Tag Archives: John Gallas

Long poem: Using forms: John Gallas, ‘Western Man’

Leave a reply

1.

Clip clop
clip clop
steady up yon stuntgrass rise, boy,
long as low and stony-brown,
slow like weeks with nothing in them:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

Clip clop
clip clop
privy-top and anchor-wires,
church-cross, store-spike, steady boy,
up yon one-street, just more-trodden dust:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

Clip clop
clip clop
steady, boy, through sad wood civics,
rippled in yon saloon-glass store-side,
road-end, horses maybe leaving:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

Clip clop
clip clop
rise, boy, steady, way ahead,
purple-white mountains, nothing in them
maybe, like weeks maybe:
saddle-tick,
dirt-crump,
poker-face.

2.

My brother’s name was Crazy Sean.
They shot him in the head.
He rattled through the summer corn
and turned the green shucks red.

I laid him in the willowbrake.
I couldn’t stand to pray.
I kissed his cheek for pity’s sake,
and then I rode away.

The plains are full of buffalo.
The woods are red and gold.
The mountaintops are white with snow.
His memory keeps me cold.

I’ve rode through Hope and Whisky Creek.
I’ve rode through Faith and Love.
I’ve laid in Hate and Hide-and-Seek,
and run from God-Above.

The prairie shines, the buckdeer cry.
The hawks hang in the heat.
Clipclop clipclop, the world rolls by.
They say revenge is sweet.

3.

Somewhere still, stark as an afternoon;
Ached in long planks of sunshine;
Like a gambler’s card dropped on an empty land;
Vauntsquare, the nailed-up main street creaks
Against the air. Clipclop – hotel, laundry, saddles,
Telegraph, clap-houses, guns. The horse stops.
Into this hollow spine of fellowship blows a slow
O of wind. Three men clatter at a boardwalk:
Nacarat boots, sharktooth mojos – oh my brother.

4.

I shot one on the shithouse board. His head
smashed like a squash and sprayed the backboards red.
He pissed his boots and died. The stinking hole
spit up a fat, black fly, which was his soul.
I shot one in the barbershop. The chair
caught fire, and ate his o-colonied hair.
He fell out like a slice of spitroast meat.
The duster wrapped him in its winding-sheet.
I shot one in the cornfield. Larks of blood
flew off his skull and twittered in the mud.
He rattled through the stalks. His mashy head
threw up its brain and turned the green shucks red.
I took a bath and threw away my gun.
I rode away wherever. I was done.

5.

drizzle pops on his hatbrim,
cord and wool and steam-sodden,
saddleticks like an empty stomach.

windpump wires and tin-dump,
like horizon-drowning, horse, then man,
hat, gone, clipclop, dusk drips in.

paraffin lamplight pricks the town,
glo-worms, night hunched above,
coyotes carry their eyes like stars.

6.

reckoning
done
how will he ever be warm

purpose
gone
how will he outrun the storm

bearings
none
how will he find another

riding
alone
how will he tell his brother

*****

John Gallas writes: “‘Western Man’ is a weird one: I have a quite spooky love of Westerns, jogging as they do some very deep links with Old En Zed, remnants (many remnants!) of which I grew up with and in. Those old wooden towns, the dim General Stores, the slightly grim and mostly silent (mostly) men, the cheek-by-jowlness of town and bush. It means quite a lot to me. I find the end of most Clint Eastwood films, and especially ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’, as the hero says ‘I gotta go now’, and rides away into lonliness after some bloody vengeance or other, inexpressibly moving.”

(“Old En Zed” = old New Zealand. – RHL)

‘Western Man’ is collected in ‘Star City‘.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see http://www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.

Photo: “lone cowboy” by GarrettRiffal is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

John Gallas ‘A Comforting Sonnet’

Leave a reply

‘Caring means a whole new world’ – Croatian Proverb

Rosa Horvat’s hound attacked my legs.
My toes went green. I had a dizzy fit.
They took me to the hospital in Split.
The wards were all full up, so Uncle Dregs
sat by my trolley till he went to work,
then Erno, who’s my mum’s half-brother’s son,
pushed me up and down the hall for fun,
until his grandad’s nephew, who’s a Turk,
came and told me jokes. I wet the bed.
Then someone in a helmet held my hand
and sang a song I couldn’t understand.
Then it was morning, and I wasn’t dead.

I’m home now. Hvala vam if you were there.
Or not. Or sometimes. Friends are everywhere.

*****

Hvala vam – thank you all (Croatian)

John Gallas writes: “As with Camaguey – same collection, the proverb this time being as the little epigraph says. I particularly wanted here a certain tone: I am not a my-thoughts/my-feelings/interesting me sort of poet, and write mostly objective tales, descriptions, experiences that contain anything ‘I’ might want to say. A firm believer in show-not-tell.
“This one has won a couple of prizes: I regularly enter competitions, testing my poems anonymously before judges from The Cats’ League to National Poetry Society. This one won the ‘Caring’ section of a national competition. They liked the ‘humour-and-kindness’ of it all – which pleased me, as that was exactly the tone-intention.
“Wee note: I often set poems – I have travelled much – in various lands and cultures: I have been in trouble for this (my Maori friend, Vaughan Rapatahana, just said ‘Don’t’ when I embarked on some Pacific Island tales-in-verse) but as a Man With No Culture (white NZer?) I feel free to roam, creatively, as long as certain sensitivities are observed. (I have a complex theory as to objection/offence as far as cultures go, but I’ll leave that for now). ‘The Song Atlas’, my best-selling Carcanet book, was a translation of one poem from every country in the world.”

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see http://www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire.
Website is http://www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.

Photo: John Gallas, Carcanet official photo

Using form: John Gallas, ‘travellin feet: a Camaguey sonnet”

1 Reply

Im walkin in my feet to Camaguey.
The sun comes up. Im cracklin like a chicken …
Takin time …
. Now somethins comin, kickin
clouds of yeller grit behind me – Hey!
Stop! … It dont. Who cares? It whirls away.
I seen inside the flyin cotton curtain –
Business sat with Care …
. My toes are hurtin …
Whoa, I got to walk another day.
How quick they drive to worry … What I got
the other end improves with evry ache,
an every dusty extra hour I take.
Im good n weary. An Im good n hot.

Whyever hurry? … Happiness will keep …
an sorrow passes – Sleep my baby, sleep.

*****

John Gallas writes: “The Coalville Divan – 100 sonnets – included this one. The 100 are based on Old Persian Proverbs (an ancient 1920 book I found in a junk shop). A heady experience, like being addicted to Rum or something, to enter a period of writing highly formal, all-the-same-form poems. I loved it, and it built on itself as I went along, but I needed something different after the 200 tankas of ‘Billy Nibs’ (Carcanet 2024) and had withdrawal symptoms (wanting to make the tankas rhyme!).
“The proverb for this one was ‘To walk and sit is better than to run and burst’. I set it in Cuba because I’d just been there for a month. I had 2 rhyming dictionaries, 2 thesauruses, atlases, and Wikipedia while I worked on these, each one set in a different country. The challenge, I guess, is to sound accomplished/natural whilst obeying all the rhyme/metrical rules very exactly.”

John Edward Gallas FEA was born in Wellington in New Zealand and is of Austrian descent. He attended the University of Otago in his native New Zealand, and won a Commonwealth Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford to study Medieval English Literature and Old Icelandic and has since lived and worked in York, Liverpool and various other locations in England as a bottlewasher, archaeologist and teacher.

John Gallas’ works are listed at https://www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk/

Photo: “Tired Man Walking” by RobertoCobianchi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.