1976 - 1978
Winter poem
I climbed the rugged, frosted slope
this morning, when the lush green earth
lay trapped beneath the winter white,
and the sun was a shadow of his summer strength
and could not harm me, only blur my eyes.
By noon I reached the plain,
the old life choked out of me.
But now, new with the morning birth,
the blood in my body, the breeze at my face,
I gazed down into the valley,
the warm busy land from which I had struggled,
as it rumbled with the traffic of so-called life.
Now I had thrown off the smothering warmth
that chokes the spirit, that crowds out true life.
Now I was laid bare to the vacant sky,
to the nothing-on-high which I touched with my fingers.
Ah, high winter! Not in you do I find
the ecstasy that consumes, but the true desolation
to purge the soul and return it clean
to the fetid stream of the common quest.
But then time draws in and my valley puts forth fingers,
and my valley sends forth voices that are calling me down.
It is a much simpler matter, going down.
© Martin Robb 1976, 2012
Weekend
Friday
So the party daylight lingers, draw to evening
through the stuffy, writhing dusk to an itching, no-sleep night:
the irritation of a grasped-at, disappearing, day-bright dream.
Until sudden, at the window, comes the longed-for,
maddened pitter-patter of the clear, cold rain,
fast down and breathless, instant, threatening.
Hear the splatter-down wet splash out in the courtyard:
lush now, fresh, the frightened dry grass,
soaked up into the startling, puddled wetness of it all,
and fused to the boom above, where the sound of thunder cracks
and the late-winter sky breaks. There leaps forth lightning
and more rain, streaming sharp now from the heavens.
And I awake before my sleep,
while she rides out upon the thunder,
safe within its warmth, to find her humid homeland.
Saturday
In the dawning cold up starts the waking hero
to a streaming flood of red and tinge of light
on the heavy curtains, while the rain-washed window gleams
beneath the great split dazzle of the open heavens, yawning,
having shaken off the longest lingering night of a thousand winters,
accumulated, burnt-out, broken by this pale and infant sun,
this shy sky-being, easing himself on me. I welcome him,
but with winter-hardened reservation, holding back,
but awed and glad, till I recall
that she, now fled, cannot be here
to share, must now be safe
within her winter homeland.
Sunday
And now regard the whitebeard stumble through the marsh:
his staff is soiled from sinking in the mud, but he comes,
with eyes as hard as coals, the Celtic flame,
sparked off in the mystic northwest, formed fine in the holy quiet.
He comes: and on his lips the shining newness of it all,
the God-hope, and he comes to me, but not for the first time.
So I am touched and turn again from the gods of marsh ands fen
and wear, refined, these robes heralding the new order.
But when will she come?
For she, unknowing,
in the fens of future Mercia,
lies hidden in her pagan homeland
© Martin Robb 1976, 2012
Morning
This is one of those early March mornings,
when everything alive is awed and laid bare
to the sudden sweep of the brisk wind blowing
and the bright sun’s shining sacrament of newness,
through the unheard hum of people waking
silently, to usher in the day.
And the higher one who holds them,
sun, wind, waking people in his hands,
is the bringer-forth of newness
and the father of the bright and blowing morning.
He breaks the silence by his coming in the dawn
which drives away in a whisper the ashes of night.
So a fire is kindled in the hearth of my life,
while his rushing wind is hushed to fan the flame.
I live: and he calls me forth
to be his minister of newness,
a blowing wind and a burning sun
in this, his holy day.
© Martin Robb 1976, 2012
Fragments of a spring cycle
Entry
And so breaks forth spring:
moulded in March by the merciless wind,
which cracked the winter’s wrinkled shell,
leaving the kernel naked, not yet whole.
And April has been a cruel month,
promising new life, but only through sacrifice.
There we were, laid out on the altar,
offered up, but not expecting to suffer.
The rain fell ceaselessly, a constant shower
of bitter gall, not a sign of manna.
We languished in the lonely raining night,
still expecting an Easter sunrise.
You stood under my umbrella (remember?)
and we talked about Eliot’s ‘Death by Water’.
And in the rain your icy cheeks
were dissolved into such a painful beauty.
We kissed, as the damp aroma of rain
rose noiselessly, anointing the dryness of our faces.
Passover
Wet ink on dry paper:
emotion infuses my lifeless words.
Such a fertile time, when I’m shut up inside
and cannot emerge, for fear of the rain.
But I walked out this morning, just briefly,
and felt a few drops of clear cloud-water
dampen my lips. So I tried to drink deep
from the cup of earth’s sorrows. I wonder,
will I inherit eternal life
in the drinking of this, heaven’s blood?
And the earth was so soft to my feet,
so strange, and even the concrete path
seemed to soften beneath my step.
But then this is the strange season,
when strange joy seems to mingle,
like the rain, with a heaviness
born out of former days,
which cannot yet be erased.
Gethsemane
Solemn, alone, but expectant,
I am treading this path to a garden of tears,
where the warm evening air is suffused
with the spray from a cool gushing fountain.
But these women on the grass,
these women are crying, crying.
When I can but see that beyond all this
lie a fresh breeze and third-day sunrise,
then I shall give in to their tears
and go down to my Jordan of dying, dying.
© Martin Robb 1976, 2012
Jordan
I am not, after all, nocturnal,
nor is the winter, white and harsh,
my natural home.
For now spring has surprised me
and summer will soon be here,
like last year.
Last year I loved the night
and gloried in the darkness
of wind and driving snow,
never dreaming that one so old
could ever again bring forth life
from his shriveled-up soul.
But now here I stand, living proof
that through death comes life,
through the baptismal darkness
of sweat and sorrow and snow,
the sun can break, the clouds part,
the voice be heard on the breeze:
‘This is my son, the beloved,
with whom I am well pleased.’
© Martin Robb 1976, 2012
Intimations
Eternal consciousness, how broad
thy being! God, how vast
thy love which springs
from the silence forth unheard.
Unnoticed life-force! Lord,
don’t show thyself too clear
or water down the mystery
which eye nor ear nor mind of me,
but spirit only, sprung to life
by thee, can know.
And then but in part,
for this wind-scarred night
is a muddled glimpse of thee,
as are sometimes when
when their spirits quench
thy love from the silence sprung.
© Martin Robb 1976, 2012
From the footpath
The little girl dancing on the water tank,
bright-eyed, ruddy as the summer evening sky.
Her father bending over her, sweat-faced,
fetching water in a can for his allotment.
And I who am walking past, work-weary.
gasping for the breath of a different air,
imagine I see them, daughter and father,
transfixed against the sky like statues.
And all I can think of is classical myth,
for the little innocent cherub-girl
and her god-like father, master of the soil,
bring that whole great Grecian paradise to mind.
Is this the way the eternal myth
must work itself out:
in forms that change but deep-down the same,
from Eden to England, forever, year in, year out?
© Martin Robb 1976, 2012
Churches
Notre-Dame de Paris
Midnight in the Place St Michel:
tourist-tired, lured by sound and smell,
but alone. My friends having left,
I sit by myself at the café counter,
pretending to laugh at the joke
of some bourgeois beside me I don’t understand.
The Seine flows softly below Notre-Dame,
dark and cold, like winter’s come.
The air in the gardens, no longer a balm,
cools my summer-dream, calling me home.
St Peter-on-the-wall, Bradwell
After cycling for miles you arrive
at this small squat chapel,
this place of pilgrimage
dominating the deserted strand,
while all around a blank haze hangs
of September sun-fire, and beyond,
the cool blue shimmer of the vacant bay,
The simple faith of the saint who came here,
fresh from the north, bearing the light,
inspires in me, the ex-iconoclast,
something like awe, a reverent silence,
while the late-summer heat, no longer a fire,
recedes into coolness, like dying embers.
On the way home I stop, sick with the strain.
Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Cambridge
Dark is the day, dark the noon sky,
dark the room when you come in at night
and reach for the lamp-switch, the lukewarm heater,
then bathe in momentary, man-made light.
Warm the lights of the pub,
the room where the party is held.
Bright the smiles on the faces
of the food-filled, fire-glad crowd.
Dark the space inside me
at midnight, on the cold street, alone.
That was a summer to dream over.
Now it gives way to winter,
to darkness that forgets the light-filled season
and sadness at the passing of a clear, bright world.
But to carry the warmth into winter,
to be the bearer of light in the darkness:
this is the burden, this the ambition,
this the never-defeated struggle.
And the light shines on in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
© Martin Robb 1978, 2012