Herne Triptych

Herne At Work

I.E.E.E. Colloquium on System Implications of Embedded Generation: its protection and control...

I see no NEBOSH here...

But sweaty men in un-ironed shirts
 Shuffle on their swivel-chairs,
Tapping plastic squares on plastic boards,
 And breathe recycled air.

I think of terracotta gnomes
 Seated round a stagnant pond
Gripping tiny fishing-rods
 In their badly painted hands.

With little sighs and tired eyes
 Girls fix their gaze upon the screens;
I mumble starving words to them
 And guzzle copious cups of tea.

My eyes yawn open to a question

And see space gape the answer back

Mr Herne

Herne, humped up in grey,
His eyes strained from staring
So long at the office PC
Got up
To breathe of the air outside his work-place.
As he stood
On the grey concrete steps
He looked up at the Sky —
Boiling black with clouds seething
Electric cracks
From the groined friction
Of Heaven's darkness injecting
Earth with rainfall.

His sandwich,
Broken and bitten,
Became the raw bloody chunks
of Ceres' trembling body

The Night
Became Terror;
The Stars
Were goose-pimples on Godflesh.

A man without shoes treading on tacks —
His brain bulged, his sails snapped
Like a stretched string - he ran
Mad through the streets - his eyes full Moons, his howls
Were those of the Wolves gulping down the Skycircles.

He sipped nettle-soup from a hot pewter pot:
The horns on his head were bent branches, crashing
And pounding and leaping his way through the dark wood.

He sprang
And dropped dangling —
Cernunnos hanging
By the neck from an old oak tree.

Herne the Hunter

He'd always been restless
Depressed, a fidget, unhappy —
Yes, yes - unhappy,
But none had expected...

Some claimed he had caught a plane to Bahrain
And hunted the spirits of whirlwind and fire.

Others claimed he ran mad, naked and freezing
through Lappish ice-wastes, hunting the Snow Queen.

Others claimed he had leapt from a bridge and drowned,
His corpse rolling slowly through darkness and silence
Out to the Ocean:
Hunting Infinity.

None knew why he had done it
Why he couldn't be happy, as they were.

Nobody mentioned

The antlered figure that crouched at the foot
Of their beds after nightfall

Hunting...

They woke to a sky of suicide-grey
And drove, exhausted, to work.