Photo by Ivan Helmer

For my eightieth birthday my family are helping me to publish a selection of the poems I've written over the years, serious and lighter verse, poems for children and a few of the mass of poems I wrote for "Punch" during my seventeen years there. Here are a few samples of each sort, in that order, There are notes at the end about some of the individual poems, and one for anyone who'd like to read the book itself.

– Peter Dickinson

The Weir

Poems by Peter Dickinson

in Celebration of his 80^th Birthday

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The Weir

All, all of our lives,
We tumble over the moment,
Ahead, unreadable ferment,
Behind, the ordered stream.
But just as the moment arrives
Notice a change in the gleam?
A patch where the light is caught
By a surface drawn silky taut
With the expectation of fall?
This is our lives, all, all.

Walking to School

(for Philippa and Polly)

These dolphining children skim through milder seas
Than they will measure when they've grown their span.
Kind are their rippling waves, gentle their wind,

Their pleasures small and here.

Not that the underdeeps are free from what
We flinch at in the headlines, suddenly
Moving in obscene parody of love,

One swirl, and the life gone.

Or, with less drama, innocence no more.
I recall Mr Clavec's soft brown eye
Shining above his seven-shilling wine.

He grinned and asked why we

English make such a fuss about the thing.
Quoting at large, he claimed our authors wrote
Of loss of innocence as much as love.

Wordsworth, he said, still stirred

In Dylan Thomas, Hartley's Go-Between,
John Betjeman – his list went on and on.
"...No other major literature can show

This bizarre emphasis."

"Just us, the English? What about dear old Proust?
And, of course, Rimbaud?" "Rimbaud, my dear man!
Not a Wordsworthian impetus. No, what

Distinguishes my list

"Is the inevitable theft of bliss
Seen as a loss that could, and should, have been
Escaped, by nursery magic, more or less."

To-day, I'm in that mood

Which Mr Clavec found so strangely rich
In contradiction. Surely, in Berlin,
Paris, perhaps, or Prague, or Rome, there are

Fathers who walk this path,

Who daily take their skipping children through
Their own equivalent of my strolling here
Under the planes in the faint April sun –

Who almost daily, too,

Get from the trip this fierce, absurd regret ̬
Sin (of the fathers, arguably) in
Ambush? Or really don't they give a damn?

Wait at the old iron gate,

Standing on adulthood's deep-layered land
To watch the shining creatures skipping through,
Pavement their ocean, time their passing wave.

They skip the wave away

Down worn cement steps to the green and brown
Gloom of the shrilling basement dressing room.
Change shoes. Hang coats on pegs. Kiss cheeks. Arrange

Hairbands. They disappear.

Myth, in all tongues, credits the dolphins with
Making the bays they visit cheerful, waking
Song in flint cottages that lacked it long.

Man haunts what shores he can.

Hedgerow Trees

Now in midwinter, every twiglet bare,

One sees what shape the dead tree left behind,

The side its mass of branches intertwined

With the still living of the ancient pair

In their long contest for the light and air.

The partner too, though only half-defined

By its own absence, hovers in the mind,

More of a presence than when standing here.

They grow to their discomforts, those thus twinned,

As much as from the benefits they share,

And missing them seem less themselves, skewed, thinned...

Now through the lone tree's hissing can I not hear

The emptiness beside it shrill in the wind?

I am allowed to think so. I have been there.

The footpath crosses a field. That is all there is to it.

Crop, either barley or wheat – no rotation at all

Within the forty-odd years of my recall.

A field at the top of a ridge, with a path running through it.

Unlovely in winter, especially after a frost,

When the half-thawed Hampshire clay clogs onto one's boots

Inch thick, and people have trampled the wan wheat shoots

Side-stepping the worst of the mire, so the line is lost.

But come back in March, when the crop is suddenly growing.

Our feet have decided: this time the path runs here.

Not ruler-straight, but a line like a natural shear

Between leaves that arch, sway, shimmer, seem to be flowing.

Or, better, July. Now, barely a walker wide,

A wriggling cleft runs between cliffs of stalks,

Hip-high to an adult. One raises one's arms as one walks

Rather than rasp on the stems upon either side.

Yes, now is the moment. A stranger might sense the wonder –

Perhaps be struck by it no less strongly than I –

How this canyon carved by a river of passers-by

Runnels down through the surface of time into layers long under.

Combine and baler come, but the path persists,

Sharply defined through the stubble. Then comes the plough,

Heaving up foot-deep clods, and where is it now?

Gone from the face of the earth. But still it exists.

Stumbling we trudge the tilted ridges, taking

Each our own route, because there is little to show

Where whoever came next before us elected to go.

We leave no path. But then come the harrows, raking

The clods to a tilth. They scrape used parchment clean

For the seeder to pen fresh lines. We cross with our one.

In less than a week, unnoticed, the thing is done.

The footpath runs through its field. So where has it been?

It is marked on the earliest survey I can find,

But that mark isn't it, not the actual footpath worn

By the feet of the dead for the feet of the not yet born.

That exists, as it centuries has, in our communal mind,

Within which mind the crop stands always full grown,

The path bears the print of those generations of feet,

And we walk through the orient and immortal wheat,

Which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown.

Third

In our community three –
You, I and We.
More than just you plus me

This Third, a thing of our making,
Animate, sentient, taking
Care in its nurture, though waking

No gene-jerk-instinct appeal
By all-but-meaningless smile,
Or frame-clenching misery-bawl.

How much more subtle our Third,
Nourished by gesture, glance, word –
As it were, quanta fired

Through our kitchen cloud-chamber, breeding
At wave-lengths beyond our heeding
Via faint and instantly fading

Traces of particles... what?
Think time-exposure, and it
Becomes a glimmering net,

A structure like thought in the brain,
Which, though it can never explain
The thought, nor we, thinking, attain

Any glimpse of its workings, is there,
As it must be while we breathe air,
Making us who we are.

The same with this Third we share.

Cogitamus, ergo sumus.
Tres sumus quia amamus.
May it be so till we are humus.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

A money spider hanging in mid air.

Like a retinal fleck it dangles from the lamp

In the blank bathroom, neither here nor there.

You reach to take the thread. Your fingers clamp

On nothing – nothing to feel or see – and yet

The thread is there, because the spider heaves

Beneath your hand. You take and loose it at

The sill, to live what life a spider lives.

A symbol surely, or a metaphor

At least. The groping mind grasps nothing. Still,

Some line of thought must have existed, for

This fleck now dangles here, this page its sill.

Song

If you were old and you were wise,

As I am old and silly,

You'd know there's more than two green eyes

From Cambridge to Caerphilly.

If you were old and you were sane,

As I am old and foolish,

One scowl would not cause all the pain

From Hythe to Ballachulish.

If you were old and you were cool,

As I am old and shaken,

You would not be my kind of fool.

But you would be mistaken.

Dear child, these worn lungs' wheezing sighs,

This frail heart's frenzied drumming,

They drown those steps the old and wise

Hear always coming, coming.

Gravy

The gravy that made England great
Does not go sluicing round the plate,
But flows by glacial degrees
Yet does not literally freeze.
In generous servings it will hide
Spuds boiled with legless things inside,
Beef more than adequately roast
And cabbage stewed to cabbage-ghost.

Unlike French sauces, rich in wine,

That tend to rot the moral spine,
It is not flavoured to a fault
But tastes, if anything, of salt;
So does not spoil the conversation
With little gasps of admiration,
Leave alone sending for the cook,
A custom that I will not brook.

Since gravy of this noble sort

Was served at great King Edward's court,
So should it be today. In short,
No preparation is as good
For life, or death, or treacle pud.

The Scapedog

The Scapedog is a beast of sin,

A villain of the deepest die,

But if you chance to find one in

A pet shop, grab your purse and buy!

He'll wreck your house, but never fuss.

He's wicked for the rest of us.

He'll steal Dad's supper, gnaw Mum's hats,

Bark like a fiend at 3 a.m.

He'll rid the neighbourhood of cats.

Postmen? You've seen the last of them.

But all the family (behold!)

Will suddenly be good as gold.

I knew a charming family –

So kind, so sane, such fun – who had

A scapedog for a pet, and he

Was extra-double-record bad

They felt too good for such a scamp

And gave him to a passing tramp.

Next day that sweet and charming mother

Wrote three rude letters to the Pope.

Papa held up some bank or other.

The children took a piece of rope

And rustled Mrs Twitchet's cow.

The tramp's become a bishop now.

"Corresponding De-Escalation"

Come, let us meditate upon
The language of the Pentagon.
It lacks both elegance and ease.
Its name, of course, is Pentaguese.
Each general, or pentagogue,
Lives in so strange a verbal fog
Only the trained pentologist
Can hope to penetrate the mist
And tell how near is the abysm,
The dreadful, final pentaclysm.

The optimists, pentiloquent,
Measure in pent and kilopent
How great a power for good such might is.
Maybe they're suffering from pentitis.
The timid fear for hearth and home.
To them the world's a pentadrome
Where our sole safety seems to be
Emergency pentectomy.

And who is right? We have seen plenty
Of foolish, costly pentimenti,
But human instinct still insists
That on the whole pentagonists
Mean well. So what is crazier
Than smothering in pentaphasia
Their honest purpose and intent?
Perhaps in time they will repent.

(If you have views about Vietnam
Send LBJ a pentagram.)