Poems about Coming Home
By Faris Anderson
I don’t live in Cornwall, but visiting Cornwall feels like coming home. This is a selection of my poems inspired by Cornwall, and coming home.
Empire Light
The country fell apart
My father said
In the year of the three-day week;
Freed from blacked-out nights
We played on the foundations
For new houses
In the yawn of summer evenings.
The roads were given poet’s names,
The terraced houses
Baked from yellow brick,
Pale and adolescent,
With narrow yards
Shallow roofs
And wider windows
Than once was customary;
In the smallest bedroom,
Lying in the unrestricted sun
The light came in from India, Burma,
Kenya, all the countries of the Empire
They gave away
My father said,
And the shapes my body made
The hidden folds, peninsulas
Were countries too
Waiting to be claimed.
My hands, my feet, my eyes
The contours of my skin I’d never claimed
The rebellious colonies
Waiting for empire light.
St Mawes Castle
When we were still a family
We crossed the harbour
Past damaged ships
With enough time on the other side
To stroll along the quayside
And walk up to the castle
Before the final crossing of the day
And now we’re not a family anymore
And now I am alone
And waiting on the far side
The ferry long since gone
I wait at the castle
And look across the harbour
Towards the damaged ships
And wait till night has fallen
And walk alone
To the place where I will stay.
Eternity for Men
A ball thrown through the sky
In black and white and silver,
The sea pulled back, the edge
Pulled gently back,
The beautiful man who held a little girl.
He bought Eternity for Men
And wore it for the cheapest tricks
He’d met in Heaven,
My Scottish friend from New Cross
I met a week before the Kings Cross fire.
And in a cheap hotel off Euston Road
We staggered from the night bus
Via the cash machine;
A room with three beds side by side,
And bare walls turning grey at dawn.
You were out on a leash, you said,
And the Edinburgh people were dark
With generations of French, Italians,
Your black eyes barely focussed
On blemishes we shared,
Except my face reflected
In the curve of your eye,
All the generations;
Not understanding what you said
In broken dialect.
So I see my face
The unseen blemishes
Thrown in a trajectory
Ending in a fire
Without any fragrance,
Never repeated
The sea pulled back again,
In black and white and silver;
And I ask if you still wear
Eternity for men.
Bosvarren
I meet you
In the old garden
At Bosvarren House
Past stone toadstools
And blue hydrangeas
Crossing the bridge
Of the secret moat
To the beautiful house,
In the beautiful room
With the gilded chairs
Shut away
For dark occasions,
For births and marriages;
Carried to the generator
In the wooden shed
Filled with spades and forks
Towards the earth station,
Hurling first messages
From continent to continent
From the vein of the sea creek
Through stone, fragmented
Burgeoning flesh
Of the beautiful garden
Towards the peninsular
Towards the Lizard.
Your hair was white blond
Your face was wide
As it is today,
As you first discovered
The beautiful room,
And lawns wide enough
For dark explorations;
When people kissed
Without guilt
When you gave your hand
To seek protection,
When the garden boundaries
Were unknowable
And the Goonhilly disks
Shot unseen rays
To harmless eyes.
To Lucy Russell
(Who died in St Buryan’s Churchyard, near Porthcurno, Cornwall,
11th April 1975)
The philosopher’s daughter
On a beach of shells
Where undersea cables
Came to the shore
Streaming to places
She’d never reach.
From the Logan Stone
On the routes of the ships
And the cargoes they carried
To untraceable worlds;
No expectation
Of the value they held.
She climbed on a bus
The journey eight minutes
Through the warm, coastal valley
Down Cornish lanes
Of lost hidden species
Ferns and warm bushes
To the grey stone pillar
Of St Buryan church
Where she stood on a tomb
And poured on the petrol
And burnt in a pillar
Of molten flame
Which her grandfather saw
With second sight
Flare over Penwith
– A mushroom cloud
– An angel of peace
To burn out the God
Who raised the grey tower
The fields danced around
To the Logan Stone
On the edge of the cliff
To the beach of white shells
And the routes of the ships
To the edge of the sea;
The brightest flare;
The philosopher’s daughter
Whom no one could save.
The Dangerous Junction
We had to cross a junction
From the south coast to the north
And my father drove the car
With all of us on board
My mother, brother, sister
When we were children
And the old white signposts
With the black spear on top
Still showed the way.
We had to cross the busy road
It was dangerous, even then
My father used to say
And only now
Is the junction safe
By a new road
My father, brother
All passed away
And only now
Is the junction safe
Which always safely crossed
Always led safely on.
Kudmore
We travelled through the night
And broke the break in the bank of earth
Where the headlights fell on gable end.
And waking in a wooden hut
In the disused quarry, banked with brambles,
My mother and father on a pull-down bed
A sliding door to my sister’s room
A lean-to kitchen at the back
And a door to the chemical loo
In an overgrown, cut-off shed;
Thick blue water spinning on a pan
And tipped into a hole.
We followed looping wire on poles
Under the disused railway arch
And shouted out the time and place
And a Cornish Blue flew by
Spinning up water down a hole
Into the sea-glared sky.
What I Meant
After fifteen years
I’m ready now
To tell you what I meant.
This is the moment,
I’m quite decided,
I practice the words
In front of a mirror
Though I’ve aged,
I know that you’re still beautiful
Though we haven’t met for years
I have the image
You posted on the internet.
I guess you’re quite alone,
You gave nothing away;
You’re still a mystery
And I have died in many different ways
And so my words will have an extra truth
The trembling, sweating, broken off
Which you’ll forgive me for;
So let me speak;
Over the gulf
To tell you what I meant.
The Blue Room
The night I came in
From the snow to the blue room
They were roasting chestnuts
Hot from the fire.
Adam from the garden,
Gawain in his burnished armour,
King Lear in his ragged clothes,
(Also people I’m forbidden to tell you).
