Chimneys of Lime

I've walked at your ruins
To seek out your history,
Charted the runes of you
Stone upon stone,
I'm left with damp walls
And a sense of some mystery;
What tamed the pride
That led on to your fall?

Some spirit entangled you
Lived in you yesterday,
Drove you, dispersed, and then
Lay you down still,
Now all that is left
Is grim ruin and disarray,
Relics of life,
Strength of purpose, and will.

Cairns and old bones at
The granite-hard cemetery,
Mounds where no markers
Recall you to name,
Time has dispensed with
All need for your mimicry,
Art has replaced what
We thought to reclaim.

Each one that wonders will
Carry the seeds of you,
Sense all the needs of you
Time upon time,
And walk the sad ruins
That long life will lead us to,
Crumble tall hopes
Like your chimneys of lime.

In search of some answer
I tap your foundations,
I sound each stone wall that
Encapsulates time,
Your dearth and your downfall
Exceed your dimensions,
I walk at your ruins,
Tread softly your rhyme.

David Lewis Paget

By Miner's Hands

What miner's art
Did meld and make,
Did stone on stone
Fling you on high,
Or lie beneath
The stars, awake
To think your shape
As nights sped by?

What weary hand
Did knead and tread
Your mud in some
Dead winter's storm,
While autumn's bride
Long kept her bed
To wait his will
Who gave you form.

And though they lie
Unknown at last,
Without foundation
Still you stand,
Your walls have stood
Six score of years
While they ran through
Their shift of sand!

And every furrow
At some brow
Did trace in mud
These barren lands,
Each humble cottage
Built in need
Was raised in pride
By miner's hands!

David Lewis Paget

An Old Coast

There's an old coast, an old coast
Bound by a wild sea,
Where I found myself, but travelled lost
For a year in every three;
Bitter the winds that blow the coast
For a year in every three.

The skies and cliffs are iron grey
And the gulls are blind in flight,
There isn't a way from the old coast
To be found by the moon's light,
When you're caught in need at the old coast
And the moon is dearth's delight.

I travelled north, I travelled south
In search of a friendly face,
But never an eye would look on me,
Nor check my troubled pace;
Lonely it was, and grim at mouth
I drift my measured trace.

I swore I'd leave that old coast
To look for the way I'd been,
The sea was still and the air was chill,
No roads lay in-between;
Time and again I found no sign
Of the man that I might have been.

So if you should come to an old coast
Bound by a wild sea,
Where never an eye will look on you
For a year in every three,
There's nothing to find but loneliness
And the storms that rage in me!

David Lewis Paget

You and I

If life was only
Held at hand
To seize, let fall
Or pass us by,
With every day
Beyond recall,
We'd still remember,
You and I;

We'd still remember
Days of Grace
That gave us peace
Beyond the lie,
We'd still recall
The calm sea,
The boat, the bay
And you and I.

David Lewis Paget

The Pen

'All curses on this pen,'
I see you think,
This dark intruder that demands
Its pint of ink;
It leaves harsh trails and seeks to
Imitate the past,
Though never moves,
But leads the eye toward the glass.

For as the trail goes out
From birth to death,
A black unbroken scrawl
To take the breath,
It steals the art
Of conversation's better side
While you look on
Like some poor, jilted bride,
Who has the well
(If I but had the ink),
And dips me well
When I do cease to think.

David Lewis Paget

The Basic Tenets

The basic tenets of my faith
Remain, though time has blunted all
The finer points I once embraced
By casting doubts beyond my trawl.

For now a sober Saturn sets
Its nets at my small sanity,
While I remain obsessed with things
That ravage this mortality.

Time teases man a little way
Then casts him out, adrift in space
As if his grace were nothing blessed
And all his dignity but waste.

And it is this that most appals
The cultured mind, the man within
Who weaves long patterns through short dreams
That he conceives, but may not spin.

That he conceives, and yet must leave
In ruin at his final breath
While others pick his patterns clean
And tread, like him, his dreams to death.

David Lewis Paget

Tennos pour Lorac

I find it strange that one as versed as you
In discontent, and having such small time
For poets, or the matter of their muse,
Would make it such an issue of the mind
To lose a book, no matter how it went;
Misplaced, or left behind, or even tossed
On this, the rubbish-heap of dreams long spent
Before the love that brought the book was lost.
For sonnets, after all, speak love to those
Who still may love, so what would you with these?
- Torment each page that it might ever close
On something you so carelessly dismiss?
I bid you, let this persecution cease...
I do not have your 'Sonnets from the Portuguese!'

David Lewis Paget

On the Raising of the Mary Rose
From the waters of the Solent,
11 October, 1982.

Long since I sailed me
I and 'Great Harry'
Pride of the ragged fleet
When we were merrie,
Heel at the wind, my tars,
Gunports at ready.

There sat the Frenchman
Here, our great ships,
Hard on the helm we are
As the port dips,
Long cries of 'Mary Rose'
Die on their lips.

Deep-dredged these centuries
Now wedged on high
Stark, as my timbers
Wide-arc the sky;
Where now 'Great Harry',
Where does he lie?

Torn from my bitter-rest
Borne to your day,
Wide-eyed and wild is my
Sad disarray;
Tell my 'Great Harry' now -
Your world is grey.

David Lewis Paget

On the Execution of a Mural
by Allan Todd, concerning the Battle of Maldon.

Dim figures from the mists walk at my wall,
Emerge and turn and point and tear them free,
From some white back-washed landscape overall,
That you have etched beyond, so patiently.

For every stroke discovers some old ground
That Saxon rode, or Viking trod before,
And from my well of words your brush has found
The distant vista of some wilful war.

The war we're waging still, the spirit seems
To chafe at limitations in the plan,
Each striving after what we know of dreams,
Is overcome by flaws in every man.

For as you peel each layer from the wall
Disturbing truth as it may lie beneath,
Your brush reveals each want these figures trawl,
Relives the last that loss would see them breathe.

Each stroke I see as tearing at their shroud
While they emerge, so wilful in the mind,
I almost hear the clash of armour, loud
Though every staring eye is dead, or blind.

As blind as we who, trapped within our time
May not remove ourselves beyond the page
That we forlornly pattern with our kind,
To pen each failing foray of our age.

For as each man will struggle to emerge
From white, to take his shape from his surround,
And hope to be embodied at the dirge
His death, a thousand years, will run aground;

Then so may we, who taunt the living clay
And heedless of the time we hold in trust,
So struggle from the bonds of our dismay,
Before the mural moulders at our dust.

But though we may, dim figures from the mists,
Emerge and turn and point and tear us free,
Once history has sealed us at its lips,
Some brush might etch our canvas differently.

David Lewis Paget

Blake (before birth)

By field and by coppice
By tumbleweed and marigold,
Skipping at the butterflies
And chattering at the wood,
It's a handful of happiness
With chubby knees and tatters all
That scurries on to Christmas
Where the old grey man stood.

With a starfish in his buttonhole
And a penny wish for the wishing well
He romps home with a puppy dog
And a flower by his ear,
While the old grey man, smiling
Says: 'Mummy waits, in a little while -'
And I have a little whisper:
'I love you, my dear!'

David Lewis Paget