Read Refuge Online

Authors: Michael Tolkien

Refuge

Refuge

OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

Verse booklets

Learning Not To Touch
(Redbeck Press, 1998)

Reaching for a Strange
r (Shoestring Press, 1999)

Verse Collections

Outstripping Gravity
(Redbeck Press, 2000)

Exposures
(Redbeck Press, 2003)

Taking Cover
(Redbeck Press, 2005)

No Time for Roses
(Salzburg Press, 2009)

Narrative verse fantasy for younger readers

Wish*
(Author-House, 2010)

(Due for republication by Thames River, autumn 2012)

Rainbow*
(Due for publication By Thames River, autumn 2012)

 

 

*See also: author’s website:
www.michaeltolkien.com

Published by New Generation Publishing in 2012

Copyright
©
Michael Tolkien 2012

First Edition

The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the
author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

www.newgeneration-publishing.com

eISBN 9781909395206

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 

The author would like to thank the recently-formed local Rutland Poets, a group with whom several problematic poems have been workshopped and ‘rescued’.

Thanks are due also to Gordon Braddy, whose patient and perceptive reading and listening have guaranteed that many poems were profitably reworked.

For the last six years the personal and professional support of Darin Jewell (Inspira Group Literary Agency) has provided me with indispensable encouragement in face of many
odds.

COVER ILLUSTRATION

Rutland Landscape by Rosemary Tolkien.

For Rosemary

...salted was my food and my repose

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

 

Edward Thomas: from
The Owl
(1916)

CONTENTS

I
IN TOUCH

 

No Game Plan

In Touch

Rooted

The Years in 2006

Outside the Rain

Lost

Unsung

Village Black Spot

Hardened

Fuchsias

Sacrilege

Stasis

 

II
CLOISTER AND PROMENADE

 

Mrs Primley’s Literary Young Men

Mr Busy and Mrs

‘That you, George?’

Cloister and Promenade

Hallowed Ground

Our Man in the Oberland

Dining

Spent

Ego

Together

In the Café of Your Choice

Gold and Silver

Poet Broadcasts

Divinity That Shapes

A Level Fantasy

Technodoc

Caring Profession (1.Mentors)

(2.Nudge from Hesse)

(3.Retreat)

Sounds from a Shell

 

III
REFUGE

 

Enlightenment (1. Fusion)

(2. Glimpses)

(3.Festival)

(4. Beyond)

Oslo to Bergen Express

Taking a Cut

Processional

Ages

Waifs

Refuge 1.

Refuge 2.

All

 

IV
BELONGING

 

Lost Among Pines

Between Lives

Flight

Resort

Belonging I & II

Mountain Sundown

After the Singing

The Assumption

The Kiss

Living Son

Psalm

A Lighter Touch (1. Ascent)

(2.Embroidery)

(3. Illumination)

I. IN TOUCH

NO GAME PLAN

Sweet Williams in a brown jug

you happened to find. Your dab of décor

for that sudden party, bright dice scattered

for a quick score. They wilt over

my unsorted mail, your rucked-up

half-read Tom Sharpe and a card

you once scribbled from breezy Margate.

Leaves curl to straw. Crimsons, maroons,

ivories fray like sun-worn curtains.

As I clutch and bin these stale virgins

in their washed-out gear and underwater

stench, I feel your gesture take its chance,

recall those whims that took a slap at time,

and turned my well-laid plans into a game.

IN TOUCH

When August tints and chills to autumn,

I notice how you cling to your clothes at nightfall,

complain that drafty spaces multiply in bed.

 

But look at the misty golden edge

round evenings closing in, vapours curling up

in hollow places. Remember fire nights,

the primal hiss and crackle, how embers shift and wink.

Be glad to batten down against a threat

that summons the snail in you, backing away and in

to womb, cradle, a first room’s embrace.

 

My fingers sift again through crumbled red earth

after roots and spuds have done their work,

lie stacked and clamped. I sniff the final

burning of a year’s husks and straws,

walk from its passing blaze and smoke into

your warmth, at ease with my autumnal need

to cover a space that makes me shiver.

ROOTED

Meandering funeral aftermath

finds us side by side

below the comforting splash

of tall, new-leaved limes.

Beliefs and sects creep

into our talk: how some suppose

no breeze can make them totter,

and most don’t need to make a stand.

‘So what are you now?’ I ask.

‘Nothing,’ you say: assured,

precisely you, leaning a moment

on the chiselled hide of a lime

that knows where it stands,

as you do, gazing clear-eyed

past a blackened tower

to where you stood

and buried two parents,

not two springs apart.

THE YEARS IN 2006

Ibsen has been dead a hundred years.

How many years ago

was Lise Fjeldstad filmed as Torvald’s Nora?

Lively, throttled wife who walked

out of their
Doll’s House
and away

from her stifling century.

In Oslo the hype blows over.

Loading a complimentary DVD

Lise sits down to watch herself

make history in Technicolor,

and finds she’s glancing at a mirror.

Expecting to greet her face

with its familiar lines and cares

she confronts a lithe chameleon,

coaxing, devious, lovingly defiant

in her tormented rôle. Some youngster

moves, laughs and weeps like her,

yet makes her scowl in envy at a fraud

who sheds those intervening years.

TYPING OUTSIDE THE RAIN

On this cold, grey day, though tapping out

fretful messages on unceasing keys,

were you watching the deluge increase

over stone walls, scarcely breathing, anxious about

nothing much? As we who lack something of ourselves can be.

Perhaps thick rain adds a shade more doubt.

Did this amorphous day that cloaked you cling

to your mind with wet lips and discontented breath?

Coffee, cigarettes, a few polite shows of teeth

and drenching walks were its gifts to your willing

body; yet you had to tread the only path

there was,

dimly curious about what premature night would bring.

Did one unguarded moment in this cold rain suggest

you might be too pliant

towards that seminar of bells and cant?

Perhaps as you filed another flat request

damp ends of hair brushed chilled fingers bent

on being

deft; and you paused at the edge of empty trust.

LOST

Safe as houses
was her favourite tag

but at over ninety she was lost

in that steep-pitched, pebble-rendered semi,

floundering, too, since her husband died

trying to start his turquoise Cortina banger.

Slim, slick-haired, tight-suited, eighty-nine,

they called him
Tear-Arse Eddie
, terror

of the local roads. Police found

half a grand stitched inside his jacket.

High time to move her to a home,

her daughter told me, as if that was that.

Neighbours, who should mind their business

liked her pluck in carrying on regardless,

her backyard rites of broom and shovel,

the way she scraped and scrabbled for coal

from ramshackle bunker, poked up weeds and litter,

clattered out plates and cups for daughter,

who shouted in daily at four, and out at five.

In the small hours she’d come alive

and pace about with a swansong, racked

and cheerless as draughts moaning through a crack.

When rain dribbled down her bay window

she sat with opaque under-water stare,

watching her life trickle back. I’d wave,

and to wake her from that lonely deluge,

call in, brew a pot of strong, loose tea.

Yet her vacant eyes like blue-yoked eggs

gazed right through me and my chatter

at splashing traffic and bent, wet heads.

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