The Poem Tree - complete reading

The Poem Tree - complete reading
recording lasts 45 minutes


Synopsis

It is 1844 and Joseph Tubbs, a local man, is climbing up to the top of Castle Hill, Wittenham Clumps to carve a poem into the bark of a young beech tree. As he makes his journey he reflects on the nature of the countryside and the people who live and work in his village. He meditates, too, on the nature of walking.

In parallel nature itself is given a voice and becomes aware of its own existence. As these various monologues develop they enter Joseph's conscientiousness and gradually a conversation ensues and an agreement is made with one particular tree on which Joseph will carve his poem.

As Joseph begins to carve his poem into the tree's bark he has a vision of the events that occurred on the hill many centuries before, events which resonate across the years and enter the text of his poem, touching his presence, and which subsequently touched the presence of this author some 150 years later.


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Landscape painting V

Landscape painting V

Scraping away the layers of earth's ochre and ore
From beneath the level of a long forgotten field,
Where primed and primeval origins are concealed
On a canvas under layers of pallet-knifed impasto.
Colour heaped on colour burying sketched outlines
Rendered in charcoal dug from an ancient fire pit
And found with shells bearing traces of green,
Ultramarine and gold mined from precious seams.
My brush reveals such details from among the debris.
Then, lifting from the pallet the unearthed fragments
And assembling them in situ it seems
That I touch upon a latent sense of lineage
That my painterly marks like pottery shards
Have a similar potential to awe.


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VELIKI OTPAD - BIG RUBBISH

VELIKI OTPAD - BIG RUBBISH

Anticipated like an annual migration
The nervous wait is finally broken
By the first few, exhausted arrivals
Washed up on the grassy shore

After an epic journey begun
In some distant, forgotten country
A sofa appears by the road's edge,
Its tail feathers torn, an arm seems worn.

Then, a rare balloon-backed chair
Lands awkwardly and a second leg snaps off.
Blind windows having lost their site
Stagger clumsily over the growing mound

Of carcasses. A flock of aged, bald headed Michelins
Alight in the field, their tarnished, black plumage
No longer impress the lesser breeds.
A nest of boxes stuffed to the brim

Spill their guts on impact with a downey,
White feathered fridge. By nightfall vans draw up
Furtively and with a flapping of wings
Relieve themselves of the burden of all our failures.

Then the scavengers descend in search of scraps
Sinking their hammer-claws into anything
Showing even the vaguest signs of potential life.
And when they leave they leave nothing
Nothing more than the wreckage of all our lives
Of our own pathetic journeys.

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A London Symphony

A London Symphony (1993)

It was such a familiar sound
I had heard it often, earlier today in fact
When I passed through Parliament Square.
I passed in bright sunshine and hardly noticed
That slow hollow chime above the cacophony
Of traffic and running feet.
Though it arrested my attention monetarily
I soon forgot about it.

Later at night, and at home
I turned on my radio at random
In the middle of 'A London Symphony'
And heard those very same notes
The three quarter hour rippling across the Thames
Spanning 80 or so years.
But what I heard in the music
Was no more than an echo
Of the moment Vaughan Williams stood on the Embankment
And committed that phrase to paper.
And I thought, 'What momentous events are contained
Between these two incidences
These bookends to our century.
This sound, this shared experience we both made a note of.

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