Several of the poems are about romantic love and a deep adolescent longing to be with someone, to connect, to find a soulmate. Looking back through the years I find these poems interesting in that they reflect my teenage immaturity and inexperience. Something is stirring in me and I am trying to give it wings to fly. It's like I'm feeling my way through the dark. I wrote this in 1969:-
MY PRECIOUS PERHAPS
Perhaps, one day, there will be me
and there will be you
And we shall have a love
To share -
For better or for worse.
But now for me there's disillusion
And for you there's someone else
But I can wait with memories
And my precious "perhaps"...
I feel better about the following poem written in 1970. Here I am not grasping at romantic love - something I knew so little about - but simply trying to process my feelings about an observed sunset at the coast. I am picking my words with some care, to produce a mood, an atmosphere connected with seasons changing and time marching on.
OCTOBER SUNSET
Colours which kiss like water
Across the day's death
Leave us as cold, grey shapes at windows watching
The pastel pools, forever merging
Beg the night crows come to swim
And through the rippling water rings
The dying summer fondly sings
Her annual farewell
We melt into the darkness, wondering...
In 1965 I was sentenced via scholarship to a posh school in Hull after passing my Eleven Plus exam with flying colours. They had a school magazine called "The Hymerian" and it always contained selected poems by boys from different year groups.
In 1968, they published one of my poems. I remember picking the idea of a scrapyard or city dump location to deliberately cock a snook at the poshness of the posh school. I detested that institution and transferred to Beverley Grammar School sixth form at the age of sixteen. It was one of the best moves I ever made. By the way, I admit that I knew as much about scrapyards and dump sites as I knew about romantic love!
THE CONTENTED KING
Amid a mound of rust and wire
Of baked bean tins and Dunlop tyres
Sits the king of the county council tip
A Morris Oxford '46.
Its deep black sheen has long since gone
A coat of dust it has put on.
The pompous king stares at the view,
The black oil cans, the vintage crew
Of four stroke cars and Singer prams
Old motorbikes and wheels of trams
Abandoned by the corporation
Because of loss of automation.
After work the youngsters flee
To this ferrous Gethsemane
And there they're met with admiration
From the metallic congregation
And every door its handle lends
And every seat a welcome sends.
From the top of his rusty fell
Past Trafford Park and Dingle Dell
Are bubbling seas and golden sands
But the king knows not of those distant lands.
And so he governs all he sees
Contented e'er more to be.
And so for today that is enough I think. Maybe I will share more such juvenilia in a future post. As I recall I have previously shared the story of another of my adolescent poems in this blog. It was titled "And Now The South" - inspired by the tragic tale of Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to The South Pole in 1912. If interested, please go here.
We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels 'cross the floor !
ReplyDeleteDid scholarship boys still use the quaint contraction e're in 1968 ?
If Masefield and the tea-drinking Georgians could write e're, why not you ?
*After work the youngsters flee/ To this ferrous Gethsemane.*
The Mount of Olives as a metal scrapyard ?
Haunting, but would it have wooed and won young Shirley ?
I'm not down on the Georgians.
John Masefield wrote The Everlasting Mercy, Dauber, and Reynard the Fox ...
The Midnight Folk, the Box of Delights and Dead Ned (who isn't dead at all).
Of course we used "e're". After all, we all had e're-holes.
DeleteI like both poems. I did not think of romantic love nor girls as a teenager. Does that make me sound pure?
ReplyDeleteNo. It makes you sound gay.
DeleteThe Perhaps poem sounds like you were lovesick, or had just overcome a bout of it, when you wrote it.
ReplyDeleteThe October sunset is moody and wants reading several times, and I‘m still not sure that I „get“ it.
Like you, since my childhood I have been fascinated with words and languages in all their forms, written, spoken, sung or thought. From the moment I knew how to read and write, I haven‘t stopped.
Your youthful poetry is good. My favourite: "pastel pools forever merging"
ReplyDeleteMaybe your next book could be collected writings over a long and wonderful life. Danny Gregory recently published one titled "Unpublishable" a collection of his early work that was rejected 40-50 years ago. It was a good read.
ReplyDeleteYou were on to something in that last one.
ReplyDeleteYou are a poet, Neil.
ReplyDeleteIt's always interesting to re-read poetry from our youth. I actually destroyed a lot of mine because I was later so embarrassed by it -- but then a former girlfriend mailed it all back to me, so it has all come home to roost! I think I've blogged some of it. I like your junkyard poem -- a clever way to challenge the posh atmosphere of your school!
ReplyDeleteI enjoy seeing your poetry, youthful or otherwise. Poetry is so subjective and can be very personal. That''s why I never liked studying it in school. (having a teacher tell me what it meant)
ReplyDeleteYou still write good poetry today. Keep on writing and sharing.
ReplyDelete