The Death Has Occurred …

… of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Sad August 1958:

my Cambridge is over; and now, more loved

than either grandfather, this man I count on for

my deeper self, is dead. I sit on a Liverpool

Corporation bus, jolting its dull green way towards

the docks, towards my in-between-things job

with iron ships, hugging a neurotic degree and this,

today's bleak news, past black warehouses, cranes,

listening to elegies inside my head: across

a dozen counties a single violin's exquisite grief.

MATT SIMPSON

The Lark Ascending

Nigel Kennedy is in the kitchen,

where all best talk happens,

trying to tell me something,

I think he wants to bring me

late spring at Llanmadoc,

on my back, in clover, reading

invisible ink on a blue page,

at my ear the tick, tick

of an ant's path through grass,

no, he wants to tell me of the murder

of larks, not an exaltation,

three thousand slaughtered daily,

mostly sent to France,

no, no, elongated arpeggio,

listen, can't you!

something wants to be said

then said and said again,

something I can't catch,

can't see at all,

till the song comes clear,

till the whole thing flickers,

tumbles, spirals, stroboscopic,

drops like a stone,

falls as news, the edge of everything,

that rap on the door,

the shout from upstairs,

my thoughts that will not settle

long enough to let the full strings

back him up. The milkman on the step

has Neil Young on his radio

and something in that soaring

Heart of Gold lets Nigel Kennedy

smile at me

over the hum of milkfloat,

the whirr and weight of memory,

his tricky, shimmering flight towards the new.

MAURA DOOLEY

To R. W. Vaughan Williams

Maker of square shaped music, hewer of sound

That has the walking quickened of me on the hills.

The taker of the very sea surge that fills

Granite of Cornish inlets, when the ground

Shakes with the onset. Singer of grove and mound

Also, of Shropshire pastoral quiet, miles

Of roadway have I gone with your marching files

Of ranked lines – Music with Nature's own worthy found.