HERNE
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| Illustration by Christopher Bell |
Herne is the ancient European god of forests and fertility. He is generally portrayed with antlers and could be referred to as The Horned One. It is quite possible that he was demonized by the Christian church and turned into the archetypal figure of the devil. My concept of Herne is of an extremely virile being, but not at all an evil one. He represents the wildness of animals and is an intermediary with the animal world. The Celtic version of the name is Cernunnos. I first used this as the name of our house “Caer Cernunnos” which I wanted to mean Herne Hall. At the time I was trying to breed wild type sheep, coloured, horned in both sexes, and with self-shedding wool. In several of my poems Herne appears as an indication that a strong force of nature is present. He is not alone however and a veritable pantheon of mythic figures creep into my poetry. There is the Snow Queen, the spirit of snow and ice; Vulcan, the god of fire and metal working, sometimes with his Greek name, Hephaistos, and sometimes in his Germanic version, Wayland; Hades, the god of the underworld. Other variant heroes crop up such as Theseus and Cúchulainn, and heroines such as Penelope, Guinevere and Ariadne. Aphrodite, the goddess of love puts in an appearance. My poems are a mythically peopled landscape, often of mixed provenance.
The Wild Hunt.
I had a house-sign on my gate
Welded with a cunning Celtic knot:
“Caer Cernunnos” – Herne Hall.
Long since the sign fell to the ground.
The screws worked loose, the wood unsound.
My horse was then called Pecos Bill,
A seventeen hand Clydesdale cross.
Hooves like plates, a kindly eye.
Gelded like so many of his kind,
Yet loathe to leave his balls behind.
At the slightest pressure of my knees,
He shifted into overdrive.
We thundered down the field,
Sailed over an eight-wire fence.
A centaur with our combined sense.
In ten minutes we were on the ridge,
Marengo and Napoleon,
Alexander and Bucephalus.
Exulting horse and rider high,
Black figures against the pale blue sky.
As demands on my time increased,
I put old Pecos out to grass,
To grow rotund and indolent.
To gratify their daughters’ need,
I gave some friends my noble steed.
The world is awash in oestrogen
From soybean milk and plastic ware,
And pills for human birth control
Excreted to our water course
To accumulate as poison source.
Boys are born indeterminate.
Testicular cancer has a ball.
They go through school illiterate
And lose their jobs to business skirts
And learn emasculation hurts.
Poetesses write Sapphic verse
Of Artemis and Mother Earth.
The pendulum has swung too far
And all is gentle, nice and good
In universal sisterhood.
Today the local hunt rode by,
A view-halloo in hue and cry,
Chasing an artificial lure.
Girls in jodhpurs and safety hats,
Smart black jackets, polished boots.
The spreading tide of hounds diverged,
Forsaking the lure and pony club.
On the scent of a living hare
Streamed without a beg your pardon
Protoplasmic across my garden.
The hare is blooded under roses
And scarlet petals fall to ground.
The hounds carol as wolves of winter,
A silver hunting horn is wound,
Snow silence settles all around.
An eldritch lord with braided locks,
Tattooed in loops and whorls of woad,
Gold harness trim of Scythian stags,
Ram’s horn bossed electrum torque,
Slows his stallion to a walk.
Hormonal eyes of steel and ice.
Sweat of Siberian mammoth musth.
Strapped to his brow an antlered rack,
A crown of tines, the thorns of horn,
Halo-hero, not of woman born.
He rides bareback a hunter black,
Spume at his nostrils, lathered flank.
Holds a second riderless horse,
A gaunt and rangy Clydesdale cross
To bear a friend of Cernunnos.
Seahenge
http://www.northcoastal.freeserve.co.uk/henge.htm
For a year we have been unearthing oak,
Unraveling coiled roots from the soil’s grasp.
We have bared the mighty timber limbs
That explored the cold dark places,
The corded arms that reached for the world’s heart.
We have teased and untangled the Gorgon’s hair
Of rootlets intermeshed with fungal mould.
The fresh rain will wash the roots clean
So that we can weave them intricately
Into corn dolly, osier wickerwork plaits.
Where the North Sea wind unpeels the dunes
And etches the land with their abrasive sand;
Where the curlew cries over the shingle shore
And the bittern booms from the rushy fens;
There at the confluence of air, sea and land
Let us build our interdimensional henge.
An unbroken ring of oak trunks, a palisade
To enclose the sanctuary of the inverted tree.
The gateway is a single-bole, twin-trunked oak,
A tuning fork through which a man might barely pass.
Under this gate they have buried me.
I was fed a meal of summer berries -
Bramble, whortle, elder, damson and crab.
And a mix of autumn grains and nuts –
Barley, rye, oat, acorn, mast and cob.
Four fair maids have washed my hair in dew,
Combed and braided it in periwinkle shells.
They each in turn made gentle love to me,
Gave me to drink hemlock, mead and agaric
Before they took the leather cord and strangled me.
When the wild North Sea scoured the coast
And the dunes of centuries were washed away,
Standing in silt at the tide’s furthest reach,
A curious circle of ancient stumps was found.
At the epicentre, at the very cusp and hub,
A strange replanted oak tree stood,
Its head in the earth, its roots in the air
So that it might draw downwards the radiant dawn,
The cries of plovers, curlews and terns,
And the laughter of lovers to feed the dead.
Iceman
**This is an audio clip about Oetzi.**
When the world had no history
Or so it seemed to people then
Who hunted bison, horse and deer,
Just as their forefathers always had,
A man climbed up to an Alpine pass.
Blue tattooed with the totem of his clan,
Weather tanned and bearded,
His long hair with a ring of antler bound.
His loincloth of split and supple suede,
Softened by enzymes in the scats of wolves.
His vest of fawnskin fallowhide,
Sinew sewn with stitches neat
In adjacent strips of alternating nap.
He carried a hunter’s long yew bow,
Dogwood arrows tipped with flints,
Pressure-flaked and tanged,
Hafted with ibex hoof and pine gum glue.
Yet in his pack was a copper axe-head,
Precious, magical, omen of change.
With the colour and the heat of casting.
Furnace red-gold not the grey steel cold.
Such an axe would glow for millennia,
Melt the ice of a mountain glacier.
In the morning he was in valley sun,
In amber hazel, tawny chestnut groves,
In orange bracken, wild-boar truffle woods,
Between the trilling lark and linnet song
And the aural gold of nightingales.
The grey wolves with their topaz eyes
Watched him from the resinous pines
As he climbed through their thinning ranks
Above the tree line to the short sward alm,
Of gentian and edelweiss the realm.
He carried with him Promethean fire,
Hot embers coddled in maple leaves,
The knowledge of smelting and ores,
And in his pack warm as a meteorite
A copper axe head, beacon bright
He had reached the mountain pass,
The waist of history’s hourglass,
The waning of the era of stone,
The demise of bison, deer and wolves,
The dawning of the age of bronze.
Suddenly he slumped to his knees
And fell spread-eagled in the snow.
A pressure-flaked flint arrowhead
Was buried deep in his back.
His blood congealed, his body froze,
Covered by the gently drifting snows.
Five thousand summers later
A global warming spring prised apart
The icy fingers of the glacier
And trampers in thermal Alpine gear
Saw the puddle of axe-thawed ice
And found his biltong body lying there.
Boudicca's Daughters
Boudicca, widowed Queen,
Had two fairytale daughters,
Brenna of the raven hair
Alanna, the golden fair.
As they grew to maidenhood,
They learnt to smile and tease,
To open wide cute, long lashed eyes,
Pout with cherubic lips,
Bring light to every old man’s heart.
All the cues to protect and cherish
In the safety of the royal court.
As they explored the power of their beauty
And played the adolescent minx,
There grew tension in the spicy mix
Of thigh glimpse pirouetting,
Skirt swirling, breasts bouncing,
Hormone enticing coquetry.
Bringing lust to every young man’s heart.
All the cues to copulate and ravish
In the safety of the royal court.
Boudicca under the wolf’s head standard,
Tasseled with white pony tails,
Riding to parley with the Roman general
To discuss tribute and inheritance
From her husband, the dead king.
She wore her robe trimmed
With the ermine of the winter stoat,
Her regal torque of twisted gold.
On either side her handmaidens,
Princesses of the royal blood
In braided skirts, tunics of soft suede,
The clan totems of the Iceni
Tattooed on their bare shoulders.
The Roman general saw no need
To barter with barbarians.
To break the spirit of the tribe
He ordered Boudicca stripped and flogged,
Their queen striped and flayed.
The daughters he had tied
Over a hitching rail, their legs apart,
Their ankles tied, their mouths gagged
And their bare arses in the air
That any man might avail himself
Of his favourite orifice.
The volunteers were legion.
They stood waist deep in the Avon
That the clear water might cleanse them.
The mingled seed of the Romans
Settled to the mud and gravel
To compromise the eggs of trout.
They stood in the icy current
Until no smear of blood leaked pink
Or trace of semen stain remained,
Until their thighs were blue and numb.
Yet still they felt forever soiled
And cared not now who saw them
In their raw nakedness.
For now they could love no man
Without remembered pain and shame.
No warrior would want to wed women
So hardened by experience
Or risk his seed in such harrowed soil.
They had themselves tattooed in blue
From heel to brow, nape to toe,
Like warriors of the painted Picts,
In a labyrinth of druidic hieroglyphs
Wherein a man might easily read his death.
They sought raven like the battlefield,
Stark naked and berserk
In their careening chariot,
Scythed wheels swathe cutting.
Alanna with the stallions in span,
Brenna braced with her spear of bronze
To spit each loathsome Roman swine
And split his guts from chin to chine.
They were glorious, brave and wild,
Valkyries from myth riding the storm,
Their raven black hair and golden fair
Streaming with the horses’ flying manes.
And when they died of battle wounds,
Their bodies were as new born babes
Warmly bathed, gently on wolf skins laid,
Wrapped in softest roe deer suede
Trimmed with ermine of the winter stoat.
The druid pronounced them purest of all,
As he launched them on the Avon’s flood
In their burning funeral boat.
Snow Queen
http://hca.gilead.org.il/snow_que.html
Snow Queen in your elk drawn sleigh,
Cloaked in wolverine fur
And a shawl of Northern Lights,
Skids to a halt in my sun-baked paddock,
Scattering a showy spume of powder snow
Onto the brown parched grass.
You haven’t changed.
Still haughty, imperious, beautiful.
There always was silver among the black,
Even those fifty years ago,
When you pierced my eye
With a splinter of your ice.
You kidnapped me from
My drab and cheerless home,
Hid me under your furs,
Warm against your bosom,
And drove into the blizzard of the North.
There was cold poetry in your halls of ice,
The music of groaning glaciers,
Champagne sophistication
Cool elegance, silken sheets.
I would have run berserk for you,
Written crystal canticles
And splintered verse.
But then one warm tear fell,
Bathed my eye and melted
All my resolve.
For forty years I have lived in warm climes
And seen no snow.
Sheep bleat on dry hillsides.
No wolves howl.
No raven calls.
Two years ago a premonition.
An ice-like spike of steel wire
Pierced my eye
And restored my vision.
And now you stand before me,
Sweltering in your fur robes
As the snow puddles at your feet.
The Plumber
The one I accidentally broke.
He will be silver-tongued with secret mirth,
Brazen faced to charge me double-time,
Mileage and mark-up on parts.
This tinker, lead soldier, journeyman,
This archetypal artisan.
For all my learning and degrees,
I cannot mend a broken copper pipe
Or earn enough to match his fees.
He will have the smugness of Smaug
And dragon power to melt metal.
He is a small, dark-bearded, wiry man
With one right, bright, intent, birdlike eye
And one left, dull, glazed, sunken one.
He is not silver-tongued with pleasantry,
But stammering in hesitancy.
A Cyclops myself, I stare at him
With my good left eye diagonally.
An unexpected bond of brotherhood.
I ask him how he came to lose his eye.
He tells me in a deep depression bout
He used his fingers to gouge it out.
He finished the job within the hour,
Neat and tidy and professional
With skill beyond my mortal power.
He had melted my prejudice.
He had forged an unspoken link
And given me mighty cause to think.
The plumber gone, a vanished dream,
Samson agonistes self wrought,
Whose mettle me humility taught.
This was a molten moment of flux.
Furnace fumes lingering in the air
As though Hephaistos had been there.
Penelope At The Bus Stop
http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Penelope.html
Penelope at the bus stop,
School skirt wrapped around the waistband,
Hitched well above the regulation
Below the knee inches.
The college boys in striped blazers
Eye her speculatively,
Tell of their undying love
And go off to university
And careers in medicine and law.
Penelope at the bus stop
With her bags of groceries
And toddlers in the stroller.
The young executives
In their cashmere coats
Eye her speculatively
As they sip their long blacks
And admire her lactating bosom.
But they are put off by
The faint odour of nappies
And the protective glare
Of the older child.
Penelope at the bus stop
With pale skin and worry lines
And a lump in her breast,
On her way to the oncology clinic,
Listens patiently as Forest Gump
Tells her of shrimps and ping pong
And that life is a box of chocolates.
Penelope at the bus stop
Coming home from night shift,
Grey haired in the grey dawn,
Listens patiently as Odysseus
Dressed as a beggar,
Eyes her speculatively
And tells her what a shit life is
For the unemployed,
How life has been rough for him
Since he left the navy.
Taniwha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taniwha
I found a taniwha in the creek.
Some would call it wave worn wood,
A sand-scoured piece of totara root.
Yet some see Madonna in a cowpat
Or a pizza immaculata. http://www.skepdic.com/pareidol.html
I knew mine was for real.
Not a full grown gruesome Grendel, http://www.orionsarm.com/books/Legacy_of_Heorot.html
But a baby one lignified.
A water naiad warped to wood,
A forest dryad caught in flux.
It happens to taniwha now and then,
Sort of goes with the territory.
If you are a shape-shifter by trade,
Sometimes, when Scotty beams you up,
Your molecules are scrambled,
The danger of going between,
A fly in the transporter beam.
This little fellow wasn’t pleased.
He’s got that peevish look,
But then it can’t be nice
To be so imprecise.
To be neither fish nor fowl,
A hox gene sonic hedgehog hoax,
The victim of transmission jokes.
There was a young lady from Lima
Who couldn’t tell femur from femur.
There wasn’t a zipper
In her one mermaid flipper,
So the surgeons will have to unseam her.
But it isn’t funny for Melagros Cerron,
The girl with sirenomelia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirenomelia
They will insert balloons to stretch her skin.
They will uncleave her clenched thighs.
Eventually the little girl will walk
Albeit with an awkward waddle.
The surgeons still have to provide her
With a separate anus and vagina.
Her teenage years will not be pleasant
I gently stroke my Pinocchio boy
And wish all mermaids peace and joy.
Hades And Cerberus.
Parked outside the supermarket
For Eccles cakes and Earl Grey tea
And habitual purchases,
Spaniels in the station wagon
To keep me canine company.
An old guy shuffles slowly by
Pushing a rusty bicycle,
Antique black iron bedstead frame,
Good for hanging carrier bags,
Leaning against dog-pissed lampposts.
This soldier has major style,
Grey biker beard and surfie shades,
Sneakers and baggy tracksuit pants,
War surplus khaki overcoat,
Rastafarian beanie hat.
Not a morsel of human flesh shows,
Not a single shred of human skin.
He is the mummy in mufti,
Phantom of my soap opera,
Perhaps the invisible man.
He holds on leash his status hound,
A brindled mean and massive brute,
Some pit bull, mastiff, demon cross.
Spiked collar and body harness
Draped in a Confederate flag.
I suddenly feel inadequate,
Boring, retired schoolmasterish,
In my brown brogues and corduroy.
This man has grown old with less grace,
But lots of flair, élan, panache.
As the grim war-dog lumbers by
Slobber mouthed, alligator legged,
My own dogs bark furiously
In high pitched, defiant yelps
From the safety of the car.
Cerberus opens his drooling maw.
In bass clef Baskerville bay
The awful roar reverberates.
Across the seas and centuries.
Runaway slaves climb nearby trees.
I wind the windows firmly up
And buckle tight my safety belt.
The old guy yanked nearly off his feet,
Glares at me as if to say,
I’ll deal with you some other day.
Flores Man http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/flores.html
On Flores in the Sunda Sea
Lived Holbytlan, the little men,
Swift hunters of the oliphaunts,
Stalkers of pygmy stegadons,
Boyish knights on men’s errands,
Rescuing goblin maids from Smaug,
The Komodo dragon that then
And now remains unchanged.
They were peeping over our tablecloth.
They almost made Attenborough
To look creationists in the navel
And say, “Explain us away then!”
We were always in the undergrowth
Of your fantasy and fairytales.
Our wizened pygmy babies
Shared the cradle of humanity.
We are the homunculi
Clutched by painted Madonnas.
We are little green men from Mars.
We were not of course called “Flores Man”.
Nothing chintzy for great warriors.
In Orang Pedek, Rumpelstiltskin,
Kobold, Orc and Leprechaun
You have hints of our proper name.
Your fathers met us on forest paths.
You left rice offerings at the shrines.
Mostly we refrained from shooting you
With our little black arrows
Tipped with Komodo dragonspit.
When the volcano split its side
There was nowhere left on Earth to hide.
We were fireflies in the fearful glow
Of the pyroclastic flow.
Now you find our skeletons in caves.
Alas, poor uruk, I knew him well.
You dishonour the bones of Snow-white.
Her D.N.A. is too late for your kiss of life.
Christians accept us as deformed men,
Microcephalic versions of themselves,
Just smaller, meaner and more cretinous.
Scientists laud us as Homo erectus,
The long lost heirs to Java Man.
It appears we got out just in time.
Had we been luckier like bonobos
You would have eaten us as bushmeat,
Chained us up for tourist photographs,
Used us for laboratory trials,
Because, although we had no souls,
We were so human in our physiology.
Hernemere.
I have built a lake where never was,
An empty hole of clay, a dry bed,
I will name it Hernemere, Lake of Herons
Or Herne the Hunter’s Pool.
The rains will come.
The waters will break
At the birthing of this lake.
For a long still while
There will be no cry of life,
No foetal beat to tremble
The meniscus, no spreading
Ripple rings from minnow rise.
But spur-winged plovers
Will fly overhead
And scream the news abroad.
A pair of paradise ducks
Will dabble in the shallows
With red azolla water fern
In the webs of their feet
And green duckweed on their bills.
The dust of dry water troughs
Will blow in the wind and settle
Like alien spacecraft
To inseminate the virgin seas
With algae, rotifers and water fleas.
Green gold bell frogs
Crossing the fields on a wet night
Will find the promised land
And lay a mass of frogspawn there.
Water beetles like overdue bombers
Will land on a wing and a prayer.
On a spring morning a green company
Will plant corms of yellow flag irises,
Cuttings of green willow, alder saplings,
The reeds of the fenlands, kingcups,
Rushes for castle floors, quillwort
And the flinty segmented horsetails.
Herne will take a leather pouch
And liberate of carp and roach,
Of tench and perch their fry,
Sent forth to thrive and multiply.
The waters of the lake will tremble
And a sigh will rustle through the reeds.
This new born lake is now alive.
In the year’s prime the stripling saplings
Will spring up like warriors
From dragon’s teeth
To shield and guard the shore.
In the hot summer water lilies
Will bloom like petticoats
Shed by water nymphs.
Water crowfoot flowers will spangle
The waters like a galaxy.
From behind the irises and bulrushes
Will glide a boat’s carved oaken prow
And Herne will row his Lady of the Lake
Out into her ancient domain.
They look down to see the carp and tench
Below them like broken swords of bronze.
The dead men’s heads of sacrifice,
Their hair fanning out as filamentous
Green algae, their teeth freshwater pearls,
Stare in grave homage up at them.
In a halcyon flash a ruby emerald kingfisher
Dives from a branch and all are gone.
The spreading rings from his entry splash
Disintegrate what could have been
The wash and wake of passing oars
And on the bank two slate and stately herons stand.
Stag at Bay.
Three score years the rabid wolves
Have nipped my heels and harried me.
I have stamped the stot
Of my pride and arrogance
And in my proven prowess pronked.
But yesterday in fight or flight response
The Achilles’ tendon of my temper snapped.
I roared the challenge of the stag in rut,
But sought the thicket’s sanctuary.
Today they have sniffed my sweat
Laced with pheromones of fear.
The ravening pack persists,
Runs me ragged to spot my limp.
I am brought to bay head down
To present my coronet of thorns.
I stand in the rushing river
So the deep swirling current
Will protect my heaving flanks,
But the cold saps will, weakens me.
The yellow eyes in narrow skulls
Watch in waiting from the bank.
One swift slash from wolfish fangs
Pulls the ripcord of my guts
That blossom in the river’s flood,
A bright pink parachute of blood.
The Winter King.
Two men of hardened mien
Are walking greyhounds in the woods,
Retired to sire and whelp winners.
Long and lean in sinews, thews,
The hounds have always paid their dues
In season to the Winter King.
The losers hang from holly trees,
Their feet barely touching the earth
To dance their last slow waltz.
It is Winter in Ireland, Carlow,
And the bare trees are ivy crowned.
The ground is strangle-ivy bound.
The only green in Winterholm,
Stumps are burled in Witches’ Butter,
Jew’s Ear, King Alfred’s Cakes,
Black fungi of the underworld,
A frozen realm of monochrome.
We watch the swollen Barrow
Overflow its banks, weirs disappear
Until even the doorstep
Of O’Conchubhair’s pub
Is sandbagged against the flood.
In the museum are the bronze
Leaf-bladed daggers, dredged
From Otterspool, the gold ring
From the belly of the old pike.
In the museum the bog man,
Found by the peat cutters
Grins his mahogany smile,
His garrote still embedded
In the leather of his throat.
Sheaves were tithed by Winter’s scythe.
When flocks were culled to lean and lithe.
The hogs that feasted and fattened
On the fragrant herbs of Summer
And the sweet acorns of fall,
Must now make sacrifice.
Among the yellow leaves of oaks,
A red gold libation gently soaks,
The ancient reckoning,
Our tribute to the Winter King.
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