Ten Shakespearean Sonnets by Gary Bills

 

WINTER, NEAR EMMAUS 

Stranger on the road, in rags or shroud,

Won't you walk beside me, through the night?

The winter stars are hidden by the cloud

And now the winter moon withdraws her light.

Emmaus - look! - is like a crown of lamps

As if the stars have fallen to the plain,

Or else we see the brigand fires of camps

Where evil men weigh life with evil gain;

No life's a silver coin to men like these,

I fear them as I fear the winter rain

And fear the moving shadows in the trees -

Now moonlight helps us glimpse our way again;

(The dead, perhaps, are playing hide and seek!)

Strange friend - if friend you are, why won't you speak?

 

GOD, 1967 

One evening, God leans closer to the earth

and thinks he spots a fire along the coast

and hears strange music - mixed with sounds of mirth,

and down he floats - not Father, Son or Ghost,

but some old guy with kaftan, bangles, beard,

so no-one’s asking - "Hey Man, are you Him?”

He sits down by the fire, not acting weird,

nods and smiles and smokes - and that's no sin,

and everyone is God and makes a rhyme -

(he takes this as a compliment, of course...)

he's naked now – his turn comes round - it's time:

"Rhyme, God," they yell, although he's dry and hoarse,

he shakes his head – turns square – “I – gotta go..”

(he’ll never learn the songs he didn't know.)

   

IF THE NIGHT HAS HANDS 

The groans of a ship descending through the sea

as if she’ll fall forever through the black,

her plates implode, as demons squeal with glee;

misshapen out of grace, her steel ribs crack,

her funnels crushed to music close to pain,

atonal pain - while bubbles float her words;

she'll miss the crowds who cheered her off again,

excitement like the twittering of birds.

Where are the fish with lamps beneath their eyes

to show her there is light where sunbeams fail?

where is the squid with luminescent dyes

and where’s the basso profundo of the whale?

Down deep, beyond the reach of shallow thought…

Say, if the night has hands, might she be caught?

   

VASHTI BUNYAN’S CARAVAN 

We're off, in Vashti Bunyan's caravan,

Don't look for us tomorrow, or today;

We're out of here already - what's our plan?

The Hebrides, perhaps, but who can say -

It's hard to find another diamond day.

We're off, in Vashti Bunyan's caravan,

Along the lanes where ferns and flowers sway,

So jolty-slow, but catch us if you can;

Don't worry though - you'll catch our song, someday…

We're off, in Vashti Bunyan's caravan -

No towns, no signs, to prove we've lost our way;

We’re friends to every gentle maid and man

And plod through heath and moor, and come what may

We're off to find another diamond day.

 

THE COLLECTORS 

Hush! We are busy collecting the dead.

An eyelash here - a hair - a flake of skin.

We grow the body back, from toe to head,

but there’s no place to pop the soul back in –

and what’s a soul? – depends on one’s belief.

The will can paint a face one loves to wear,

but that’s all art, a mask for saint or thief.

A soul lies deep, beyond the morning stare,

that is, if souls exist, for bliss or hell -

to mourn beside their broken violins;

we sift the dust to find the rotting cell -

we seek no angels on the heads of pins.

In quiet rooms, where shadows never creep,

we store the twitching dolls that cannot speak. 

  

FANTASY PAVANE 

Which maiden for remembrance? Let him write,

note by note, her steps of courtly joys

before our tears; her solemn dance, the sight

shaped by music, with foreboding and her poise

in gilded scales, with youth that lives or dies...

Recalled, the princess glides across the room,

her beauty captures all the yearning eyes.

Recalled, she lies forsaken in her tomb;

the torches and the candles flicker low -

(the cellist and the flautist earn their fee)

and garlands wither - shadows touch her brow;

from nooks and chinks, the toads crawl out to see.

Then darkness, with a fading violin,

and so, eternal silence can begin.

 

 XERXES WEPT 

Even now – the dregs of middle age -

My world grows small: a thinning of the ranks;

My phone book shows deletions page by page

And random searches end with puzzling blanks

As if those clamorous spirits never were,

And some are less than whispers on the beach

Because, though winds return and sand dunes stir,

Lost friends have lost their voices – out of reach,

They cannot sigh their dust about the earth.

The Persian Xerxes sensed this, in his day,

How Death the Stealer waits by every birth;

At Abydos, his forces filled the bay,

And Xerxes wept, to see what all must know -

In time, and soon, all voices fade and go.

 

CARNYX 

The dark’s immense, although our woods are small,

Extending to infinities of lore;

And in the dark we hear the carnyx call,

The copper tongues of horns, the roll and fall

As epochs end - and tattooed gods remain

In spite of Christ - they have not had their day,

Defiant in their wilderness domain

Where cautious wolves approach the Roman stray,

As rules and cities tumble from his hand.

The carnyx turns the mind and turns the harm

And brings the blood and famine to the land

Or brings a captured harvest to the barn;

It gives and takes, quotidian as before,

Until the chaos gathers at our door.

 

SHAPES  

Oh damn, those swirling floaters in my eye..!

clear cells in chains or parachuting through -

quite maddening if you love to scan the sky

as I do - any cloud defines the blue,

unfurling grey or opalescent pearl

with silver edges fringed with tassel showers,

white-bearded with the north when blizzards whirl

or wisping summer by, come languid hours -

high cirrus like the feathers of a swan

and some like mackerel fillets turned to fluff,

then ships and gods when blooms of nimbus come

with floating nuns and friends of changing stuff,

and purple heads, which bear the apple's bruise,

when lightning strides before the thunder's news.

 

MEETING THE ANCESTORS 

Each photo holds a code of captured light,

the eye and mind unravelling the sense -

after photons dance from black and white

between two disparate days, to form one tense.

The smiling dead might meet our eyes as friends

or question why we peer into their day

and stand behind the dark side of the lens,

suspected - sensed - but vague and far away.

Grey figures under trees, all ghost and guess

and veined between the spaces with grey shade;

they'll meet our gaze with eyes that hate or bless,

with nervous pride, or sometimes half afraid

for what the rocked collodion and tide

might half reveal - for what they cannot hide.

Gary Bills was born at Wordsley, near Stourbridge. He took his first degree at Durham University, where he studied English, and he has subsequently worked as a journalist. He is currently the fiction editor for Poetry on the Lake, and he has recently gained his MA in Creative Writing at BCU, with a distinction.

He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his post-modernist epic poem, Bredbeddle's Well, which was published  in Lothlorien in 2022.

Gary's poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including The Guardian, Magma, HQ and Acumen, and he has had three full collections published, – “The Echo and the Breath” (Peterloo Poets, 2001); “The Ridiculous Nests of the Heart” (bluechrome, 2003); and “Laws for Honey” (erbacce 2020). In 2005, he edited “The Review of Contemporary Poetry”, for bluechrome.

His work has been translated in to German, Romanian and Italian. A US-based indie publisher, The Little French, published his first novel, “A Letter for Alice” in 2019, and a collection of stories, “Bizarre Fables”, in 2021. These were illustrated by his wife, Heather E. Geddes. His second novel, "Sleep not my Wanton", came out in January 2022.

"Sleep Not..." is due out again shortly as an audio book, as possibly as a hardback.