Wild Hares: 2022

SONGS OF THE EARTH, SEA AND SKY

(Personal Journeys) Douglas Ciluird

Crab-claw Books

Limited Edition ___ of 50

This one is for Malcolm Edwards

Songs of the Earth, Sea and Sky

The right of Douglas Ciluird to
be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First Edition

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, or locals, or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

Crab-claw Books

38 Tropicana II Las Palomas La Herradura Almunecar Granada Spain

Author’s Note

I have written five books of poems, including this one, plus 76 novels and 11 collections of short stories. I can see there’s a danger here of quantity overshadowing quality. Naturally, not all my books are what I had wished them to be, but some are what I set out to achieve. There are several pieces of prose I would like to consign to an oubliette and others I hope will remain in the light. I have no idea yet where this particular volume of verses will fit in. I decided, as a homage to forebears who crossed the Irish Sea from the Kilworth Mountains in County Cork and for other less explicable inner reasons, to bring this volume out under the Gaelic version of my surname.

Most of my poems are short and I wanted to write an epic in the sense that it is longer by far than any other I have penned. Here it is, along with the usual handful of briefer efforts. On the surface it looks like a long run of what we called in the Air Force ‘when- eyes’. When I was in such-a-place. Those who move home a great deal mark their individual memories by where they were living on a certain date. There’s a touch of showing off, but there’s also an indelible recollection, an impression that’s printed on one’s brain which one is eager to share. One of the extra poems in here is dedicated to those men and women who live their lives in one city, town or village without ever having the desire to move. They are indeed just as blessed as those that trot around the globe. Both paths in life have their rewards. All in all, I hope the reader of this epic poem just enjoys the way I have embellished and flirted with

my visits to other lands and perhaps nudged the memories of their own travels abroad.

I do not have good photographs of all the places I have been. In the 1990s and early 2000s I only used video, which does not provide good stills, any frozen frame being fuzzy. Any pictures I took in the days before I owned a digital camera are re- photographed prints and of poor resolution. The tiger we saw in Rambanthore is a good example. Where I have no acceptable photos at all I have taken a picture of a symbol or artefact to represent the subject.

Douglas Ciluird, 2022.

Songs of the Earth, Sea and Sky (Personal Journeys)

I have been to the Ran of Kutch to see in the wild hinterland
an ass as noble as a horse with two-tone coat of umber sand.

I have been to Gujarat
where dark-maned Asian lions kill: smaller than their cousins yet they murder prey with matching skill.

An orangutan, gazing down,

studied me from up on high. His gentle eyes revealed to me, he has a better soul than I.

I have been to Ranthambore seeking cats with sheaths for paws: saw a tiger and his mate shred a deer with sickle claws.

I have been to Raratonga, Tahiti, Fiji, Aitutaki - Oceania’s lovely islands, sadly now too far for me.

I have sailed Alaskan seas
where killer whales and humpbacks glide, churning the waters, stirring the deep, mixing the hues of twilight’s tide.

Off the Turkish Kerme Gulf I saw a rare Monk Seal. She was eating octopus:
a slimy, squirming meal.

I have slept in the Hadhramaut, found scorpions, spiders and skinks escaping from the desert’s cold, inside my boots and blanket fold.

I have walked the Yukon Trail, watched a grizzly eating fruit: wanted to go to Yellowknife, but that was much too far to suit.

In Addu Atoll’s jade lagoon I swam with giant rays, big as boardroom tabletops gliding over coral crops.

In Tamanagara I have sought

(aware I was a walking feast) a giant python, plump as me, a huge, reticulated beast.

In Australia’s vast Outback, where deadly snakes bask in the sun, I camped in a swag for several days without encountering a single one.

I have been to the Western Ghats

and seen long-legged lizards leap from leaf to twig, from twig to leaf: kangaroos of the reptile heap.

A fact I learned in Rajasthan (a most peculiar thing) not every Singh is a Sikh but every Sikh is a Singh.

I once roamed the Serengeti, found a splendid greater cat, a leopard lazing in a tree, nature’s prime aristocrat.

I have been to Hiroshima
in the cherry-blossomed spring: first the bomb and then the silence, now - again - the linnets sing.

I have been to green Guilin,
its mountains ‘sharp as pins’,
where crooked dwarf pines hang their hair and the River Li begins.

I have been to Yosemite
and climbed El Capitan: meadows, domes and valley trails, lay below in spindrift veils.

I was caught out in a typhoon, where high winds and water meet:

Hong Kong junks and harbour sampans tossed up on a Kowloon street.

I have been to Istanbul
and have sailed the Golden Horn: I wish I’d been a Byzantine before the Christ was born.

I have seen the Grecian ruins where democracy was sown:
with those seeds, you ancient Hellenes, western politics were grown.

I have seen Tunisia,
the place where Carthage stood, where Romans razed Queen Dido’s city leaving naught but blood.

I have been to Uppsala,
saw tombs of royal Viking dead: their kings lay underneath the earth on which my Saxon boots did tread.

I saw bowls of coloured spices,
in the souk of Tangier town: cumin, cinnamon, fenugreek, cloves – subtle shades of downy brown.

I skated with her on the Rideau Canal on a magical midnight hour when my pronoun changed from me to us and never went it back again.

I have been to Ecuador, taking pictures on the line - the Condor bird, I never saw, but capybara, he was mine.

I have stepped on solid lava, pocked and pointed underfoot: Bali’s aa and pahoehoe
cut right through my leather boot.

I have been to far Malacca where the Nonya man agrees: ‘Oran Cina bukan Cina’ –
‘I am not Chinese Chinese’.

Once were garbage tips where children from Manila fought for scraps: chicken bones and slops were stuffed in pockets and in filthy caps.

Junkrubbishtrash

I have been to London town
to see our Liz, the Queen:
I rang the bell three times but she was nowhere to be seen.

I have lived in Leeward, Windward, islands in a turquoise sea:
full of music, laughter, colour – each one owns a piece of me.

We canoed in Sarawak
to a longhouse hung with heads: enemies of a Dyak tribe, bunched and dangling over beds.

I have been to Delphi’s ruins, asked the Oracle my fate: she told me I would have to wait and wait and wait and wait.

I have been to Iceland’s fields and stood in awe before Law Rock. The Althing sat in year 930 -

parliaments were on the clock.

I tried to scale the steep ice wall, Franz Josef Glacier in NZ:
it was too sheer and so I climbed the smoother glacier, Fox, instead.

I swam warm in seas called Red,
in Meds and Blacks and seas named Dead, China, Coral, Caribbean:
just our North was cold and mean.

I have been to Arnhem Land where the Yolngu live still: there the rock art is superb carved into Injalak Hill.

I have been to Rotorua: volcanic beauty in the raw: one requires a nose of stone where rotten-egg-smells soar.

I crawled through a Cu Chi tunnel, deep and tight and long and black: the more I tried to flout my fear,

the more the world weighed on my back.

I have sailed in ancient seas,
on the waves Odysseus used
to reach his home in Ithaca, bewitched, bedevilled, sadly bruised.

I have been to Tuscany, imbibed the beauty of a land, where the finest art appeared, created by an Angel’s hand.

Have you been to Trollfjord where eagles poise on peaks, then hurtle from an Arctic sky to snatch up silver streaks?

Have you been to the Taj Mahal? This sultan’s symbol must be seen, blinding in its marble white, tomb of Jahan’s Mughal queen.

Have you walked in Chang Mai’s hills – met Kayan Lawhi on the way?
At night the trails are cool and dark, though blistering hot the live-long day.

Have you seen Kuala Lumpur railway station’s deft design:
a wedding cake with stilt cupola, fretwork arches, serpentine.

Have you seen the red Alhambra? Bathed by moons and kissed by suns: honeycombed its halls and pathways where its precious water runs.

Have you seen that ancient wonder, flayed by days and stroked by nights: Petra, home of Nabataeans, carved by hand from sandstone heights?

Have you seen that marvellous city, sitting on a sea of light? Venice, its basilica
and Ca’d’Oro’s golden sight.

Have you seen the Aussie croc: the Saltie that can eat young boys? - or sweet girls, it doesn’t care, even if a lassie cloys.

Have you been to Kinabalu,
seen the gully known as Low’s?
A deep, green gorge that swallows people on whose bones the star moss grows.

Have you seen my Spanish village, white-washed house with red-tiled roof? La Herradura is ‘The Horseshoe’ scalloped like a giant hoof.

(¿Has visto mi pueblo español?
¿Mi casa encalada, su techo de tejas rojas? La Herradura es ’The horseshoe’ impreso por una pezuña gigante.)

Have you seen Semana Santa’s deep, mysterious parades? Sombre, sinister to strangers, dark, profound arcane displays.

Have you seen Aguila village? Their fiesta will enthral. Eat your heart out, Rio folk, this carnival surpasses all.

Have you seen Al Jebel Shamsan’s wide, volcanic hollow cone? There the white-housed town of Aden nestles in its well of stone.

Have you been inside the boatyard of the Viking town, Roskilde? There lay nine enormous longships crafted by a long-dead builder.

Have you seen the golden cone, Wat Saket in Bangkok,

blinding in its brilliance when the sun’s at noon o’clock?

Have you been to Napier,
for which New Zealand is renown? Art Deco architecture reigns
in every house throughout the town.

Have you been to Corsica, where fragrance overflows and spills wild scents of flowers, herbs and bark, down its aromatic hills?

Or to far Macao’s casinos, where obsessive gamblers play? There the old colonial houses lapse in elegant decay.

Have you been to Chicken Town tucked inside Alaska State? Population seven souls, mining gold at paltry rate.

Have you been to Wadi Rum? The sand is pink and fine. There the Bedu noses are

superbly aquiline.

Have you been to Bay of Fires, Tasmania’s mouth of golden sand stretched along the wild, wild shore of Van Diemen’s Land?

Did you see Kowloon Walled City, the massive slum in old Hong Kong? One square mile of shanty dwellings, happily it’s been and gone.

Were you parked in Singapore when kampong villages were there? Now there is a Sky Park perched above a modern thoroughfare.

Have you been to Quebec City where the proud St Lawrence flows: stiff in winter, swift in summer, prince of both the seasons’ shows.

Have you seen the Amazon, shorter river than the Nile? It’ll always come in second, if by just a single mile.

Have you seen Calypso’s Isle, slept on Gozo’s golden sand: or Cyprus rock where Aphrodite stepped from seashell onto land?

III

I will go to Everest, tallest mountain of them all: Mallory is buried up there somewhere in its snowy wall.

AAAA

I will go to Machu Picchu, famous ancient citadel, haunted by mad Incan ghosts, glaring at the tourist hosts.

Inca

I will go to Samarkand,

a city beautiful, arcane, on the way to China’s riches: rhubarb, silk and porcelain.

I will go to Galapagos where iguanas snort and spray Sally Lightfoot Crabs with sea salt every hour of every day.

I will walk that wall in China keeping Mongols on their plain,

walk from Shanhai Pass to Gansu – then I’ll walk it back again.

I will go to Angel Falls,
that long and plaited rope of water dropping silken from the sky: nature’s own Rapunzel’s daughter.

↓ ↓ ↓ ↓

I want to visit many lands
but I’m running out of time: mortal years spin round the clock – faint, the distant final chime.

I will die and go quite soon, out to swim among the stars, as I pass I’ll touch our sun, then drift on past Orion’s Bar.

Extras

Bozburun, Turkey

Stacked
against the house,
a gable of olive logs, wonderfully ancient and ugly, contorted, knotted, gnarled, sawn from trunks
that once writhed slowly out of the arid earth
of Baba Dagi.

After yielding
jade and dusky fruits, branches for peace, colours dragged
from a grudging soil, they will now warm
the wood-cutter and his wife, with a final brilliant blaze, before these craggy, tortured, iron-hard lumps of life become just wraiths.

Standing by Groyne B101 Felixstowe

When I was a boy, these groynes were blackened wood wearing garbs of green: ancient, slimy monsters crawling from the sea at low tide.

In the new century, those groynes were gone, great granite rocks became breakwaters: magnificent sleeping dragons, mica glistening in the sun, feldspar, quartz, hornblende burnished by breakers, defying the pull of the moon, commanding the currents, the ebb and flow of tides, the North Sea drift,
the swells.

Coming from Norway they were the new Vikings, invaders from over the sea, the legacy of King Canute – and this time they really did do what King Knut could not.

Great

Today I learn
I am
a great-grandfather
with three begats to my name. It feels
mythical
and I hold his little hand fusing four generations. Yesterday
his first smile
filled my world with light. He is my grandson’s son. He is my sun.

Domicile

To live and die in the same village, in the same house,
a life bookended by the same bricks, could be rich in many ways.
To know intimately every tree, every track, wood and glade;
to know most neighbours
since birth,
must be satisfying.
A soul would be safe in such
a cosy circle of dwellings and friends, the graveyard full of familiar names, the lodges, nests and dens
of local wild beasts and birds
no secret.
The world traveller is aware
of the general,
while the stay-at-home
privy to detail.

Pros and Cons

I like to be there,
but I don’t like the getting.
I enjoy a rainstorm,
but dislike the wetting.
I love cuckoos calling, though I hate their habits, and I’m fond of the fox, when he’s not ripping rabbits. I love the ocean
when I’m not going under and a lightning-filled sky, without loud thunder. Life’s full of stuff
that one loves-and-hates, going in doorways
and out through its gates.

Sky and Sea

Next in might and wonder to planets, stars, comets, an awe-inspiring cosmos, the infinite universe, black holes and dark matter, the swish and whizz
of distant suns,
there is the sea.

I can stare at the sea, ponder on impartial power, its many forms and shapes, many shades and hues, feel overwhelmed
by terrifying waves, heart beating in my breast like wild surf on shingle.

The Bird Ringer

He holds in his hand
a feathered ball with a beating heart, index and middle fingers forked gently round the nape
of its neck:
a wild thing with wild eyes.
I wonder at its fear,
rage or even contempt
for the holder.
The ringer blows on its belly, stirring the softest of down.
‘A juvenile.
See the grey area?’ Minuscule measurements taken and logged and then, indignantly
the bird is upended in a paper cup to be weighed.
Freedom!
A wide-open sky
instantly swallows
the tiny speck,
leaving just marks in a ledger:
a banal code for a beautiful creature, a marvel of nature, whose home is not the earth,
but the infinite air.

The Silence

We sit in one room, one-minded, in quietude.
This we call Meeting for Worship initially a mental falling-away from the world around me,
a drift into calmness,
a shedding of personal cares, jagged thoughts, pressing problems.

This is the Silence adored by Quakers
for being what it is:
one hour of
stillness,
severance from shopping lists, bills, boilers that break, dentists and doctors, Myself.

A time to consider Concerns:
war and poverty, unnatural disasters and other lunacies at which we chip hoping to uncover a saner-shaped world beneath.

Death

Death is not something
you meet face to face
at the end of your life. Death is always right behind you, following you from birth, tapping you on the shoulder, nipping at your heels, trying to overtake you,
until finally,
he does.

Á Deux

You must brace yourself before roaring off on a Harley-Davidson Softail Deuce, with its twin-cam balanced engine.
The Twomey effect, which applies to clouds, counts double for this great machine.
I don’t want to sound bipartisan,
but in a duel with any other bike
ne’er the twain
shall meet again.

(That’s a rhyming couplet for those who like their lines in tandem.) Then again, a pair of these hogs can form a duo upon the motorway to give you twice the danger. Yeah. Yeah.

Pickin’

When we were young we would go pickin’ hips and haws,
sloes from blackthorns, crab apples, blackberries from brambles, elderberries
to make wine, mushrooms from meadows, conkers to conquer, acorn cups
to make pixie pipes.

A Magical Morning

A magical winter morning:
the day of the first frost.
The pines have silver sheaths
and crab apples hang heavy
with shells of icing sugar. Fallen leaves have turned to glass and crackle underfoot. Everything glitters and sparkles
in the slanting winter sunshine. Overhead, the wide Suffolk sky
is blue, inlaid with white cloud. Somewhere in the trees, a bird sings: happy or sad I know not.
Cold, it is, but a cleansing cold.
A freshness is on the earth.
My skin feels alive to the wind’s touch and my heart is thin, light crystal. This is a fleeting gift.

Incense

These wraiths that waft around my room fill my head with formless dreams and lift me on a fragrant cloud
into a place devoid of schemes:
a touchless, edgeless, floating space that frees me from the human race.

Blondes

Blonde, blonde, blonde sends me high into beyond. Lovely Scandinavian girls send my wilding dreams in whirls. Debbie Harry, Dragon Lady, nothing dark, nothing shady, Goldie Hawn and Shelley Long: how my heart blooms into song. How I love the luminesces
of long golden, golden, tresses: Pony tails of sunlight’s rays send my mind into a daze. Carole Lombard, Sandra Dee, Doris Day and Grace Kel-ly – and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet, there is one who bests the best: my lovely, loving, blonde Annette.

Felixstowe – Dusk over the North Sea

Night is drifting softly in, beyond the distant strand
Way out there a cloud bank, becomes another land
Pale blue melds with deep blues, forming darker rays Here on the quiet hinterland the borough slowly greys
One by one sharp squares of light appear around the town And busy roads and noisy streets begin to settle down Then suddenly a coruscation, rids the dusk of scars Dockland cranes have sprung to light, festooned with feral stars Next a strumpet ship arrives of several thousand tonnes
A gaudy hussy who has spun her own bright web of suns She drifts on slowly, slowly past the watchers of the earth Careless of the many eyes that guide her to her berth Then the sky’s last pale-blue pools, seep silently away
Into the oil-dark ocean, to end the run of day.

Paintings by Annette Kilworth ‘Cranes by the River Li’ ‘Sally Lightfoot’

Cover art for ‘Tales from the Fragrant Harbour’ by kind permission of Vincent Chong

Kuala Lumpur Railway Station was licensed by iStock

My thanks for assistance go to: Tamzin and Dean Howell Keith Brooke
Cath Beacher Deborah and Peter Bush Robin and Glynis Moseley Mara McCaffrey

Monday 18 July 2022