Memory

by

Moment

Leigh

Who knows when that moment will occur?

Moment

 

There was a New York moment
An ice-splinter in a sheet of sunlight
When without the aid of smart devices
Using dumb mind trails and heartstrings
We managed to connect
Like two sparrowhawks circling the Downs
Two wayfaring strangers caught in eye contact
A brother and a sister separated at the orphanage
The tramrails of recognition in a train carriage
Two carvings divided by centuries on an ancient Ashdown Forest oak
Together but alone, two flights scribbled together, trails in the sky
Lattice-work moments that we didn’t recognise then
But now in our Hadleigh twitchers hide they start to form letters
on the Estuary horizon as we look across the marshes of Foulness
And in the distance the iron-toothed refineries and the Essex tides
wash dreams from the tarnished golden mile to Thorpe Bay.
Do you remember being scared by thunder in the same storm?
Before grammar schools dressed us in new ambitions
That hung off us like extravagant hand-me-downs
And we didn’t know each other then
And yet we did, somehow.
We heard the strains of the same songs
drifting through our different worlds
echoes in adjacent rooms then
but hearing them again now,
as our eyes dance in the same places.
And as the shadows lengthen
The midges rise and the fairy-tale forest draws in
We let the thought hang in the air
There is a new Wealden moment
An iceblink as the glacier shifts
And the sun traces our faces,
our shadows merge, becoming one
as all of the things we always meant to do
collide here like carriages of a train
in its silent Beeching siding
but there in the car reserved for lovers
two people who have not known each other
all their lives
finally have their moment.
 
Roy Stannard 6th June 2013
(the 50th anniversary of the Beeching cuts)
 
Listen to a live recording on Soundcloud
https://soundcloud.com/roystannard/roy-stannard-moment-final-mix
by

Alfriston

Alfriston - St Andrews in the Tye, raised mount and flint walls

Alfriston

 

Alfriston, oh Alfriston

I still hear your sea winds blowing

I was 21 the last time I smuggled myself into your secret passages

It was sunny then too, with the light dappling at windows

like an impressionist painter with an endless palette of time.

 

Alfriston, oh Alfriston

I can still hear your sea waves crashing

At the end of the Cuckmere where Eleanor Farjeon’s morning was broken

Sea trout, dace and perch open their gills

as the anglers brace their lines.

I lock my car and recall an Anglia owned by a brave young student

abandoned beneath the tree in the village square,

its straight 4 engine glowing with the exertion of the trek from Falmer.

Tucked under my confidence then was the contraband of hope

And today there’s an Inn called the Smugglers, a kind of memorial.

 

Alfriston, oh Alfriston

I still see her standing by the stream on the east of the village

Looking over the valley of lows and highs

We unfolded our plans on precious parchment, wondering

where this unmapped love would take us.

Today I look at the steeple on the Tye and can still see the tears

That watered my memory, my crying shame.

And the raised mount of St Andrews and its flint wall

express the dialectic of the place, the uplifts and falls

like a gull wheeling in the small eddies and minor currents

and a man down, below.

 

 Roy Stannard 6.10.11

 

On National Poetry Day – with apologies to Jim Webb and Glen Campbell