It stopped, and I was left with just myself -
myself just doodling in the kitchen, as it happens,
doing supper-things - the table set for one,
a saucepan prickling to the boil, the frowsly smell
of stuff beginning to get glued, and brown, and burn...

And then this pure sensation of my body
lifting out of gravity. A rocket-rush. A roar
of oxygen and atoms like the burst a diver
makes escaping from the sea-bed to the light
still tangled up with bubbles and the melting threads
of currents which have held him down...

I saw the whole world at a distance and complete,
a marbled O with veins of strung-out cloud.
I watched the oceans chaffing at their shores,
the continents contract and bulge like ink
suspended in solution, ice-caps and then deserts,
then the silver tracks of rivers snaking through
their valleys, sparking trails of deep green fire...

And as I went on looking, something else: the music
of an axle turning, music like a groan of infinite
dead-weight, but sweet as well - sweet harmony
I thought might never end, except I also saw
the passage of the sun, a definite dark curtain-edge
drawn steadily across, so what it surged towards
seemed always threatened and about to fade,
while what emerged in colour as it passed
was polished back to life...

I watched a day round, though it might have been
a year, a century, a thousand years. It made
no difference. But then my purchase on infinity
began to slip, and with it my un-looked-for rocket-
rush again, a headlong blinding race among
dense starlight-storms, the ether slithering
against me like the spray around a salmon
when its leap collapses back into the stream.
A race until I found myself again, at home again,
and everything the same but not the same -
the supper-things, the table set, the voice that says
I know just what those sad Flat-earthers meant,
the winter evening turning into night, the hours
of dark ahead, the brittle frost collecting
on my garden apple tree, its iron branches
tipped with crystals where the buds will come
and after that the morning and the thaw.

To Nelson Mandela: A Tribute

Andrew Motion
Friday April 7, 2000
The Guardian

That straight walk from the
prison to the gate -
that walk the world saw, and
which changed the world -
it led you through to life from
life withheld,
from broken stones with your
unbroken heart.

To life which you imagined
and then lived,
which once we shared in your
imagining
but soon shared in the
present that you shaped:
the life which gave each
human hope its chance
of turning into truth and
staying true;
the life which understood
what changing takes;
the life which showed us we
become ourselves
in part by watching you
becoming you.

Picture this:
For the 100th birthday of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother

Andrew Motion
Wednesday July 19, 2000
The Guardian

My dream of your birthday
is more like a wedding -
the August sky
confused with confetti,
no, not with confetti,
with photograph-falls
where the steady gaze
of the century's eyes
captures your ages
unguarded or posed.

1905: CHILDHOOD

Nobody heard the blackbird chink-chinking
on the level lawn but it was always there,
declaiming its birthright; and nobody saw
how lichen blistering the drive had mixed
green and gold in stubborn coats-of-arms,
but they clung on. The frame of everything
was Glamis with its battlements and towers,
and you side-saddle on your boxy grey
inside the moment as it froze and held:
your life your own and all the world unknown.

1914-18: SERVICE

The shutter opens and the world expands.
It's Hawtrey at the Colly for your birthday
but he can't be heard, or not heard
as he wants - outside, along St Martin's Lane,
a people-torrent runs and will not wait
to get the enemy. The show goes on.
And then goes on elsewhere, in wards
where nursing changes strangers into brothers
while your real brothers pack their bags
and leave as strangers, or else go for good.

1923: MARRIAGE

Jazz, New Look, new plunging necklaces
and snap! you're cornered in a studio
where beauty holds its own but loses edge
and makes a soft advertisement for love.
For love which finds its focus as a bride
and keeps its nerve, and sees its way,
then rides the shimmer of its own delight
returning to the world the gift it gives
in private - tongue-tied tongue set loose,
the head confirming what the heart believes.

1937: CORONATION

In public; chairs into thrones; people
to subjects, and the shudder of transition
rippling through the camera's eye - his sombre face
an effigy as inescapably the crown
is lowered; your face tender with the load
it brings to bear, and what it means to hear
beyond the shooshing satins and the stone
Guernica crumbling, fire in Palestine,
and Germany again - earth groaning
as it shifts its weight and stalls in misery.

1940: BLITZ

THE PALACE CUP: then comes the blast
and choking lift that brings you where
you look East Enders in the face - not land
exactly now but roof-spars, earth-in-shreds,
a gluey crater which was once indoors,
and you as one of us - or like enough
to make a crowd of wind-frayed kids
and peering mums, and husbands jostling
with the press-men in their burly coats,
all think you are. And thank their lucky stars.

1952: WIDOWHOOD

Basalt blackness at his funeral
and basalt stillness: through your veil
the fossil-face of grief, the stricken gaze
which bounces back the flash-lights to their source
but masks a working brain, and sees the years
and years ahead the way an acrobat
might see a tightrope and the audience
below: the dizzy space, the camera-pops,
the swaying line between thin air and ground
and every single step bourne up by company.

1960: THE FAMILY

The years wind on, the world and family
develop into colour and due season: winter
poppies, Spring in May, the grassy Ascot drive
half summer-greeting, half-acknowledgement.
And everything a system made of signs: the marches
past, foundation stones, the plaques and special trees
which prove your life in ours yet make it seem
a secret too - the way a salmon swells in secret
through the currents of a pool you stand beside,
and glances at your fly, and keeps its course.

1997: LATE ON

No changes, on the face of it: the balconies,
the open smile and wave, the garden parties,
and the hats, the hats, the hats, all pictures
in our albums or our heads along with these:
the photos no-one took of you -
the grandmother-confessor-friend, the mourner
at divorces and the rest, the worldly watcher
of the world who shows the world no changes
on the face of it: the balconies, the open wave
and smile, the hats, the hats, the hats.

My dream of your birthday
is more like a wedding,
the August sky
confused with confetti,
and lit with the flash
of our camera-gaze -
the century's eyes
of homage and duty
which understand best
the persistence of love.

The Younger Sister

Poet laureate Andrew Motion's poem on the death of Princess Margaret

Friday February 15, 2002
The Guardian

The luxuries, of course, and privilege -
The money, houses, holidays, the lot:
All these were real, and all these drove a wedge
Between your life and ours. And yet the thought
Of how no privilege on earth can keep
A life from suffering in love and loss -
This means we turn to you and see how deep
The current runs between yourself and us.

And now death spells it out again, and more,
As it becomes your final human act:
A daughter gone before her mother goes;
A younger sister heading on before;
A woman in possession of the fact
That love and duty speak two languages.

'You helped give a shape to slipstreaming time with a wave of your hand'

An elegy on the death of HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, by Andrew Motion, the poet laureate

Tuesday April 9, 2002
The Guardian

Think of the failing body now
awake in its final hours
although
The fizz and scythe of city
wheels,
the pigeon-purrs, the way
light steals
across a bedroom wall then
goes,
are not the things this body
knows,
held in a trance of fading light
before that dies, and gives the
sight
of what it means to be set free
from self, from sense, from
history.

2.

In the swirl of its pool
the home-coming salmon
has no intuition
of anything changed
just that the silver cord of its
current
is clear water running,
the lid of its sky
light soaking through light
without any shadows
of faces or lines
to splinter its path
and pull out of true
the course of its mind.

3.

Think of the flower-lit coffin
set
in vaulted public space, in
state,
so we who never knew you,
but
all half-suspect we knew you,
wait,
and delve inside our heads,
and find
the harsh insistence in our
mind
which says we're honouring a
time
that simply as a fact of time
could only end, as also must
our own lives turn from dust
to dust.

4.

In the grip of their season
the sky-scraping trees
continue their business
of plumping up buds
without an idea
of what it might mean
so long as leaves shoot
in the polishing breeze,
so long as leaves fall,
so long as the burden
of sunlight and dark
rolls around its O
without changing its plan
or resting its weight.

5.

Think of the standard and its
blaze
the tightened focus of our gaze,
as now the coffin glides away
through London's traffic-
parted day
and we who estimate our loss
in ways particular to us,
can start to understand that
here
we see our future coming
clear -
ourselves the same yet also
changed,

and questioning, and

re-arranged.

6.

On the crest of their Downs
with galloping sunlight
the horses in training
know in their bones
nothing but racing,
so all they can manage
today is the beauty
of springing and spurting
mud-moons behind them,
the draggle of mufti
wind-burning to silk,
the unbuttoned gasp
of pleasure and longing
at what might be won.

7.

Think of the buried body laid
inside its final earthly shade,
in darkness like a solid cloud
where weight and nothing
coincide,
in silence which will never
break
unless real angels really
speak,
while we who wait our turn
live on
re-calculating what has gone -
time-tested dignity and pride
and finished work
personified.

8.

In the eyes of our minds
when the country and cities
turn back to themselves
this history stays:
the four generations
which linked with your life
re-winding their span
to childhood again,
and seeing you stand
at the edge of their days,
where if they so wished
you helped give a shape
to slipstreaming time
with a wave of your hand.

Home  |  Departments  |  English  |  Mr P. Rush  |  Year 10 GCSe  |  Year 10 Autumn 2002  |  Fresh Water