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Welcome to the Michaelmas 2013 edition of ‘The Queen’s Rambler’. This term we have delved into the dustiest corners of the Queen’s library to print, alongside the current submissions, two archived poems from the 1920 publication of ‘The Queen’s Miscellany’ (The Rambler of its time). It’s great that over ninety years later, creative writing and the printed word is still being kept alive within Queen’s and we hope that this will continue on for future members. As always we really appreciate all the submissions we’ve received and hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have.
Emma Papworth and Poppy Middleton Michaelmas 2013
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Contents
LOVE’S HOME IS IN THE INFINITE- A.W.M. BRYANT
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Two Gardens- Laurie Churchman
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Divisions- Bilal Siddiqi
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Denial- Anonymous
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“Who is Laura Coleman?”- Oliver Randall
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Eclipsed in the Melting Hues- Emma Papworth
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Dew Drop- Bilal Siddiqi
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Counting Sheep- Anonymous
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Paraphilia- Anonymous
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Cold Times- Anonymous
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Our Withering Heights- Poppy Middleton
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When the Night Died Young- Emma Papworth
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Reflet –Jack Straker
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Teenage Break-Up - Anonymous
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Saturate Me - Anonymous
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Sonnet – Jack Straker
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I Write this Sonnet for the Second Time - Anonymous
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JABEZ Q. HIS ROSE GARDEN, HIS CIGAR AND INFINITY
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LOVE’S HOME IS IN THE INFINITE
I Is there a dream to follow love, When all the words that I have writ Have mouldered to a yellow death And worms devoured the exquisite?
There is a dream to follow love, A knowledge passing mortal wit: This truth I saw upon the wind I have not ceased to follow it.
II Two peacocks saw I on the wind, A cloud above, a flower beneath; There was Atlantis in their mind; There were four blue-bells on a heath.
Though long ago the seed was sown, And my dear blue-bell planted them. In far Atlantis there is known The fashioning of love’s diadem.
A. W.M. BRYANT 1920 -5-
Two Gardens I We were always in the middle of some tarmac sea Foaming and grasping at the rings left by your tea. But in my mind, You are always at home.
Laurie Churchman
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Divisions
Born with an unspent soul We barter its pieces – Gamble for pearls.
One piece called a whole, Says all is one. It shatters most early – In division is done.
One piece is called love. It lives longer, But dulls in good time – When hearts grow smaller.
One piece is called logic, Certainly the oddest! It teaches and preaches of leaping great heights, And comes to rest finally in our most violent tides.
One piece is called spirit. Long does it dwell. You carry it through thickets Of loss and loose hell.
But it lingers on, -7-
And sings its sad song, ‘Repel! Repel! My spell will wake all!’
But soon it too dies, Begins to comply With man’s – unbounded wisdom Which knows all too well, that souls are a fiction Which make us unwell.
Bilal Siddiqi
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Denial
Without you my world is grey Waiting on a rainy day For the blazing of the sun To dry the drops, one by one.
Counting seconds, minutes, hours Wonder if you’ll be bringing flowers To colour in my empty night And with your smile comes the light
After all these cloudy skies Half afraid you’ll blind my eyes I crack open another beer Drinking more now you’re not here
Not long now, you’ll soon be round And listen! Isn’t that the sound Of your car, upon the drive? As though you, were still alive.
Anonymous
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“Who is Laura Coleman?”
Jack Wakefield is a dim figure in my memory. He was stocky and powerfully-built, and his face reminded me of an actor who had gone to our school a generation earlier; I assume he went on to study Italian and Spanish at University. I knew him because we were in the same Italian class for a year, and, more significantly, because we were on the Italian exchange together for a week in Easter. I never particularly liked Wakefield, and I certainly never disliked him. He was in the year above the rest of the class, which was probably why he was so aloof, but he came across as arrogant. But really he is little more to me now than a name. Which is appropriate, since I mostly remember him for the name that he brought into my world.
Almost all of Jack Wakefield’s contribution to my life was contained in five words that he uttered one day in early March, as we were looking through the papers our teacher had just given us in preparation for the Easter exchange, and contemplating the Italian surnames listed next to each of our own. I could not know the power of the incantation that I heard then for the first time, and which would grow with each succeeding month. Yet somehow, some of its potency must have been clear even then, because I remembered the words for weeks before they meant anything to me, and because I remembered that it was Wakefield who said them.
“Sir,” he said, “who is Laura Coleman?”
He spoke with a slight frown, and a mildly affronted air which was probably his reaction to everything that did not immediately sit well with his understanding of the world. I think what struck me at the time, and what made it memorable, was the concision with which Wakefield bluntly implied the question that he was really asking. The dozen boys in the room looked up: Wakefield had a good point. I turned the page in front of me for confirmation and found “Coleman, Laura” listed next to “Ramella” halfway down. There were half a dozen other unfamiliar names, but they were all male, and I had assumed that they were from the year above – from the class that Wakefield would have been in if it had not taken him a year longer than everybody else to realise that he wanted to learn Italian.
The teacher explained that three Italian-language students from a different school were coming with us: two boys and a girl. There was a murmur of interest. I’m sure I was not the only one whose first response was an ironic smile. Sixteen hormonal teenage boys and one girl: good luck to her. Good luck to them. I decided there and then that I would keep my distance and my dignity – there was no point in doing anything else. No doubt some of my friends would compete to hold her attention, and I looked forward to watching with the amused detachment that Wakefield had mastered.
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I said as much to my girlfriend when I called her that night. It must have been one of our last sporadic phone conversations, made taut and awkward by the three months that had passed since I had seen her. Our last chance to rekindle our relationship, a Model United Nations trip to her school in Edinburgh a week before the Italian exchange, had not yet been cancelled by a British Airways strike. It will be entertaining, I said to her dispassionately, to watch from the sidelines, to see if this girl becomes the centre of attention, and whether any of the boys fall for her. Perhaps that conversation was when I first said the name aloud, and it started to mean something to me.
“Sir, who is Laura Coleman?�
Oliver Randall
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Eclipsed in the melting hues
Eclipsed in the melting hues of sunlight you were barely tethered.
In the lurid whispers of bowing blades, you felt you had witnessed the dancing of the heavens a celestial encounter Seen only once in a lifetime in youth.
Watch, the abiding horizon smoulders into measures of mauve. As a thousand dying rays of sunlight slide past the sycamore depths of your eyes.
Safe in the curtain of a certain dusk
you watch, until the last traces of pink dissolve against the brazen sky.
Emma Papworth - 12 -
Dew Drop Once, in dewy air Crisp, cloudy drop on the burr Bulging, growing like life in her Belly – fruitful swelling Rising, rising till it drops off, revolves or leaks out From its gracious fated host. I waited for the drop to pop To leave the bristles on the burr ringing from the loss. I smell the pine in the air Observe - with a fixed morbid stare, longing to catch the moment this one leaps in despair. Drop little drop Don’t leave me so unsatisfied Drop and let me watch Your little life flicker and subside.
Bilal Siddiqi
Counting Sheep - 13 -
Into the hobbledybobble we go. into the cloud as into the mouse, We run and run faster till no faster we run, and all the while Tom is sitting in Hull.
Anonymous
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paraphilia
In the end, he always comes back to the shoes. They’re racked up neatly in the back room, pair after pair, high heels and trainers, ballet pumps and loafers. The ones closest to the door are the oldest, faded and brown, laces frayed at the ends, buckles falling apart despite the care he lavishes on them, but the further back the racks go the brighter the colours become: lime green kitten heels next to bright blue trainers, inky black boots above clean white plimsolls. He walks through them, sometimes, touches the leather, rubs the suede. There’s a pair of lace-up heeled ankle boots he’s particularly fond of: every other Tuesday he wakes up a little early, goes to the back room, pulls the worn laces through their eyelets. They’re almost silky to his touch after all this time, and he re-laces the boots slowly, slowly. The heels are barely worn: they were fresh on when he stumbled across them, wrapped around the fat pink toes of a pudgy PhD student, and he’s been very careful to keep them pristine. He adds to his collection every now and then—a pair of satin pumps with a dark green bow on the toes; a new pair of expensive sports trainers, custom moulded—but he’s hardly greedy, no, not at all. Quite the opposite: he’s always been picky, always been selective. These are the crème de la crème, the pick of the bunch, the exceptions that prove the rule. He brings them home in a correctly sized shoebox, cleans off the dirt and the blood, stores them in the next place on the racks, and reveres them. There’s a pair of men’s dress shoes that he brings out of the back room from time to time, polishes them with small, quick circles and a cloth as soft as butter. He takes them to the lounge on sunny days and watches the brightness sheen the leather into brilliance. It’s a beauty most people can’t grasp, but he understands. He knows, and he would never wear them. Beauty shouldn’t be spoiled. No one else understands. No one else wants to. When they find him, racing through one black night with sirens wailing and flak jackets strapped tight across their hairy chests and wobbling bellies, he’s in the back room, sandcoloured gladiator sandals in one hand, dominatrix thigh-high boots in the other. He cradles them like they’re children, and there might be bright blood on his forehead and his arms and his shirt but his hands are scrubbed pink and clean, nails clipped and neat. They can’t be sullied. It’s not right. When they hurl him to the ground and wrap his wrists in steel, the boots tumble underneath one of the racks, hidden and pristine. When they drag him away, footsteps thud across the sandals, breaking slender straps, snapping buckles and kicking the fragments across the floor. When he lashes out at them, grabbing for a pair of tiny trainers with flashing lights in the heels like a drowning man, they spit in his face.
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The shoes stay where they are, voiceless and uncaring.
Anonymous
Cold Times Open the window? It’s cold outside today. Keep it out. - 16 -
Keep it away. we’ll stay warm within the walls without the wind Keep it out. Keep it away. Guard against the night close the curtain light the light Keep it out. Keep it away. a growing guilt, gradually emerges, its nauseating gnawing slowly souring our complacency, our complicity, against– Keep it out. Keep it away. – those without walls within wind no curtain to close no light to light Keep them out Keep them away Keep us warm Keep us safe and yet, open the window! Its no colder out than in.
Anonymous
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Our Withering Heights
Your heart was always of a precarious disposition, when subjected to the delusions of mine, But I, devoted to your artistic terms and conditions, have never found a more liberal soul or mind.
Yet ‘graceful’ remains in the mess of those heights, And that wind blew too strong, Now you bestow those frames to fresher eyes, I, the imperfect model all along.
Poppy Middleton - 18 -
When the Night Died Young You will go outside and see a world put simply. Your eyes, though deeply unmoved, will tolerate each object undeservedly, whilst your fingers find floor in a grazing void.
This simple outlining of matter formed constellations in the mind of a man
who clutched at the inward and grappled with material
he, becoming the only symbol of a world outside a window lit fully.
Such revelations hit when the night died young and the eyes were no more the key to the soul.
Emma Papworth
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Reflet
Too... Squandered
Years.
Jack Straker
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Teenage Break-up
So long ago, you and I were intertwined, both in body and in mind. I felt your pulse and your pain, seeping through like drops of rain on my cloudless unborn skies. Now all that was between us Lies. Broken. Open. Your heart cannot keep pace with my youthful rushing race. Tearing headlong through the years, headless of your trailing tears. Till I may stand here, as you do, fearing to lose my daughter too.
Anonymous
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Saturate Me
Saturate me; sweep like a cold sweat snow under skin. A stolen state no more body than mind.
Anonymous
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Sonnet
J’eus un vrai coup de foudre au moment où je vis Tes cheveux blonds et longs, ton sourire joli ; Tu éclairais la pièce avec ton style unique Ton air peu loquace protège ta mystique.
Si j’ai la chance de te parler vis à vis, Le savoir-faire de toute la poésie Ne m’aiderait pas à communiquer l’amour Qui a bien imprimé un cachet sur mon cœur.
Aucune équipe de fleuristes ne me serve Pour créer un bouquet qui perce ton écran, Voici une lande et le désert de ma verve :
Car dans l’atelier de cet écrivain-bouffon Je ne réussis qu’à écrire une réserve – Ton maudit artiste, voilà Vénus si bonne.
Jack Straker
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I write a sonnet for the second time. On this very table the first one died at the hands of my mighty pen. No rhyme did it have and with Shakespeare it complied not it the least. It had imagery that feigned a contemplation of the world around. But the enjambment seemed strained to all who read it and no meaning found. You want to read a good poet I thought. Therefore out went the first draft and in came this lame introspection that offers nought to reader nor “poet” – unworthy name! Let me now put both drafts on the shelf, Save you from “poet” lamenting himself.
Anonymous
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JABEZ Q. HIS ROSE GARDEN, HIS CIGAR AND INFINITY
Jabez Q. the millionaire His oozy hands, dad lichen hair, A grey rag eye, no spark is there. He also has a garden close Where Jabez likes to think he grows The most expensive kinds of rose. Once he puffed a ring of smoke Towards the stars; it spread, it broke, Disintegrated past revoke. Jabez watched it; hiccoughed 'Gee !" Then shuddered . . . . what if he Became like this vacuity ? When the body - horrid - doubt Suffered this atomic rout Would it . . . . His cigar was out. * * * * 'Waal,' said Jabez, 'I'm doggoned !' And pitched it in the lily-pond . . . . E.W JACOT 1920
Illustration: Evie Kitt - 25 -
Cover Photograph: Emma Papworth For submissions for the Hilary edition please email emma.papworth@queens.ox.ac.uk or poppy.middleton@queens.ox.ac.uk
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