The Fourteen Line Whip

Poems by Christopher Daybell

first published by The Unbound Press,
Grafton Street, Dublin 2, © Christopher Daybell, April 1996

The Fourteen Line Whip
Voyeur
The Rhyming Insanity
Sonnetscape I
Sonnetscape II
Country Girls
Spring
Rise of the Conifer
Canción de los Indianos
The Siren
The Salon
The Kit of Being
My Cathar Sister

Biography
Cristopher's Poems in editions of Electric Acorn

Flick the television quickly off
With violence take control of such machines
If you should ask me why I act so rough
My only answer it must be my genes
Somewhere there is a Luddite in my heart
Even a typewriter needs certain skills
I have a biro only as a dart
To keep this weapon will ward off my ills
There is a point to it so do not scoff
I'm following a line within my head alone
There is a form that's slowly taking off
I do not need to speak to cry to moan
In fourteen lines the whip has been surpassed
So for a moment I can rest at last.

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Voyeur

I used to gloat on fireworks at age ten
Volcanoes rockets and the catherine wheels
I watched them from the backs of gardens then
From the allotments as a child who steals
Better the sideshow than the ones I had
Light the touchpaper and stand well clear
My own lasted so little I was sad
But watching others had the thrill of fear
Sparklers and unknown faces in the dark
What would have happened if I'd cracked a branch
While any public showing in a park
Would never match the thrills I found by chance
The catherine wheels whirling in the night
While I was always watching out of sight.

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The Rhyming Insanity

Don't try too hard it might drive you quite mad
Seeing the blankness of the empty page
And really what's the point of feeling sad
Just because you haven't written for an age
There are so many tomorrows anyway
Why not be optimistic on that score
You can start again on any day
And find that you are writing more and more
The trouble is you might indulge too much
And soon become a scribbler in the night
For in this city there are many such
Who justify themselves by taking flight
I do not like to hear of suffering
And writers often tremble on the wing

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Sonnetscape I

Who can escape the slavery of routine
And watch the trail of days go slowly by
And can I never be what I have been
A poet and a lover equally
I know there is a telephone at hand
But if I ring such trouble could ensue
There is no new elixir or a wand
That can connect on Friday just with you
And this is just a day within the chain
It's harbouring unsettled thoughts of mine
Even to watch the fall of snow not rain
Will bring this cold creation falling fine
You could say I am held within a net
And always can remember not forget.

^

Sonnetscape II

The scream of ambulances on the Monkstown Road
Under a very grey and leaden sky
Flurries of sleet with usual winter mode
And who would want to be a passer by
I sit here drinking coffee with clear eyes
Watching the cars and rhyming as I go
It seems that I'm inured to all surprise
And wonder what else must I undergo
To write a sonnet on a tablecloth
Mostly red and white and many squares
People should say at home and drink hot broth
Not watch the windy city and its snares
But then can anyone just stay inside
Ignore the moving world so large and wide.

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Country Girls

(Confessions of a lapsed conqueror)

Your eyes were blue in fifty five
When I on Wicklow Street
First saw the far horizon
And lay dying on my feet
You didn't know you'll never know
The ruin that you made
And yet on me the blame was cast
On me the curse was laid.

Country girl oh country girl
The Carrick Castle shows
Where the mists and wraiths both swirl
Where past in present glows
I was a lad from England
So green and blue to you
Country girl oh country girl
You changed me through and through.

And I am guiltless for my sins
I was seduced by you
I moved in pious innocence
To places that you knew
Your fingers led me down the ways
To where the fountain streams
Where the Carrick Castle stays
Whose walls are in my dreams

I couldn't win I couldn't lose
Your grip was like a vice
Should I have found a counsellor
Should I have sought advice
Because I came to Dublin
In nineteen fifty five
To see the Carrick ruin
And to be a Norman slave.

^

Spring

The sun is rising high on morning's wing
The garden showing off its growth of flowers
The birds are taking off and how they sing
A cloudless sky no wintry cloud now lowers
Is this the start of seasonal attack
Explosion from the ground of daffodils
And nothing needs to burn in chimney stack
because the sunshine all the garden fills
The mood will change also the range of clothes
Who wants to wear the winter garments now
For all the seasons winter most one loathes
With all that frost and all that spread of snow
Forget that in the past the winter dies
And everywhere the spring now forward flies

^

Rise of the Conifer

These trees have all been made with Scottish birch
The seeds are always thinly covered up
For all deciduous trees are in the lurch
Their forests cut and little mothered up
And so there is much more transplanted pine
Because the conifer's much hardier
They all grow up in regimental line
While native trees are growing rare like fur
Enthusiasm may save something still
But still those rows of conifers abound
And all the sides of mountains they will fill
The wheel of history has turned right round
So everything that was deciduous
Is now most generally coniferous

^

Canción de los Indianos

It whistles, the song,
It whistles but it is
Scarcely heard -
If it is heard they sing
In far Castille,
But how it got so far
The Lord knows how -

The Lord was a knight
On a dark horse,
he had come from a land
Where the Rising Sun
Was in the West,
His sword was a special blade
Cast in Toledo,
The rider and the horse
Were miraculous two,
Miraculous one
He had a way with the Indian,
He had a way -

It whistles, the song,
It whistles but it is
Scarcely heard -
If it is heard they sing it
In Washington
But how it got so far
The Lord knows how -

The Lord is a single man
Who sits at a desk
And he is in a land where
The Rising Sun
Is in the South
He has a pen which,
With a single stroke,
He can decide oh he can decide -

Where the song of the Indian
Is sung, and when it is sung,
And if it can be sung,
Or if it dies, on the wind -

^

The Siren

The sea sows savage songs,
Escape, escape out there
From familiar September nights,
Raise anchor for a journey without end,
Don't stop, move on to turbulence
From the purlieus of the present,
there is a future somewhere beyond,
No shelter and no unremitting love,
The emptiness, the tedium of the day,
Sundial with its shadow turning,
The ache, the ageing of security,
Raise anchor on this manic moon
For your worth is ruined
In the city's knowing looks,
Dance on the yardarms of forgetfulnes
And the thinner ice.

^

The Salon

Romantic agonies have coursed my brain
My blood will only flow from quickening
Music has driven me to the heights
I'd hardly recognise upon the plain
And happiness has left me sickening

The salon was the place where minds would call
And interchange the strangeness of their thoughts
Mixed with the practicalities of life
Bohemia's lakes and unexpected falls
The archaeology of modern forts

In the salon everyone reclined
And did not sit up straight in chairs
While women mixed with men with total ease
They were not hospitals from blind to blind
And talk flowed wide or stuck on splitting hairs

The salon spirit can grow up again
With children hearing poems upon the road
And meetings grow impromptu everywhere
While love is teaching without thought of gain
The hedgeschools of tomorrow bud and grow

^

The Kit of Being

I Marlowe Christopher or Tamburlaine
Have used the silver dagger treachery.
It tears into my hand - there is no pain.
Life is a great adventure or a game -
Between the two what is there in the end?
To Faustus gave I fear what others feel,
And in the writing felt the heat of flame,
Like all things else it burned within my mind,
For what can bodies be but glut for worms?
I light my candle for myself alone.
Of all men I am truly dangerous -
For fealty let others lose themselves.
Great eyes are ranged beneath this kingdom now,
And Mephistopheles is Walsyngham.
Go play your part, and better play it well,
A red-wigged woman pants to save her throne.
So what are you, my queen, but Lucifer,
You bear the light but stay within the dark,
For you no devil but the king of Spain.
Between the two I like this shadow play,
For I have lighter wings than Mercury,
And nobody has seen behind my eyes.

^

My Cathar Sister

You are the source
The flo
The sleeplessness
The transcendance
And I don't mind
If you have feet of clay
For how else
Would I walk with you

The land of Provence
Is modern with motorways
But it is this soaring
Out of reach
Which is the secret of
La Domna Sosebuda

Seventeen years it took
To see you clearly
Amid the sweltering heat
The mirages of flesh and spirit
Seventeen years
My Cathar sister
With the green dressing-gown
And all the colours of the spectrum

^

Biography

Christopher Daybell was born in Oxford, England, and educated at  Merchenent Taylor’s School, Hertfordshire and St. Columba’s  College, Rathfarnham [he was expelled from both]. He completed a  degree in modern history and political theory in Trinity College, Dublin  {1957-71} and taught in schools in London, Tundbridge Wells and  Edinburgh in the 1960s. He has also taught EFL in Dublin, Milan,  Greece and Germany and began, but did not finish, a PhD on Social  and Political Theory of the English Romantics at the London School  of Economics. He was a member of the Dublin Writers Workshop in the 1980s and 1990s - he died in Dublin in March 2000.

His work appeared in the Irish Times, the Irish Press, the Sunday Independent, the Dublin Magazine and a collection, “Requiem For a   Man Alone” was published by Beaver Row Press in 1989.

He has also published a number of self-published pamphlets, including  “The Black Geraldine” (1974), “The Napoleon of No Fixed Abode”  (1976), “Night Life” (1976), “Programme” (1983), “The Leader”  (1984), “The Flaw” (1986), “The Judge’s Brain” (1987), “Moloch”  (1991), “The Fourteen Line Whip” (1996), “The Winterman” (1998) and “The Illusion of Power” (1998). 

Daybell's Poetry in Electric Acorn

He was published in a number of online publications with the Dublin Writers Workshop, including:

Acorn 5
Electric Acorn 1
Electric Acorn 2
and Electric Acorn 3.

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