Myra Schneider: Two Poems

Deer  

 

Day or night they reappear from nowhere,

the to and fro of their terror an echo of mine

when panic rushes upon me and each time

I question, as I did then, how anyone

who’d dreamt up gardens with mango trees,

myrtles and herbs from all over the world,

could believe captive deer would enhance

such an Eden. Their fleet grace belongs

to the wilds of hills where they can run unseen,

their stillness to privacies in woods, their mystery

to forests dense with dark where any human

glimpsing a head bearing stately branches,

eyes which are softly-lit lamps, would sense

the animal innerness Artemis revered.

Yet there they were inside a wire enclosure,

huddled among spindly trunks with nowhere

to hide from children’s squawks or prying adults,

jerking again and again into flight, shock

shrieking from eyes as they raced from end to end

of the world that caged them. That was years ago

but I can still feel the pulse of their terror.

Isn’t this the fear which drives people who live

in places where each moment’s so weighty

with threat they rip themselves from their homes,

risk their lives in frail boats and trudge

through dusty miles of languages whose jabber

they can’t understand, clinging to the hope

of a life in which they won’t be caged in dread?

Myra Schneider

 

Dunwich

J.M.W. Turner, Dunwich, c. 1830

The higgle of pale houses, the church

perched on the clifftop and the gleam, eerie

as a cat’s eye, in the tower’s upper window

draw me in. The village already seems

to be no more than a ghost. Below it

two cliff shoulders curve inland

like those of a resigned beast pulling

a heavy load in a farmer’s cart.

Mute, they withstand the ocean’s

white lashings which look certain to continue

for hours. Beyond the tousled shore

men are struggling with a wooden boat.

My heart sinks when I discover they are trying

to launch it in the fuming waters, not land it.

Then I realize the specks on the turf slopes

are people gathering to watch. Peering,

I make out a fleck on the horizon, am sure

it’s the sail of a fishing boat in distress

and for moments I hear that hymn of long ago

at school: for those in peril on the sea …

Today I’m standing on these now lopped cliffs

in August sun—not a trace of church,

the only dwellings ex-coastguard cottages.

I gaze at gorse, at ants massing on sand,

at the ocean docile as a sleeping dog

and utterly unlike the savage creature

Turner saw. But how long before

even this subdued hill and its crumble paths

to the sea are toppled in a storm,

dragged away by waves, devoured?

Myra Schneider

The Totem Stump

A loved landmark, taller than a man,

it stands as if on guard on a Roman road

where a path takes off between trees.

Hockney picked out this character, painted it

as a rugged torso in magenta and blue

with scar circles which could almost be eyes.

It holds out short benevolent arms, seems

to give audience to saplings on striped grasses

and people who travel from afar to pay homage.

                                   *

Who came in the silent night with a chainsaw

and can of red paint, sweated to butcher it,

strewed the remains round the raw stump?

No way to resurrect the hefty trunk. Minor,

this piece of vandalism when violence

blooms every day but its slaughter haunts me.

Myra Schneider

 

The Totem Stump, which features in some of David Hockney’s Yorkshire paintings, was destroyed one night in 2012.