Poetry
Important Things
I ought to write about important things,
content myself with facts as papers do,
reflect on tragedies, the way life brings
a sense of helpless chaos surging through
to grip the innards, wring the heart and squeeze
the flesh of joyful happiness to stone.
I ought to write of useful things like these:
Sky Sports, the Internet, the mobile phone.
I know that GM foods aren’t safe, I know
our days are filled with crime and drugs and war,
that meningitis kills and that we grow
our own extinction in our lust for more…
and yet I find the flowers, sunshine, sea,
the peace of cliff tops written up in me.
Harry Owen
(from Searching for Machynlleth, 2000)
Unhinged at Chintsa
After the great windstorm that blew in from the West –
sunshine and luminous skies disowning the gale’s treachery
of amputated branches, dust and dune-menacing surf –
he dreams in the calm of another day, glances out
from his book through ageing French windows
across the sundeck to a newly-crisp ocean, rich
as the skirling of pipes beyond silverleaf, milkwood,
strelitzia and palm: he knows this pulsing
creature, this loved world, as he knows his own breath.
As he stares, the open door groans, creaks back on itself,
subsides in a heap – a stricken glass geriatric
crutched and straining for support. Years of salt air
have rotted the old screws, and he hadn’t noticed.
Quick to grab the frame and hold it up,
they wedge it clumsily back into place,
locking it in. It will hold for a few more days, they hope.
But who will restore this fragile thing now
in such a time of keening collapse?
Suddenly the whole bright world is unhinged.
It needs fixing.
Harry Owen
(from The Cull, 2017)
The Shearing
(for Rob Wilmot)
Warmth of the holding pen: ewes wait their turn,
huddled together greyly, tiny feet
tapping out a soft dance of nervous doubt
upon the wood laths for reassurance,
and I stand behind, leaning on a rail.
Sporadic low bleats. I’d half expected
the rasp of machines, bustle of rough men,
but there’s none of this, just uneasy calm,
a tense waiting for something to begin.
Do I like it? Am I relaxed, easy?
No, but not yet discomfited either;
this is just a day’s work, ordinary
as yesterday’s sun or tomorrow’s rain.
In the shearing shed, its floor wool-scattered
with greywhite globs, I watch them working.
No rush, a rhythmic shaving, practised poise
to release each naked ewe at last and
cast aside her limp fleece like some sheep-ghost
or pale soul upon its slatted altar
to be picked apart and assessed for truths.
Returned, they huddle, stark as candle wax
into the flock, faces, necks together
while the others wait their time. And now I
am with them, sly voyeur of the shearing,
witnessing their profound indignities
and thinking of Auschwitz. All this happens
in uncomplaining silence as clippers
snigger their electric penetrations.
Yet I’m here with the sheep. Will someone come
soon for me, heave me expertly onto
my back, drag me, hands raised in submission,
into the next room by my wrists to do
who knows what unthinkable things to me?
And if by some chance I survive, shorn of
all I am, whose bleak creation will I be?
Harry Owen
(from The Cull, 2017)
Rustlers at Bethlehem Farm
If the boundary here above Bethlehem
is meant to keep out intruders,
it isn’t working.
Having wandered away from the fence line,
we scramble up next to a clicking stream
within a coarse stumble of boulders,
a dry mulch of grasses and brush.
Every few steps we must stop and listen.
The rustlers are here already, scraping
invisibly, shuffling about their own
avian, reptilian, insect business.
Under, through. Over, between. No problem.
This scribbling stream, too, is a rustler –
fluent, yes, but no respecter of fences.
The morning is soft, mild, almost English,
high clouds breaking fitfully
to admit the rustlers’ sun
while Old Rocky watches from afar.
Fences will never hold him, or them.
No theft here, no plundering. Only gift.
Harry Owen
(Shortlisted for the South African National Poetry Prize, 2023)
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