The Gun Site

A Norwood Georgic
by John Gibbens

FORTHCOMING


A5, 32pp, stapled, card cover
ISBN 978-1-905465-21-7
£5.00

In the Georgics, a poem of rural life written in the midst of a civil war, Virgil used epic metre and the outward form of a manual on farming to unfold his vision of a peaceful society. In The Gun Site the classical model is transplanted to an English suburban allotment. The poem brings a modern sensibility to that perennial tradition of seasonal cycles in English verse which has recurred from the Elizabethan Shepheardes Calender of Spenser, through James ThomsonÕs 18th-century Seasons and The ShepherdÕs Calendar that John Clare wrote during the Industrial Revolution.

from Spring

When the yearÕs first warmth loosens the leaves from their buds,
where bronze of their unopened sheaths had made the woods,
a month before, like the bloodÕs iron beneath the skin,
the colour of life, we begin to work the ground.
Levering it up in single lumps on the tines,
still heavy with quick-melting snow and the March rain,
as we stoop to break the clods into finer crumbs,
our knuckles soon know how the cold clings on in clay.
But we who labour from desire and not for want,
not punishing our backs, can stand to let the light
green that illuminates the treesÕ crowns refresh us.
And then one morning after a night that had poured,
after days of gloom and thunder, the brightness that
before just pierced the dense, impending skies briefly,
edging sullen cloud with sharpened steel, to open
the promise of blue beyond, takes the upper hand.
The afternoon grows hot, unseasonably. Sun
absolves our bodies of care, the cityÕs coating
of minor angers, anxiety, duplicity,
which seem gathered between the clothing and the flesh,
and in the scarlet that brims them under closed lids
washes out the dead print and pixels from our eyes,
and takes us back to the good world we were made in
and bathes us in the memory of where we are.
The may treeÕs white as a wave that spouts up a rock;
poplars play warm winds their rustling summer music.
Three such days, and hands find the earth at body-heat.
Three such days, and the hands that were formed but feeble,
the foliage hands like infantsÕ, pressing further
forward, further up, take a firm grip on the air.
Outlines around us soften, are filled and rounded,
and we come once more to the place of arrivals.