Hymn of the Haar

The path here over winter grew

With wild madder and restharrow

I came to tread another in

At the end of spring

I walk my miseries here on a leash

The strait of Dover

A silver verisimilar Damascun Road

The sea wrack bore in just after noon

A boy in the shape of a balloon

His jumper a Rashidun green

Came clear there was no rousing him

So I wrote for him a name

Before the police came

To tarpaulin and erase the evidence

Crisis to crisis

Life needn’t be like this

Or must it and must I be oblivious

Nor ask why

Just to hear the hymn of the haar

Or haul away to harbour?

Easterlies at Shakespeare cliff

Provoking the precipice

Here come the lee waves, shuddering the neck of bluff

Enough delusion

My crop will fail

The scansion of the spindrift binds me to the metre of despair

Crisis to crisis

Life once was not like this

Or was it and was I too delirious to realise

Or to hear the hymn of the haar

And haul away to harbour?

The shadow needs the light

To keep it’s void in sight

The left wing needs the right

To keep the beast in flight

Skylark to bugloss, to self-heal

To cormorant, to samphire, to plover

No bluebird flies over

Here in the hymn of the haar

As we haul-away to harbour

Or where the voices just too loud today

To let you tell anybody

Or back across the barr them pray

Oft him anhaga are gebideð