled light
moving on the side of your face, you will
have to insist on this validation
For fifty years through all exits and ignorance
star and leaf in tension through the sky
as the mist descends
And the ring is not for love now, the ring
is for war. You know this and continue,
arm over the magpie’s shoulder.
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Birches and small oaks. Fear and despair
stirring in the wind, which is not strong,
swaying like wrens on reeds, we make our progress
In slow careful steps, over and through
the barriers the world creates to thought towards
crystal horizons, purple stain on the leaf
And off you go, on your own as we always were,
sorrow band across the forehead, opening the gates
the birds flock over the stones.
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Is where it always was, the bright certainty
flying up on uncertain wings
to conclude high on the world’s lack
We forget it, fumbling
with connectors at the edge
of our spaces as the days roll over
Starlings and blackbirds
high in the trees, presiding there
where the president fell.
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Down in the valley below high in the clouds the old tension
is stretched that snaps into love and hatred, red leaf
take these cares on your shoulder
For we creep between our failures as the sunlight through the branches
some of our failures are vast enough to blanket the world
and the surviving sense is a hearth light calculated on the dark earth
a point bringing others together, small fires dotted on the plain
Keep them burning into the next century,
you old drunks.
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The pristine burn of thought that
rends up from the stones
what must be done
The earth must be recognised.
The dead must arise and the shopping be done but first of all
the earth must be recognised.
And when recognised released.
Tell it to the astounded pigeon. That bangs
into flight.
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December, patches of bracken stalks
brown leaves clinging to some of the trees
and strewn in the pale grass, thousands
of chestnuts rotting on the ground.
The A6, slightly visible, slightly audible
down the end of the valley through the trees
your route home to southern business.
Remember this north before its bitterness.
Hairclips, Cuban rap, analysis
And a farewell to the song thrush.
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In five months’ time flowers will start to emerge
on the ground and in the trees
but none of us will be here then
We’ll be somewhere else
pursuing our centres
to the world’s core and closure
With passion to reach the world’s
gravity. For they exist,
the little ones with nothing to eat.
Bright eye, yellow beak.
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How then should I your true love know
from another one?
A voice, a message, a promise,
a wrong to be righted, a future.
Moving in the forest at night
towards a conclusion, and an end to oppression.
May he reach you from the ends of the earth,
humming-bird caught in his hair.
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