Dear Arthur,
I remember your other poem about this plane crash.
I'm wrongfooted at the start, with the 'feller'. I read this as a feller of
trees. I'd prefer fellow or fella for the more colloquial.
Now, have you become American? What's this with 'odors'?
My main problem with the poem is that some lines display knowledge that I
don't think the narrator would have:
'He moved beyond me,
lost in echoes of the yard
pealing with the protests of a roped sow;'
How does the narrator know what was in this chap's mind right then?
In the last stanza, I'd omit ''mask of' and perhaps reconsider 'blaze of'
which sits a little oddly with a quiet smile.
Kind regards,
grasshopper
----- Original Message -----
From: "Arthur Seeley" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2004 8:20 AM
Subject: [THE-WORKS] New Sub: November 1956
> November 1956
>
> He was a good sort of feller.
> The soft burr of the Fens was on his tongue,
> and in the smoke and stale odors of the billet
> his rosy cheeks shone
> around a quiet smile and pale blue eyes.
> He moved away from foul language
> and brute mouths, without judgment
> of their struts and boasts and wide wet lips.
> He read, darned his socks,
> wrote letters home or snoozed.
>
> Before our time there,
> he had worked his father's fields,
> hoed the long rows of kale
> through rods of rain
> or helped around the yard
> but brought here now
> to bend over engines, plugs and pistons
> and the warm reek of oily steel.
>
> Sometimes he'd cock his head
> and follow with his spanner
> the flight of swallows
> over waves of wheat.
>
> But we found each other out,
> he and I,
> one gray afternoon in November
> when a Canberra fell from the sky.
>
> A circle of silent boys,
> stunned by enormity,
> enclosed the huge pit in the mire.
> We moved, slow as grazing deer, over the shambles,
> flicked muck over torn bits of people.
>
> He moved beyond me,
> lost in echoes of the yard
> pealing with the protests of a roped sow;
> poked with a broken spar a thigh bled pale as pork.
> It rocked and sucked in the mud, slid to his persuasions.
>
> He turned his mask of quiet smile and rosy cheeks
> and blaze of pale blue eyes upon me
> as I stumbled down the bleak perspectives of his mind;
> a land of no horizons.
>
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