Background

    Conquering William
puffed up with the recent title
and a previous pack of Norman bandits
seeing easy pickings
pitched camp
lazily besieging Dol
before John, by a hundred years.
But that time Alain Fergent was at hand
and the very rumour sent them drumming.
Something of a reputation had le duc Alain !
A bigger gang or a greater braggadocio.
But after seven years crusading a decline set in,
returning almost wistful,
unreliable.
He later joined a monastery –
How’s that for an insidious Antichrist !
The Duc was far too tough and easy in his cups
to be converted by the infidel;
but in the desert something speaks to tough men.
Whispers of sand.
The silence ratified by metaphor
seduces.
    Faith ! The clamour !
Flapping trees crowd round you in this Brittany.
The cows, the carts, the birds,
the gossiping
bells all night make inroads on the silence,
swapping the time of day from town to hamlet,
each a little more delayed..
The peasants teasing quarrel out of pretext
chew their tongues.
And though the sea speaks with a little voice on mud flats,
still the gulls must shout above it,
so you come back from the beach
more weary than you went,
the gritty mussels husks, belying tight beaks
clucking in the sack!
    The trees
as well as our own clamouring ancestors
evolved all by themselves.
But the sand was ground by God
declared the heretic.

© 1975 Nicholas Messenger

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