Wimpole Deserted

Wimpole Deserted


And suddenly we’re up to our shins;
Sporadic calls from the trees
And ripples on the mirror
Echo our own.

Weeds of the shallows fidget on toes,
Just as they would have done
Centuries gone, here
In the lake of the Wimpole Estate.

Fish rise like bubbles, nudging,
Toying with your fleck of apple offering,
But soon, it too is memory.
And we make for the kissing gate – knowingly.

Deceased: the hoove-thuds that
Fell down and through verges,
Ghostly boots that sauntered in
Dappled shade,

Hunting horns, stable straw,
Cigar smoke, damp grass,
Kitchens of steam, the incense of chapel,
Journals of dust and embers of a Brideshead grate.

And what of this bench staring
Up at the house?
Has it always sat here, or only since
The National Trust moved in?

In any case, you at least expect
A plaque to remember the
Ghosts, the Barons, the crests, and
Family china. Perhaps

A year of birth and a year of death…
So much the same,
So much forgotten,
So much now only the gift of imaginations.

Southbank

Southbank by night


Kisses usher them home,
And from the opposite bank the
Narnian lampposts shimmer
Flame and gold shafts
Over the water towards me;
And in these regal columns the
Quivering currents shiver and
Swirl in a nightly dappled-dance.

The daily peopled-mass has
Dissolved with the light, and the
Dusk-breeze asserts again its
Ownership of pavements;
The leaves rekindle their
Gossiping whispers –
And yet wafts of reggae
Distil their chatter. A man:

His guitar, tambourine and mic
Are midnight bound. No song
Played out to the end; each other
line encroached on by passers-by; –
Goodnight sweetheart –
Joy throbbing the cold;
Determined to reach those who cross the grey;
A new mood and key rising out of the smile.

Anchored boats are silently rocking in the
Delicate rolls kissing the shore; music
Sighing back – deep and spontaneous;
A large boat swims south and the waves are alive,
Swelling a passionate chorus themselves,
Heaves lapping over the other,
Then sloshing back to a whispered accompaniment.
Goodnight sweetheart.

Something

Something

There was a buzz about Checkpoint Charley –
A flaunted aura of razzmatazz.
American soldiers – zwei euro a photo – stood
Broad with wandering eyes.
Patience fraying, we crossed the wall - casting to
Echo the American throng and waft of
McDonalds’ juices.

A graffitied canvas of a city cut into blurs

And soon we were rounding a sleeping corner
To the place where Hitler died.
Beige was the ground.
No speak or sight of keychains and t-shirts.
Just a seemingly docile snooze.
But here among the parked cars and raised blocks
Something unspoken was chiselling the gravel
Like colonies of dead fingernails;
The secret guiltily seaming the air,
Loaded like a pistol.

If you didn’t know you’d smell the breeze and guess.
And that is Berlin’s nutshell.

A few tourist books had it earmarked; a single
Plaque, malleted into ground, marked the spot.
But a mere half-dozen drifters were there to
Stop and stand uneasy on the dust, conjuring:

It was here in this car park
That Evil screwed up his eyes,
Clenched his molars,
Thought about… something,
And fired death into his brain.

Baptism

So,
I suppose I'd better actually put some of my poetry up.

Here's one I wrote earlier in the Summer, as the heavens opened as I've never seen them do before.



Baptism

“This water droplet, charity of the air…
Which saw the first and earth-centering jewel
Spark upon darkness…” [Ted Hughes]

This ground – bloodied and died for – was
Wrought from angry spews of liquid magma,
Blistered by shields, nails and knives of ice.

We are all atoms when the rain comes
And chariots of cloud plunder and ransom the sun.
Roofs bend, sea-walls cower, drains glug their last, and
The tindered truth is sparked in us:
We are not here at our own discretion, but
Slaves to the freak voracious maw of the
Elements; forever swaying drunkenly
On the sharp of a canine tooth.

The grass was whimpering-scorched, just
Half a full hour past, when we – across the bench –
Felt the earth turn under us,
And I flicked from your cheek the lonely glinting
Tear:

Once a particle of the first-dawn, a dew-drop on the
Fields of formula-tribes; caught in the roots of
Amazonian weeds; may have ricocheted as
Frenzied rain from the peaked dome of St Peter’s,
Or shivered in deathly brunt of missile and cry
Beneath a ghostly-white Paschendale sky.

Our warning was sent in sudden icicle-winds
Gusting from the nostrils of the steeds of Zeus,
And we heard and saw the rumblings of hooves
And steel-capped chariot wheels pummelling and
Scratching the horizon – so we made ourselves scarce.

And as I stand now, beholding this weeping, cascading
Station frame, your train deep-rumbling above, –
Bent against the storm -
I can’t help but feel, a moment fleeting, that
Nature is living this baptismal act for you and for me.
But of course the atomic fact is merely as before…
Surely.
The thunder hollows my lungs.

Atoms are the both of us, but not our all.

And out in the swell I charge, skin slow-luxuriating
In the drench of millennia:
I, the hunter-gatherer, the eagle,
The first torrential flash of the Sun.
The rains of time are rattling my ankles like the
Rapid uncoilings of snapping snakes bouncing from the
Sweating tarmac; but I out-pace them all,
Knees stretching to the sky, flip-flopped heels
Squelching through torrents, fingers erect,
Slicing the wind, my chest ablaze.

"It started out with a song"

Hi, and welcome to my new blog, "Something to be said..."

My name is Alex Knox. I'm twenty-two, a singer (about to start a Postgrad. course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London), and a writer and poet.

That's the boring stuff out of the way (hopefully)!

The plan is to use the blog to show you some of the work I've done, and give you an idea of what inspired me to write it.
I'll also try and inspire YOU from time to time with lines, stanzas, or even a whole poem by poets living and dead.

Please get in touch - would love to get feedback from you all.

...

I'll kick off in slightly unusual style, because this isn't a poem by me or even a poem at all. It's the lyrics to a song by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century: Stephen Sondheim. It's his 80th birthday this year, and i recently sang this song (from his musical 'Merrily we Roll Along') in a recital I gave during the Edinburgh Festival. I've not been able to get the words out of my head since:


Good Thing Going


It started out like a song.
We started quiet and slow,
With no surprise.
And then one morning I woke
To realise
We had a good thing going.

It's not that nothing went wrong:
Some angry moments, of course,
But just a few,
And only moments, no more,
Because we knew
We had this good thing going.

And if I wanted too much,
Was that such
A mistake
At the time?
You never wanted enough —
All right, tough,
I don't make
That a crime.

And while it's going along,
You take for granted some love
Will wear away.
We took for granted a lot,
But still I say:
It could have kept on growing,
Instead of just kept on.
We had a good thing going,
Going,
Gone.



Hope you enjoyed it!