Lee Laurie - Laurie Lee Selected Poems

Title Page Laurie Lee Selected Poems Publisher Information First published in 2014 by Unicorn Press Ltd 66 Charlotte Street London W1T 4QE www.unicornpress.org Digital edition converted and distributed by Andrews UK Limited www.andrewsuk.com Copyright in text The Laurie Lee Estate. www.laurielee.org Cover artwork reproduced with kind permission by Jessy Lee. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright holder and the above publisher of this book. Designed by Felicity Price-Smith Dedication To Jessy Note Most of these verses were originally published in three separate volumes - spanning perhaps a decade or so - and for this selection I have cut them down by about half. They were written by someone I once was and who is so distant to me now that I scarcely recognise him anymore.

They speak for a time and a feeling which of course has gone from me, but for which I still have close affection and kinship. L.L. Invasion Summer The evening, the heather, the unsecretive cuckoo and butterflies in their disorder, not a word of war as we lie our mouths in a hot nest and the flowers advancing. Does a hill defend itself, does a river run to earth to hide its quaint neutrality? A boy is shot with England in his brain, but she lies brazen yet beneath the sun, she has no honour and she has no fear. A Moment of War It is night like a red rag drawn across the eyes the flesh is bitterly pinned to desperate vigilance the blood is stuttering with fear. O praise the security of worms in cool crumbs of soil flatter the hidden sap and the lost unfertilized spawn of fish! The hands melt with weakness into the guns hot iron the body melts with pity the face is braced for wounds the odour and the kiss of final pain.

O envy the peace of women giving birth and love like toys into the hands of men! The mouth chatters with pale curses the bowels struggle like a nest of rats the feet wish they were grass spaced quietly. O Christ and Mother! But darkness opens like a knife for you and you are marked down by your pulsing brain and isolated and your breathing, your breathing is the blast, the bullet, and the final sky. Spanish frontier, 1937 Words Asleep Now I am still and spent and lie in a whited sepulchre breathing dead but there will be no lifting of the damp swathes no return of blood no rolling away the stone till the cocks carve sharp gold scars in the morning and carry the stirring sun and early dust to my ears. Andaluca Music in a Spanish Town In the street I take my stand with my fiddle like a gun against my shoulder, and the hot strings under my trigger hand shooting an old dance at the evening walls. Each saltwhite house is a numbered tomb each silent window crossed with blood; my notes explode everywhere like bombs when I should whisper in fear of the dead. So my fingers falter, and run in the sun like the limbs of a bird that is slain, as my music searches the street in vain.

Suddenly there is a quick flutter of feet and children crowd about me, listening with sores and infected ears, watching with lovely eyes and vacant lips. Cordoba, 1936 Juniper Juniper holds to the moon a girl adoring a bracelet; as the hills draw up their knees they throw off their jasmine girdles. You are a forest of game, a thought of nights in procession, you tread through the bitter fires of the nasturtium. I decorate you to a smell of apples, I divide you among the voices of owls and cavaliering cocks and woodpigeons monotonously dry. I hang lanterns on your mouth and candles from your passionate crucifix, and bloody leaves of the virginia drip with their scarlet oil. There is a pike in the lake whose blue teeth eat the midnight stars piercing the waters velvet skin and puncturing your sleep.

I am the pike in your breast, my eyes of clay revolve the waves while cirrus roots and lilies grow between our banks of steep embraces. A t Night I think at night my hands are mad, for they follow the irritant texture of darkness continually carving the sad leaf of your mouth in the thick black bark of sleep. And my finger-joints are quick with insanity, springing with lost amazement through a vast waste of dreams and forming frames of desire around the thought of your eyes. By day, the print of your body is like a stroke of sun on my hands, and the choir of your blood goes chanting incessantly through the echoing channels of my wrists. But I am lost in my hut when the stars are out, for my palms have a catlike faculty of sight, and the surface of every minute is a swinging image of you. Landscape The season does not leave your limbs, like a covered field you lie, and remembering the exultant plough your sheltered bosom stirs and whispers warm with rain.

Waiting does not leave your eyes, your belly is as bright as snow and there your naked fingers are spread over the dark flowers shaking out their roots. My kiss has not yet left your blood but slumbers in a stream within your quiet caves: listening to the sun it will cry forth, and burst with leaves, and blossom with a name. The Armoured Valley Across the armoured valley trenched with light, cuckoos pump forth their salvoes at the lark, and blackbirds loud with nervous song and flight shudder beneath the hawks reconnaissance: Spring is upon us, and our hopes are dark. For as the petal and the painted cheek issue their tactless beauties to the hour, we must ignore the budding sun and seek to camouflage compassion and ourselves against the wretched icicles of war. No festival of love will turn our bones to flutes of frolic in this month of May, but tools of hate shall make them into guns and bore them for the piercing bullets shout and through their pipes drain all our blood away. Yet though by sullen violence we are torn from violet couches as the air grows sweet, and by the brutal bugles of retreat recalled to snows of death, yet Spring, repeat your annual attack, pour through the breach of some new heart your future victories.

Larch Tree Oh, larch tree with scarlet berries sharpen the morning slender sun sharpen the thin taste of September with your aroma of sweet wax and powder delicate. Fruit is falling in the valley breaking on the snouts of foxes breaking on the wooden crosses where children bury the shattered bird. Fruit is falling in the city blowing a womans eyes and fingers across the street among the bones of boys who could not speak their love. I watch a starling cut the sky a dagger through the blood of cold, and grasses bound by strings of wind stockade the sobbing fruit among the bees. Oh, larch tree, with icy hair your needles thread the thoughts of snow, while in the fields a shivering girl takes to her breasts the sad ripe apples. The Three Winds The hard blue winds of March shake the young sheep and flake the long stone walls; now from the gusty grass comes the homed music of rams, and plovers fall out of the sky filling their wings with snow.

Tired of this northern tune the winds turn soft blowing white butterflies out of the dog-rose hedges, and schoolroom songs are full of boys green cuckoos piping the summer round Till August sends at last its brick-red breath over the baking wheat and blistered poppy, brushing with feathered hands the skies of brass, with dreams of river moss my thirsts delirium. Interval All day the purple battle of love as scented mouths position soft fields of contesting langour or jealous peaks of suspicion. All day the trumpeting of fingers, the endless march of desire across the continent of an eyelid or the desert of a hair. How long we roam these territories trailing our twin successes, till the bending sun collapses and I escape your kisses. Then I drink the night like a coconut and earth regains its shape; at last the eunuchs neutral dream and the beardless touch of sleep. Equinox Now tilts the sun his monument, now sags his raw unwritten stone deep in Octobers diamond clay.