What Will Be by Aly Stoneman
‘all these things urge the heart […]
to set out on a journey’
The Seafarer
I
Like a mote of dust, a pollen grain,
an unassuming apple pip,
I slipped into my mother’s cup;
she drank me down, ingested me.
Wanderer, back again, possessed
by a shadow memory, a yearning.
II
I come from red Devon mud
rooted under fingernails, a communing
with rough-haired ponies in the dimpsy,
a tradition of short legs and apple orchards.
Father was hayseed, soil and salt;
Mother pegged sheets like wings,
singing, ‘my butterfly child, so free and so wild’.
Neighbours, wary as cattle,
suspected a changeling, a daughter
too long awaited.
III
Rain tapped me awake finger by finger,
unfurling leaf, apple blossom. I sprang,
I spun, I cartwheeled, I sang. I balanced
on my fingertips, I could almost fly. Bees
dozed between my toes, silky nubs, undisturbed.
IV
How it came about, I dreamed what will be.
Try telling that in the playground
or at the tea table, for I do fear (and so should you)
the attentions of gods and men; whether
they curse or bless you, it is the same.
Block your ears and close your eyes, child, become
a stone they may pass over like a scratch of wind.
V
Mother, we sang along
brambled lanes,
my pockets bled berries,
your sleeves were stuffed with tissues.
We looked for Dad in the flaked fields,
followed disguised tracks into fairyland.
Off the school bus, Mother, I searched
for you, I found you weeping;
apple trees folded their branches
around you: trees held you.
Like roots through droughty clay,
life cracked you, burst through.
I am a field of crows, I tread
the world in like mud. Oh, Mother,
now your deadwood wrists snap underfoot,
even my softest step
breaks them.
VI
Clumping through claggy fields
past the ruined cob piggery –
our customary dead-of-winter walk.
Sandstone, wood-smoke,
red clay; smudged hills deceptively soft.
This land was ours, you said,
but pigs were always copper or gold.
Rain clouds, low, blot out the view.
VII
What sent me out, what was it?
The thing
I should not have told my mother,
the thing I should not have said.
Our legacy of graft and hard knocks,
our conflicted hearts.
A sparrow
flashing along St David’s platform and away,
brief spark of sunlight on its wings.
VIII
I dreamed I met a wayfarer at Starved Oak Cross,
smoking his clay pipe through a gun barrel,
his red horse twirling and frothing in the dusk.
His coins scorch circles on the bar and good ale
hisses down his furnace throat, but how he sings:
Face your mirrors to the wall, pluck
out your hairpins in thunderstorms;
washing clothes on Old Year’s Day
will wash your family away; and oh,
there’s a price to pay, maid, for wanderin’.
IX
And what I said was, up my sail must go –
X
and the gods laughed and the gods blessed me
and the gods cut me loose there and then.
For my mother was a daisy and men
burn the fields;
the land is bone-hard, crops fail.
Note from the poet: ‘What Will Be’ draws on Old English poems including ‘The Seafarer’, ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Ruin’ from The Exeter Book (written about 970AD), the oldest book of English Literature in the world, which has been kept in Exeter Cathedral since the 11th Century. Many of the riddles and poems featured in The Exeter Book evoke the natural world in their explorations of loneliness, restlessness, fate and the passage of time, themes that continue to speak to lived experiences in the modern world.
Aly Stoneman, Riddler-in-Residence at Exeter Cathedral (July–November 2023).
References
The Seafarer’ in The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology, ed. by Kevin Crossley-Holland (Oxford: OUP, 2009) p. 54.
The Casuals, ‘Jesamine’ (1968).
Also after St. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731AD) and Antoine Ó Raifteirí, ‘Cill Aodáin’ (early 19th Century).