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 | Yorkshire Times A Voice of the Free Press |
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
@stevewh16944270
1:00 AM 26th November 2024
arts
Poem Of The Week: Pearl By Stephen Littlejohn
Pearl
It's made from cinnabar and bone, iron oxide,
nervous glances caught in oil, wedding cake
palaces, long silences, great bursts of music, singing,
a furtive deal done down a shaded Trento street
beneath apartment buildings cluttered
with rug-saddled balustrades, warm colours hung
feudally as flags and women's laughter spiralling
groundward like spilled change. It speaks to the roil
of tidal surges sweeping off the Spanish coast:
swollen scoops of nail and beaten lumber, shipsail,
drowning men; a whorl of fingers, hair and crushed
skin. There's hope in it, and pulverised glass,
tonguetip from a soft mouth, godslurry, wakened
bell. Only the beasts in their cages ache more,
only the night's cold only the dark eyes lit
by some out of picture act of savagery (bent
backed, thirsty) penetrate deep enough to touch
its salt-silted undersurfaces. Places best left unbled
where dead kisses rot and forgotten dreams darken
and drift, and torment sleep like powdered lead.
Conceived in death and in fear of death
it favours sharpened steel, glints in the moonlight,
the violence of birth. It's as if
everybody whispers, afraid to wake the child, while
around Him the house collapses. But He will rise,
live to die a man, and somewhere later, in a red room
in the last sunset of the final orbit of the planet's
long, lugubrious journey, a shadow will form
on the wall of a man lowering his guard one more time.
Grace: shallow smile offered up to fate
like woodsmoke in the dusk, single note lifted
from a drained well, lavender on the air, aftertaste
of pomegranate. So little it takes. Grace,
brought in on creaking ships with half-lowered sails,
rampaging through the city like a new song.
It's made from cinnabar and bone, iron oxide,
nervous glances caught in oil, wedding cake
palaces, long silences, great bursts of music, singing,
a furtive deal done down a shaded Trento street
beneath apartment buildings cluttered
with rug-saddled balustrades, warm colours hung
feudally as flags and women's laughter spiralling
groundward like spilled change. It speaks to the roil
of tidal surges sweeping off the Spanish coast:
swollen scoops of nail and beaten lumber, shipsail,
drowning men; a whorl of fingers, hair and crushed
skin. There's hope in it, and pulverised glass,
tonguetip from a soft mouth, godslurry, wakened
bell. Only the beasts in their cages ache more,
only the night's cold only the dark eyes lit
by some out of picture act of savagery (bent
backed, thirsty) penetrate deep enough to touch
its salt-silted undersurfaces. Places best left unbled
where dead kisses rot and forgotten dreams darken
and drift, and torment sleep like powdered lead.
Conceived in death and in fear of death
it favours sharpened steel, glints in the moonlight,
the violence of birth. It's as if
everybody whispers, afraid to wake the child, while
around Him the house collapses. But He will rise,
live to die a man, and somewhere later, in a red room
in the last sunset of the final orbit of the planet's
long, lugubrious journey, a shadow will form
on the wall of a man lowering his guard one more time.
Grace: shallow smile offered up to fate
like woodsmoke in the dusk, single note lifted
from a drained well, lavender on the air, aftertaste
of pomegranate. So little it takes. Grace,
brought in on creaking ships with half-lowered sails,
rampaging through the city like a new song.
Image by Myriams Fotos from Pixabay
For here, in the tiny obscurity of a pearl, we find a raging world of invested provenance, in which fulsome economies and the lunatic energies of trade and commerce are bound within its imagined span of ‘cinnabar and bone, iron oxide’. Littlejohn’s measuring of the pearl’s simple but magnificent effect is a polychromatic kaleidoscope of associations, delivered in a flotilla of ornamented metaphors and compound words whose language is soaked in relish.
Here is a languid journey across meaning, in the deconstruction of an object whose value is entirely subjective, a means of payment, an adornment, an accompaniment to avarice and prayer. The rise and swell of the picaresque, and the swashbuckle of the pearl’s ‘begetting’ in a dream of sailors and plunder, add greatly to the received effect: the glistening iridescence of calcium carbonate is transformed, in the purlies and shady corners of the poem, by rhyme and assonance, and by alliteration quietly insinuated in the irregular rhythms of contemplation, into that which it represents to the human imagination.
And yet, the rise of another figure in the complex final verses of ‘Pearl’ yields a suggestion of transcendence, of a getting beyond the ‘tormented sleep’ of misdirected reason, to a profoundly ironic state of grace. Littlejohn’s ineffably beautiful final stanza would be a thing of hope, even in the presence of satire.