Another poem by Alison Brackenbury (see also weeks 20 and 225), one of the contemporary poets whose work I find most congenial for its humanity and formal skill.

The Queen referred to in the second stanza is of course Queen Victoria, not the late Queen. As I have observed before, it is easy to forget just how far back the direct oral transmission of memories can take one – my own grandparents were born in the 1870s.

My Old

My old are gone; or quietly remain
thinking me a cousin from West Ham,
or kiss me, shyly, in my mother’s name.
(My parents seem to dwindle too; forget
Neat ending to a sentence they began,
Beginning of a journey; if not yet.)

Cards from village shops they sent to me
With postal orders they could not afford.
They pushed in roots of flowers, carelessly,
And yet they grew; they said a message came
To say the Queen was dead, that bells were heard.
My old are gone into the wastes of dream.

The snow froze hard, tramped down. Old footprints pit
Its smoothness, blackened footprints that I tread
That save me falling, though they do not fit
Exactly, stretching out beyond my sight.
My old are gone from name. They flare instead
Candles: that I do not have to light.

Alison Brackenbury

Some years ago one of the fields round the South Oxfordshire village where I live, normally given over to corn, turned a most amazing shade of blue, as if a patch of heaven had fallen to earth, though it appears that a more mundane explanation had to do with EU subsidies at the time. At first I was completely puzzled as to what the crop could be, until I remembered a passage from John Moore’s ‘Brensham Trilogy’: ‘an azure mist upon the field, like smoke from a squitch-fire’. Of course: this was flax or linseed, the ‘blue field’ that had given the third of the trilogy its title. After due contemplation I went on my way with a definite feeling that here was something I would one day write a poem about. Now, you can’t rush these things: a poem will come when it’s ready, but there can be a small problem with this relaxed attitude, as I discovered when some time later I came across this piece by Alison Brackenbury and found, slightly to my annoyance, that she had very definitely scooped me. Fair play to Alison though: it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have made a better job of it.

Linum

It is not tall enough, it will not make a crop –
it has changed its name. It used to be flax,
maker of sheets for fine ladies’ beds.
Now it is linseed; feeds cattle.
It is high as a knee, blown with threads of leaf,
scattered with flower. What corn is blue?

They are mouths, they are stars, they gleam
sweet as those pictures of children under dark leaf
in frames of dark gilt. It knows nothing;
the sky is bitterer. Last night’s sun
was icy lemon, with drifts fog grey;
the morning’s blaze is for storm. The flax flowers
begin to shimmer, with a metal edge,
to reflect ripe cloud, race a colder sea.
The flies still whirl in hot air, and I
rise quick up the ridge, through the brief, starred fields.
It is not every day you can run through the sky.

Alison Brackenbury

Apple Country

I am living, quite unplanned, by apple country.
Worcesters come the earliest: sea green
with darkest red, even the flesh, veined pink.
They have a bloom no hand can brush away
sweet breath made visible. But do not think
to have them through the dark days: they’ll not keep,
for that choose Coxes flecked with gold
which wrinkle into kindness, winter’s fires.

Where I was born they let no flowering trees
in the bare fields, which grow my dreams, which hold
only the lasting crops: potato, wheat.
How low the houses crouch upon their soil
with fruitless hedges; at the barn’s end, cars:
none yours. I have no art for probing back
to such dark roots. yet if you pass this place
though skies shine lean with frost, no softness dapples
white wall to cave of leaf, yet stranger, knock.

For I will give you apples.

Alison Brackenbury

A poem no doubt laden with symbolism, apples being potent in myth from Avalon to the Hesperides, but these are real apples too and real country, lovingly rendered, and in the end no myth is better than the fact.