Two Poems by Julian Orde
PN Review 2, January - March 1978
Death in Lyndale Avenue
Step-laddered to where I can't
Be my own compasses, I
Measure the years ahead by
The white windows I'll paint.
Doors, walls, ceilings, all-
Year after year I've snow-stormed over,
Though each spring stiffer, the spring fever
Jerks me where white flakes fall
Round my hot head. Yesterday,
In this fanatical fix, breathing
Not sweet spring but paint, saw a coffin
Out of next door as I bobbed in my bay
Window. Saw the black cloth
Lopsidedly drape it, and two little nurses
Follow my neighbour, with child faces
Modestly down the pink path,
Bend through the double doors and wait
(Politely not talking) for the mortuary team
To settle in, and the broad-beamed
Glittering black car to start.
So departed, in home-made fashion,
My right-hand wall, and her dreams of rats
Climbing up lavatories; her kindness to cats:
A gardener; passionate old Jewish woman.
Death dared fell her, or else she chose
To leave the new apple tree grow by itself;
To let go and drift, feet first
Away from her lace-curtained house
And the few left who knew her with love-
In full view of a girl in trousers
Washing a car, a man pruning roses,
And myself, crossing another spring off.
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Makers of Wars and Poems
My daughter's sleep
Spreads wide as a far prairie.
Outside go the violent lorries
Making the house leap.
More strong her sleep
Than the rattling of winged cages,
Than the going of time's paces
More swift her sleep.
The poem I read
Comes up with a burning and a roaring
Let loose in a column of glory,
And down go house and street.
Stronger than house shall leap
When backwards and forwards we've gone
Finding at last we are all one
Maker of war or sleep.
These poems by Julian Orde are taken from PN Review 2, January - March 1978. More of Orde’s poems from this issue are available in the archive to paying subscribers, as well as other poetry, features, reviews and reports from across the back catalogue.
This month, Carcanet is publishing Conjurors, the first collection of poems from Julian Orde (1917–74), who published only in magazines during her lifetime. A friend of Stevie Smith and an intimate of Dylan Thomas and W.S. Graham, she was one of those 'peripheral figures' who turns out to be a centre in her own right. Her evolving worlds and changing landscapes as a writer come alive in these substantial, unexpected poems.
Note: ‘Song in the Saloon Bar’, the poem included in a previous version of this post, was wrongly attributed to Julian Orde in PN Review when originally printed in 1978 - it was in fact written by poet A.J.S. Tessimond.