Today and Yesterday
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About this ebook
This new book of poetry from David McMichael seeks to attain a balance between the modern and the traditional, the real and the dreamlike, ‘today and yesterday’. Only the reader can decide to what extent this is achieved.
David McMichael
David McMichael is a doctor living in Northwest England, where he shares his time between the Ribble Valley and Keswick in the Lake District. Whilst now retired from medical practice, he maintains an active involvement in healthcare matters. His interests apart from writing are family, all forms of the arts and science, nature and the countryside, fell walking, foreign travel, world ecology, and the environment. He is the author of the novel Shadows in a Photograph, published to high praise in 2016, and of Today and Yesterday, a book of poetry also well-received, which was published by Austin Macauley in 2021.
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Today and Yesterday - David McMichael
A Far Peak
A distant peak has haunted me
since first remembered thought,
an elusive view of snow and ice
through sun-filled mist had caught
my vision with its purity
and light, a pinnacle clear
and white above the clouds
above the drab grey plain
and constant squalls of blackish rain.
I thought that all would wish to scale
its ice-clad slopes, to find
some purpose for this fragile life,
a reason for a reasoning mind.
When, with hands hard-hooked, with stretch
and strain, muscles bunched from strife
and pain, above the clouds
then men’s minds would fly
above the rains to a sunlit sky.
It was courage, faith and selflessness
I had in mind to seek,
they needed me as I needed them
to climb that far-off peak;
for without that summit remote
and tall, its challenge and its clarion
call, life will ever be drab and slight.
Yet I’ve still to gain that cloudless height.
After the Bomb
The swirling cloud, black streaked red,
as thick as any night,
begins to lift
and nightmare is revealed:
the fires of hell burn not as bright
as the billion torches here;
the face of hell seems kindly
against this evil-visaged scene.
In a landscape like a lava flow
of blackened bricks and blocks,
gaunt skeletons of twisted iron
stand buckled at the knees;
water flows to clouds of steam,
the ground itself red hot,
from which miasmas,
of gas and drains,
join that of blood and rot:
the smell of roasted bloated meat,
flesh flayed raw and wet,
is the smell of folk,
scattered, thrown,
or crouched in fervid pain.
Cries and screams, loud as they are,
are drowned by a louder moan,
the moan of a vortex-driven wind and
the moan of anguished man.
Scattered trees,
not one erect,
charred black, in jumbled piles,
glint and glisten with shards of glass
sharp driven in their lengths:
the glass that had been a city,
gold mirrors to the sun,
but, in an instant, lethal blades
that shredded flesh to bone.
The summer sun once silvered streets,
shop fronts, cars and parks;
the fireball whiter than the sun
had fused them dull and dark
and fuelled a furnace ten miles wide,
igniting clothes and skin,
searing eyeballs milky white
in blind agony of pain;
and fed the blast,
that banshee wind,
solid as hurtling train,
glass and debris
in iron fist
a screaming bolt of death
and hateful hateful pain.
Then comes the dust
and with it rain
that should be cool and sweet
but carries death
in silent form
to burn a cringing skin.
From the choking veils of dust and smoke
comes a woman perhaps I’ve known;
her skin hangs down in dripping shreds
through clothes that are charred and holed.
She carries a bundle,
wet and white,
a swollen naked child
from whom comes groans that tear my guts
vile torment to my mind.
‘Doctor? Thank God! Is it you? Please help my child and me.’
I stare right back
in mute disbelief:
what help can ever be?
She senses my grief,
‘Where is it, then,
the help they said would come?’
Wearily I say, ‘Like the ghosts of men
who’ve led to this,
blown to a whimpering end –
there’ll be no help,
the whole world must be the same’.
And for those alive
the gaunt figure of death
will stalk us one by one
with haemorrhage
infection
cancerous change
hunger
murder
and cold,
and then in the end
when we seem to have won
with mutations –
his last laugh of all
I lift my face to God and the sun,
but see only black icy skies.
Tragic the few who’ve survived the Bomb
and fortunate those who’ve died.
1986
Boredom
Boredom nods
its empty head and smiles
its deadly smiles
and descends its hand
like a grey wool pall
that weighs a thousand pounds
I hang my head
to scuff my toes
through miles of gutter dust
I’m full of work that
no one wants
blank eyes all greet my pleas
there are no hobbies
in the world
in which I live
(though live is an empty word)
and interests are those
I have been taught:
to gain, to