Poem
David Morley
A Steeple-Climber
A Steeple-Climber
A Steeple-Climber
The Blue Bell Inn on Woodgate in the small hours after Time.‘I was thinking’, slurs John Clare, ‘now I can turn a poem
I might turn to an even thornier art’. ‘Like hedge-laying
you mean?’ winks Wisdom, ‘There is more coin in snedding
than blotting’. ‘My friend, there are men of merit and name
who pleach whole hedges of words. They call it criticism.
What I want’ – Clare pounds the deal table – ‘is more scale.’
Mishearing, the landlord stumps across with a brimming jug.
‘I just mean’, stammers John, ‘to be taken to heart by those men.
I have been a steeple-climber all my life. Such is my poor pen’.
John glares into his ale. Wisdom flickers a finger toward the ceiling.
He blows a slow column of smoke up. Everybody in the pub
stares and sees what the gypsy has made. ‘There is the steeple.
This’ – Wisdom circles his arm – ‘this is the church and the people’.
© 2013, David Morley
From: The Gypsy and the Poet
Publisher: Carcanet, Manchester
From: The Gypsy and the Poet
Publisher: Carcanet, Manchester
David Morley
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1964)
David Morley, an ecologist and naturalist by background, is one of the most linguistically invigorating poets currently writing in Britain: a poet for whom science, language, and the natural world all meet at a point we might call ‘meaning’. Part Romani, he makes extensive use in his work of his double heritage of Romani and English – two conduits of the secret knowledge, or lore, that makes a ...
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Poems of David Morley
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A Steeple-Climber
The Blue Bell Inn on Woodgate in the small hours after Time.‘I was thinking’, slurs John Clare, ‘now I can turn a poem
I might turn to an even thornier art’. ‘Like hedge-laying
you mean?’ winks Wisdom, ‘There is more coin in snedding
than blotting’. ‘My friend, there are men of merit and name
who pleach whole hedges of words. They call it criticism.
What I want’ – Clare pounds the deal table – ‘is more scale.’
Mishearing, the landlord stumps across with a brimming jug.
‘I just mean’, stammers John, ‘to be taken to heart by those men.
I have been a steeple-climber all my life. Such is my poor pen’.
John glares into his ale. Wisdom flickers a finger toward the ceiling.
He blows a slow column of smoke up. Everybody in the pub
stares and sees what the gypsy has made. ‘There is the steeple.
This’ – Wisdom circles his arm – ‘this is the church and the people’.
From: The Gypsy and the Poet
A Steeple-Climber
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