Two New Poems by William Thompson

Felling

For Duncan Sanders

That June, the tree had to come down.

Your mum hated how autumn

stewed the apples: how they killed the grass;

how they turned slurry-brown

and slippery as dog muck.

I remember your tacit disagreement

and compliance: your shouldering

of your new mantel, pater familias.

I waited as you stretched

over the shed’s insides, then handed me

the tools: the long axe; the hand saw

with its speckled blade; the gloves

heavy as a wicketkeeper’s.

I found it fun: the sunlight

on your back, my loping axe-swings,

our necks thick with the fibred white

and little chips of apple tree.

It’s only now, really, I realise

– your carpenter’s precision; your mum’s

determined washing at the sink;

me, not realising, as I took a photo.

Fenland’s Pompeii

i.

It’s easy to be underwhelmed

as I was as a child.

The kind of field

I’d seen a hundred times before:

lumps and rabbit holes;

tussocks of sedge;

sheep dung

like clumpy musket balls.

A constant flux: first warmth

then cold when a cloud

blocked out the sun

like someone stood up in a cinema.

ii.

Around the time that Tutankhamun’s hidden underground

here, more than a world away, the smell of woodsmoke

curls into the tunic of a man who’s travelled miles and miles

and, now, stands on the saw-fresh platform that’s been built above the fen.

He basks in the attention of the crowd, thrills at his wife’s

smug smile, then drops a pristine, just-forged sword into the water.

iii.

The day that I come back, I come alone.

The mucky gravel crunches as I park.

The visitor centre is empty as the forecourt

of a service station during lockdown.

I wander past the exhibition boards

with their photos of lambs, timelines,

child-friendly illustrations. Outside

the sheep are sat like they’re expecting rain.

iv.

They stamp their feet in rhythm with the drums.

As the high priestess starts to wail, the gathering

lifts its hands and shakes them like signed applause.

Now, they speak in tongues. The drums accelerate.

Then, the horse master parts the crowd and leads

a yearling’s sleek, sinewed nobility into the space

next to the fire. When the blade flashes

across his throat, the yearling shivers, then collapses

like a tall chimney stricken with dynamite.

v.

To begin with

I’m vaguely unimpressed

like the first time.

But then, I smell the must

inside the roundhouse,

stand in the preservation hall

where what’s left

is tangled in ambient,

dripping darkness

just beneath my feet.

The causeway

is freshly mowed. It has

a kind of presence

rooted in absence

like a long-gone grandparent

or a house you used to own.

vi.

So, what happens?

Do they get them out,

Birkenhead drill:

women and children first?

And do they stand there

with their hands on their heads,

tears running down their cheeks

as the whole things disappears:

crashing, rending, sinking

like the hull and rigging of the Mary Rose?

vii.

I’ve seen everything there is to see:

the ancient hammerheads;

the sheers, brown as bog oak;

the nails like rusty tadpoles.

I make to leave, but as I do

I come upon a clearing where

an archaeologist and her assistant

are dumping sheaves next to

a new roundhouse. And it’s

pure kindness: his Saxon beard

above a Gore-Tex fleece;

her demonstration of the warp

and weft under a half-built

wicker frame that spirals into a clear blue

nothing and smells of hay bales.

***

William Thompson is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. Born in Cambridgeshire in 1991, his poems have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Birmingham, Wild Court, The Interpreter’s House and elsewhere. His debut pamphlet After Clare (2022) is published by New Walk Editions.

Photograph by Jon Woolcott.