Read Online Collected Poems by Alan; Sillitoe - Free Book Online Page B

to be
    One’s possession, which sets you to
    Retaliate against the weals of fate.
    God has no pride. Lucifer’s mistake
    In thinking so was responsible for the
    Vanquishing of
    Entire
    Nations.

THE LAST
    When God said
    Let there be Man
    He also said
    Let there be Lucifer.
    Lucifer became
    And in becoming
    Was the only threat to God.
    Lucifer is part of God
    And part of Man:
    Unity is limitless
    Small and indivisible.
    Lucifer thought
    God ruled through Lucifer
    But God rules alone.
    Man rules, if and when,
    Through Lucifer.
    Lucifer walks in circles,
    With God forever present
    And forever silent.

GOODBYE LUCIFER
    Goodbye, Lucifer, goodbye:
    I say goodbye to everything;
    When the end arrives and knocks its time
    My body won’t dictate the tune
    Nor my soul sing dead.
    Goodbye, Utopia
    Whose minute never came.
    Goodbye –
    In case I cannot say it then
    Or death’s too slow for me to care.
    Goodbye, Lucifer, goodbye
    People music language maps
    Goodbye to love
    And rivers alluvially curving.
    Goodbye the sky.
    Goodbye, Lucifer and all reflections,
    Farewell to bodies and machinery
    Goodbye the spirit of the universe
    Goodbye.

from Sun Before Departure, 1974–1982

HORSE ON WENLOCK EDGE
    A tired horse treads
    The moonpocked face
    Of a ploughed field
    Cuts furrows blindly
    Through drifting rain
    On chestnut trees, soaked hedges
    Energy sucked out with evening;
    Seven nails in each steel shoe
    Are empty scars of twenty-eight nights
    When the white horse dreams
    Of galloping through star-clouds,
    A moon of nails flying from its path.

NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
    Clouds play with their water
    Distort shekels between grass
    Enriched by the city that flattens
    Surrounding land with rubbish;
    Binoculars ring the distance like a gun:
    From a sea of shining slate
    Churches lift and chimneys lurch,
    Modern blocks block visions,
    The Robin Hood Rifles drilled in fours
    Practised azimuths on far-off points,
    Eyes watering at southern hills
    A half-day’s march away:
    â€˜They’ll have to swim the Trent, thou knows,
    God-damn their goldfish eyes!’
    Musket balls rush, break glass,
    Make rammel. The Nottingham Lambs
    Smashed more than a foreign army,
    Came through twitchells to spark the rafters
    Paint pillars with the soot of anarchy.
    The Trent flowed in its scarlet coat
    Too far off to deal with fire:
    The council got our Castle in the end
    Protected by Captain Albert Ball VC
    Who thrust into a cloud-heap above Loos
    Hoping for his forty-second kill.
    In school they said: ‘You’re born
    For Captain Albert Ball
    To be remembered. Otherwise he’d die!’
    A private soldier, he became Icarus:
    â€˜Dearest Folks, I’m back again
    In my old hut. My garden’s fine.
    This morning I went up, attacked five Huns
    Above the Line. Got one, and forced two down
    But had to run, my ammunition gone.
    Came back OK. Two hits on my machine.’
    Fate mixed him to a concrete man
    An angel overlooking
    On the lawn of Nottingham’s squat fort.
    My memory on the terrace
    Remembers barges on the Leen
    Each sail a slice of paper, writing
    Packed in script of tunic-red.
    For eighteen years I blocked the view
    No push to send me flying.
    Another brain shot down in sleep:
    Rich Master Robin Hood outside the walls
    Where he belongs robs me of time
    And does not give it to the poor.
    The whimsical statue stood
    With hat and Sherwood weapons
    Till a Nottingham Lamb removed the arrow
    Someone later nicked the bow
    Then they stole the man himself
    And rolled his statue down the hill
    One football Saturday
    And splashed it in the Trent:
    If you see it moving, take it:
    If it doesn’t move, steal it bit by bit
    But do not let it rest till Death’s sonic boom
    Blows the sun through every Castle room.

OXNEY
    Smoke all evening, too thin to move
    Stubble aflame
    Up a hillside when I drove
    Across the flat half-mile between
    Iden and the Isle of Oxney. A line
    Of white, lipped in red set a corner
    Of the