Late Harvest: Collected Poems

By J.D. Frodsham

Exploring themes of love, death, war, suffering, and spiritual insight, this collection features carefully crafted poetry and humorous light verse, spanning decades of the authors personal experience, while also touching on something of the universal human condition.
Threnody
This story must end as a threnody
For poets know that lovers disappear,
(Crying out: Liebende, seid ihrs dann noch?)
Leaving only ashes and faded petals
In the rose garden with leaf-clogged fountains,
Where no birds sing, cold breezes blow at nightfall,
And the maze echoes with lost childrens voices,
As the ruined house settles into silence
Among the yew trees shading tumbled graves,
Where crumbling names sink into mossy stone
And time takes back what it so briefly dealt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: May 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524629465

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© 2016 J.D. Frodsham. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/03/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-2944-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-2945-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-2946-5 (e)

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Contents

I    POEMS

Threnody

Thin Ice: A Haibun

The Wheel

Love All in Colonial Algeria

Affairs of State, August 1962

Missing You: 1440

High Tatras

Humble Apology for a Grave Breach of Propriety and Decorum

Lucy

Secret Agent: A Riddle

Prospero to Miranda: His Testament

Grown Old, I Walk through Gathering Dusk

Vision

Elegy for Thelma Challenor, aged 10

Colours of Twilight

Winter at Red Rock, Hoylake

Coastal Exile

Sea Shanty

Life Cycle

Fading Beach Snapshot

Exam Time

Epigram: Wind Chimes

With thanks for astrological counsel

Dead Leaves (Les feuilles mortes)

Infirm of Purpose

In memory of our Jaya, who died 30/12/1999 after spending only ten months with us

Lyric: Jasmine Garland

Cen Can

Cen Can

Cen Can

II    CLASSICAL POEMS

Julian in Athens: 351 C.E.

By Imperial Order, Julian II Contemplates the Head of Gallus (354 CE)

In the Antioch Suburbs (From the Greek of C.P. Cavafy)

Julian II in Nicomedia

Epigram: Hades

Song

The Song of Peleus to Thetis

Classical Abduction

Easter Rising

Eurydice

Epitaph for the Tomb of Flavius

Poems from the Ancient Egyptian

III    LIGHT VERSE

Distraught Philosophers Woo Aletheia (Truth)

Nietzsche Foresees the Future of Literary Criticism

In a McClass of His Own

Light-Hearted Verses for Grandchild No. 10, Master Rafe James Haslehurst Esq.

Clever Cats

Great Literature for Dummies

Ophelia Muses on the Glass of Fashion

On Reading Bettina Arndt’s Sex Diaries (2009)

Note left for an Icebox

Cancer in a Smart Suburb

The Quadratic Formula Case: Mafia Style

ENDNOTES

I

POEMS

Threnody

Wer, wenn ich schriee, höre mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?

(So who then, even if I shrieked, would hear me among the angel orders?)

(R.M Rilke, Duineser Elegien)

That which speaks to me about the humane…are the figures of those who died young and the loving….Through both these figures the humaneness is blended into my heart, whether I want it or not.

(R.M. Rilke, Letter to A. Kolb)

Ha gente na fica na historia

Da historia a gente.

(There are people who remain a part of us

Becoming part of our own story.)

(Jorge Fernando, Chuva: Fado).

When the World War to end all wars was over

And planning for our next war under way,

With other wars, not ours yet, burgeoning

In distant countries bearing half-known names,

Wars laying ambush for us, steel unsprung,

Weary of war and sick of war’s alarms

I sought brief solace in less lethal arms.

At eighteen, Eve was also fresh from school,

A Ladies’ College siren, slim and blonde,

High-breasted, swan-necked, rose-lipped, azure-eyed,

Her smile bright as a blade. Though intertwined

Shrouded in darkness in a dream-palace,

(Sole sanctuary for lovers in their teens

When Church and State conspired to keep us pure),

Our thwarted passion left our thirst unslaked

Without the solace of that Grecian Urn¹

For we were fated both to fade and grieve.

That wintry week, a thoughtful War Office

Had sent a Christmas gift, my conscript card,

(Too young to vote, just old enough to kill).

Long years of separation loomed ahead.

Such severance leaves love bleeding, if not dead.

When king and country call, your number’s up.

The hemlock’s brewed! Drink boldly from the cup!

To tell but the truth,

We lived among losers,

Puritan provincials,

In a land that was lamed,

Damaged by Depression,

Shabby and scarred,

Tired and tawdry,

Worn out by wars,

Battered by bombing.

Forty years of folly

Had dragged us down

To a ramshackle ruin

Ineptly administered

By arrogant asses,

Braying buffoons,

Oxbridge oafs;

Traitors at the top,

Whores in high places,

(Harlots like Hollis,²

Filth like Philby).³

On misshapen monuments

We mourned mass murders,

Flesh of the fallen

Fettered to stone,

Incised in iron,

Name after name,

Squandered and scattered.

Broken the banners

Of ruined regiments

Blazoned battalions,

Decimated divisions.

Were we too destined

To die with devotion,

Unquestioning idiots,

Massacred morons,

Asinine armies

All annihilated?

Schlachtfeld!      Battlefield!

Mordesmorde    Murder on murder

Blinzeln            Blink

Kinderblicke⁴    Children’s sight

For I was set to go and ‘play the game,’

Stiff lipped and nonchalant, the ‘old school’ style,

Befitting scions of a Brigadier,⁵

(Courageous veteran of two world wars,

Still walking stiffly from the wounds he bore),

In hopeless rematch with an ageless ogre

That had devoured grandfathers and fathers,

Killed half our kin, slaughtered wailing children,

Defiled our mourning mothers, weeping wives,

And now was gearing up to do to us

What Minotaur had done to Greek ephebes,

Its expertise perfected by long practice,

Ingeniously improved technology,

Strange artifices meant to expedite

The mathematics of Apocalypse,

Mutual assured destruction by consent

Till, surfeited, earth could not hide the slain.

Times were brutal then, our winter icy,

And hearts grown hardened as the frozen soil;

Since love was rationed tighter than our food

And sex become an obscene, sniggering word,

We hungered vainly, dreaming of a life

Less circumscribed by harsh necessity

Than this one where the State’s Medusa glare

Might turn us all to headstones, row on row.

‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’.⁶

(Horace, Poet Sycophant to emperors,

Stern advocate of soldiers’ funerals

Along with Virgil, sonorous as geese).

I filed my call-up with my Latin verse,

Then crept back to my place in Plato’s Cave.

Since ‘Carpe diem!’ was my watchword then,⁷

Intent on death, I plucked my roses fast.

For ‘true to one another’ did not mean we’d last.⁸

‘With luck,’ I’d tell her, ‘We’ve five years to go;

Russian roulette’s a short and lethal game.

When Stalin sows our killing fields we’ll see

Red dragon’s teeth spring up as fighting men,⁹

And then our ignorant armies, East and West,

Locked in blind struggle by this darkling Rhine,¹⁰

Will join those vanished legions Varus led

Through German forests where black trees eat men,

Grim Felsenfeld, where blood drizzled like rain.¹¹

That Christmas Eve a snow storm swooped on us,

Holding us captive in a snowbound house,

Parents away, alone with the TV.

Then, just as ads were fading from the screen,

And darkness drowned our auditorium,

With unseen angels caroling of peace

To shivering sheep and shepherds all unwashed,

Capricious Eve lavished largesse on me,

A gracious gift richer than Orient pearls,

Dazzling as diamond, rarer than radium,

As unexpected as munificent.

As Merteuil