Inside the Wave Read online

  MacNeice, freckled with brown

  From many damps in many different houses.

  On the inner page, under my father’s autograph

  An early flourish of blue crayon

  Where I scribbled a figure so primitive

  There are not even legs for it to walk upon.

  Bowed, chipped, darkening, edge-worn

  Sunned, loose, fading

  Binding copy, reading copy, shaken:

  Ten books that I have taken.

  From the balcony on an August morning

  I see the rest fly to the tip lorry

  Where the sofa for a moment reposes

  Legs in the air, grinning.

  It is soaked through with music

  But nothing will save it.

  Behind it the sea makes the usual silveriness,

  The café opens and the bikes whizz

  From end to end of the promenade.

  Meanwhile in my father’s hand, a quotation

  On the title page of Herbert Read’s

  Thirty-Five Poems: ‘I absorbed Blake,

  His strange beauty, his profound message,

  His miraculous technique, and to emulate

  Blake was to be my ambition

  And my despair…’ (Faber and Faber,

  24 Russell Square.) I see my own hands

  Smooth and small as they are not now

  Lifting, turning, ‘I am amazed

  To find how much I owe to him.’

  Subtraction

  You always thought that you’d die mid-stride,

  Sun on your left hand, darkness

  Crossing you out in one swipe.

  When you got on to subtraction

  It was easy-peasy. Add one

  At the top, take one from the next column.

  Good at take-away, good at adding,

  Revving up for the 11-plus

  But no mathematician,

  You stumbled upon infinity

  With infinite terror, and knew

  The limits of divinity –

  What you’d been told was wrong.

  If all you loved had been given

  Then all could be taken.

  You knew then that you must blot

  In the blue notebook, trim

  With happy pencil, the sum

  Of what is when it is not.

  My people

  My people are the dying,

  I am of their company

  And they are mine,

  We wake in the wan hour

  Between three and four,

  Listen to the rain

  And consider our painkillers.

  I lie here in the warm

  With four pillows, a light

  And the comfort of my phone

  On which I sometimes compose,

  And the words come easily

  Bubbling like notes

  From a bird that thinks it is dawn.

  My people are the dying.

  I reach out to them,

  A company of suffering.

  One falls by the roadside

  And a boot stamps on him,

  One lies in her cell, alone,

  Without tenderness

  Brutally handled

  Towards her execution.

  I can do nothing.

  This is my vigil: the lit candle,

  The pain, the breath of my people

  Drawn in pain.

  September Rain

  Always rain, September rain,

  The slipstream of the season,

  Night of the equinox, the change.

  There are three surfers out back.

  Now the rain’s pulse is doubled, the wave

  Is not to be caught. Are they lost in the dark

  Do they know where the coast is combed with light

  Or is there only the swell, lifting

  Back to the beginning

  When they ran down the hill like children

  Through this rain, September rain,

  And the sea opened its breast to them?

  I lie and listen

  And the life in me stirs like a tide

  That knows when it must be gone.

  I am on the deep deep water

  Lightly held by one ankle

  Out of my depth, waiting.

  Hold out your arms

  Death, hold out your arms for me

  Embrace me

  Give me your motherly caress,

  Through all this suffering

  You have not forgotten me.

  You are the bearded iris that bakes its rhizomes

  Beside the wall,

  Your scent flushes with loveliness,

  Sherbet, pure iris

  Lovely and intricate.

  Death, you heap into my arms

  A basket of unripe damsons

  Red crisscross straps that button behind me.

  I don’t know about school,

  My knowledge is for papery bud covers

  Tall stems and brown

  Bees touching here and there, delicately

  Before a swerve to the sun.

  Death stoops over me

  Her long skirts slide,

  She knows I am shy.

  Even the puffed sleeves on my white blouse

  Embarrass me,

  She will pick me up and hold me

  So no one can see me,

  I will scrub my hair into hers.

  There, the iris increases

  Note by note

  As the wall gives back heat.

  Death, there’s no need to ask:

  A mother will always lift a child

  As a rhizome

  Must lift up a flower

  So you settle me

  My arms twining,

  Thighs gripping your hips

  Where the swell of you is.

  As you push back my hair

  – Which could do with a comb

  But never mind –

  You murmur

  ‘We’re nearly there.’

  (25 May 2017)

  About the Author

  Helen Dunmore (1952–2017) was a poet, novelist, short story and children’s writer. Her poetry books have been given the Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations, Cardiff International Poetry Prize, Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and Signal Poetry Award, and Bestiary was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poem ‘The Malarkey’ won the 2010 National Poetry Competition.

  After making her debut with The Apple Fall in 1983, Helen Dunmore published all her poetry with Bloodaxe Books. Her earlier work is available in Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), which was followed by Glad of These Times (2007), The Malarkey (2012), and Inside the Wave (2017), her tenth and last collection.

  She published twelve novels and three books of short stories with Penguin, including A Spell of Winter (1995), winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, Talking to the Dead (1996), The Siege (2001), Mourning Ruby (2003), House of Orphans (2006) and The Betrayal (2010), as well as The Greatcoat (2012) with Hammer, and The Lie (2014), Exposure (2016) and Birdcage Walk (2017) with Hutchinson.

  Copyright

  Copyright © Helen Dunmore 2017

  First published 2017 by

  Bloodaxe Books Ltd,

  Eastburn,

  South Park,

  Hexham,

  Northumberland NE46 1BS.

  This ebook first published in 2017.

  www.bloodaxebooks.com

  For further information about Bloodaxe titles

  please visit our website or write to

  the above address for a catalogue.

  Cover design: Neil Astley & Pamela Robertson-Pearce.

  The right of Helen Dunmore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifica
lly permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN: 978 1 78037 359 1 ebook