This is an old poem that has always been a problem for me: I both do and
don't like it. It belongs to the category of 'Sunday morning' poems, quite
obviously, and as such has a mixture of rhetorical leanings im-or-explicit
in it. I feel uneasy about those, yet at the same time like something of the
sweep of long breaths and occasional observation in it. H'm. Any responses
welcome.
A Canticle for Leicester
7 o'clock. Sunday morning. Dominic, my black cat,
mews like a supplicant at the stained bays.
Farther out, a navy-rig of washing strains
its odd unlikely semaphore: +t+ee-shirts, +u+nderpants,
+t+rews.
Disturbed, like an art-teacher's hair,
some low dishevelled cloud tumbles on the sky:
in the faint, myopic admissions of light
paper-boys race against addresses like orienteers,
bored and thickening husbands elope with dogs,
bag-women trespass from gut-rot and cardboards of careers,
and God's holy anglers and ramblers pilgrim
to their scattered, county ways.
Even in a small town,
among the anonymous friezes of its griefs,
the municipal statuary of a hard-working fate,
even in a place of flat vowels and soiled surnames
unglamorous as grudgings, grimes and grits,
on the banks of a grey river where Lear and his Cordelia
impounded their lives in the black banks, like lines dropped
from the play, even in such wakes on moments the numinous,
littering its bronze haloes like late moons.
Semper eadem,
the motto hums. Which is to say: ever constant. Or always the same.
Like boredom, its pities claim. Or like the flat bread
of persistence, its unleavened resurrection in truth.
David Bircumshaw
Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
& Painting Without Numbers
http://www.chidesalphabet.org.uk
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