Wild and Wounded

I

Visit or visitation, when in frost
A heron descends to the garden pond
For any snack, late frog or goldfish fry,
Frustrated by the cover’s netting stands
A monument to hunger, motionless.

So it has always been.
But on the snow-flecked lawn
As never yet in twenty-six winters here
A swan sat, whiter, hissed when we fed him bread,
For two days barely shifted, though he grazed
Within his lithe neck’s radius,
Calmer than we were after another death –
Until he made to rise,
Dragging one leg, a wobbling majesty
Not come by choice, for refuge
From riveret pasture puddle now and iced,
Crash-landed, gashed while in flight or fight:
A casualty, a case,
Therefore to be removed, hospitalized.

2

Meddling is human, Adam said, and Cain,
Remembrance mortal too. The haunting ceases.
Get out your guest-book, then,
Your cenotaph of the fallen, who knows where,
No matter if incomplete:
For winter, jack-snipe, furrowing, red-legged partridge,
Fieldfare and redwing, song and missel thrush,
Three kinds of other rank sparrows, noted when they were gone,
The whole long field mottled with plovers daily,
Dusk marked by barn-owl’s passing
And for top brass marsh harrier’s whirl at prey.
Oh, and the swallows, martins more than missed
For their low muttering, wilderness brought home.

3

No loss to them, merged in their time unmeasured,
Nameless identity
That suffering, maimed, wants nothing but to be
Or perish, so humble their indifference.
Roused from complaisance, looking, walking, we
Clash with an empty cage
Which, wildering, we for our not their defence
Blast in self-injuring rage
At absence, ours to feel, of trapped lives treasured:
End of an age, our age.

4

The tamed, no less, the petted, the still tended,
our cultivars driven wild:
clenched rose in January, primrose and violet
amid the aconites, growth without rhyme or season
by the mad weathers tricked, beguiled:
a warm breeze after hurricane, frost and rain
that seemed unending, flooded the kitchen floor,
those weathers in our doings, in our minds.
When friends and strangers met for this New Year
The small-talk halted, ripped by small detonations –
Of course, the firework rockets in the street,
Defiant celebrations,
Larger explosions imminent, not here,
Too near the fission works long obsolete.

5

Dreaming, I see my father sixty-three years dead
come to my work-room where engrossed, engaged
I ask the walking wounded
To wait a little in the sitting-room
Before I join him there.
But then it’s travels, devious and drawn-out,
Uncertainties, delays.
At a forgotten house
I see my mother opening some back pantry door,
Her who died forty years later,
Remember who I am. She seems preoccupied,
Almost fades out, the scene – a home? – suspended.
Perhaps, though, turning, less absorbed, she whispered:
‘come back when you have died.’

6

Frost has returned, rime to the swans’ terrain
Beside the riveret
Where, whiter, distant, a family crops and wanders,
Even or odd, symmetrical, incomplete.
I’ll count no heads now, lines or syllables
To fix this whiter whiteness quivering.

Michael Hamburger