After fifty years of writing my archive of poems numbers in the hundreds. I’ve organized two full-length collections, Paper Black Leaf and Last Poems. I’ll publish selections here in small, chapbook-sized collections, one at a time. A new chapbook should appear, and an old one vanish, every couple of months. If you missed them, previous chapbooks can be read here.

           

These poems in the voice of Arthur were partly written to express my deep love for the county of Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of what is now England.  They also embody my lifelong fascination with the legends of King Arthur, though few of the famous episodes are reflected here, even fragmentarily.  There are many Arthurs, and of course in another sense there was never even one.

My Arthur is the Celtic warlord who lived after the Roman Empire collapsed in Britain, and who fought to stave off the Anglo-Saxon invasion and settlement of his British lands and, in myth at least, succeeded at re-establishing British self-rule for a while before the Germanic peoples overwhelmed the island.  We encounter him before those victories, and after a first successful sweep across southern Britain by the invaders.  He and his army and people have been chased across the River Tamar into what is now Cornwall.  The defeat feels final. It will not be, but that is a part of the story my suite of poems never encompassed.  In these poems Arthur knows the mythic role he is bound to play, and much of his spirit yearns to walk away from that calling.  Perhaps in the last two poems there is some hint of the successes to come; but there is also a faint echo of his eventually crossing to the Isle of Avalon after his death.  The sequence ended, for me, at that knife’s edge, and remains unfinished.

Note to mobile readers: best to read the poems in landscape format, so longer lines don’t break in two.

Chapbook 7

Arthurian Suite

© Brian Trehearne 2025

Arthur: and now snow

we’ve barely settled ourselves into the bog
on this side of the Tamar and begun
to nurse those injured we could bring in flight—
those with a chance of fighting again

(the more gravely stricken, who could not follow long
we left strewn like bloody leaves across the south-west of Britain
either on the field at Camel awaiting Saxon mercy
or falling off the wagons as we yanked them)

and now snow; I haven’t seen it since I was a child
running after stupid sheep in this same open moor;
how sure I was then of its welcome

but it comes on tonight, and the wind so fierce
the flakes are blowing sideways into our beards and meagre fires
and the boulder-gates howling with it

there’s just no kindness in our God, no let-up:
when we most need comfort, or at least
no interference, he is hardest
upon us.  Our priests tell us this is his special good
among all gods; but a warrior needs dry land
and the wind in his enemy’s faces

give him the opposite often enough, O Lord
and he will surely sell his spear to another faith

look at them: weeping, and crossing the mud on their knees
to seek surgery of my woman, their battle-dress
bearing them down under white blown hair

look at the drifts beginning to arise
at the base of that boulder wall
and at my boot a small snow-devil playing;
under the moonlight the crust is strewn with the light of gems

I feel sure I should not be standing here the commander of a defeated army
sure that something is trying to bless them in their injury

my boot-prints lead away from the camp and soon mingle
with the traces of sheep hooves, a flock taking shelter
not far from here; they will be heavy with matted wool
at this time of the farm year, and fairly fattened

food and warmth to be provided for the men
that I could not find without the literature of the snow
 

Arthur at the Tamar

I smell them on the far side of the Tamar, the Saxons;
they are mingling, humming beer-songs,
flittering in and out of one another’s fire-light
and passing around our women.  Among my cohort
are ten who say we should make a raid
by nightfall, though not this night, and another dozen
who might join those ten, if they hold sway
in council.  The rest look to me for their ethics;
I see their faces when I circle the earthworks
and no one can meet my eyes.  These are hoping
I will rule like a king, and like every other king
they have known, save what I have amassed
in wealth in a strong place, keep my own skin,
and let them go home. I tell them their kings 
command me, but they do not believe it;
I tell them we will return from these citadels
laid down for us by oceans long ago
and right the wrongs littered across our island.
That’s the kind of story they can sleep on for generations
for that is the kind of men they are: they need a legend
at suppertime, one they can feel called to, truly,
and mournful when they tell it to their grandchildren.
When I tell them we cannot attack the Saxons
for weeks yet, they begrudge me that wisdom;
after I have passed talk of me as a king already broken,
my would-be queen a captive, and my heart in dread.

Arthur at Rough Tor *

lay down your hearts in swollen layers of granite
you men who lived here, clung to your hill-top power;
your songs are horizontal now, your palisades rounded
with the Cornish wind bearing salt from two directions

where you were angular, red-bearded, bristling spear-heads
your dead kings are blunted, body upon body smoothed
with such a weight of specific grace that only an ocean
could lift and lay these world-stones one upon another

and leave them rocking, minutely, buttock to buttock,
rising through the millennia, never to kneel to gravity

so from the top of the uppermost stone I cry out in all
directions to the moor you defended for sons—
your men huddled with lambs, or peeing in leeward corners
where long-beard grass now sways over their grave-skins

* The two words are pronounced together to rhyme with American “router” or “doubter”.

Arthur in Gethsemane

I can’t be sure that exile isn’t preferable
to the long sustenance of war
it will take to reclaim our generations
of land and water use from the Saxons
who now camp among the ash pits and middens
they have made of our several homes
in echoing distance of the great henge

we can make an adequate life here
though the soil is scrawny and the water metal-tasting
and the sheep themselves will only live
on one side of any tor; the smoke
of our clustered courtyard houses will smear again
over the moor as it rose before
we accepted the Roman temptation

shearing and weaving we can re-learn
and find other fuels for our fires;
husbands and wives can tutor their sons
as shepherds across the whole Fowey Moor,
and in their dotage study again the handcrafts
of metalwork and gem-setting;
even granite can be carved—I’ve seen it done—

suppose by dint of slaughter larded on the Saxons
more than is suffered fresh by our own men
we win back the sun and sacred pools
and comely pastures we’ve fled from—
how far will our children’s lives be bettered?
will having stood our ground at such a price
make the Dumnonian kings greater, or prouder?

or would the greater gift for these poor sods
who now huddle under the third stiff rain since noon
be that I take my sword and general’s badge,
plant them between two lips of granite
that shift and seal the blade, and then go whistle
out on the open moor, till fog confuse
firm grass and edge of bog and sink my legend
 

Arthur: I dreamt again

Merlin
I dreamt again of Rome
pathetic
I have never seen
such grand cathedrals, fountained terraces
so vast a Forum
yet I knew it was Rome
for I entered by the victor’s arch
and was greeted with derision
though I trailed in one hand
the broken heads of several of my people

I would kill that many, perhaps
to be freed of these abominable visions

I lead simpler men
who build with mud and timber or,
for their petty kings, a round of piled granite
on a strategic hilltop

the gentle music of those fountains
can only torment me;
fine fabrics so sheer you can see your hand, no,
your fingerprints through them

at the end of these wars
I will live in a stone circle hut
a little bigger than my neighbour’s
and wear homespun still stinking of the sheep’s life

why should my night mind so linger
where I have never been, among gods
I have no faith in, snuffing up the aroma
of spiced meats from the public hearth
and fearing the beckoning of women
from fragrant alcoves

when my own Fates have placed me here
on a spit of land drowning in rain
not even Saxons care to die for
 

Arthur on Kingship

I can’t rally them to the necessary courage of battle
by urging them to taste in their gullets again
the acid pride of their Britishness, for neither they nor I
know now exactly what that nation means;

there are no shared songs I can get them singing together
to remind them of an innocent childhood kingdom
they should now rise up to defend, as if their mothers’
gentle lulling syllables still spoke to them in this wind

they know their own language, but in the way of ignorant men,
and Latin alone, which they do not understand,
strikes them as the idiom of war: in their illiterate serfdom
they think their old masters, the dead Romans, will rise

from barrow and frontier and streaming into legions
once again will break like that the Saxon hold
on Winchester, and restore us to our centuries of servitude:
the pig man, the tanner, the butler’s boy, the vintner

they long to be again—long to put down these sudden weapons
I’ve thrust into their hands—so what can I cry out
over the leeward slopes where they’ve arranged themselves
under my command, to make them soldiers?

Each man here wants his days to unroll as a single tale
and history is any accursed thing that interrupts its lilt;
there are no myths left to this people, and I am among them
the last to remember my duty and the fatal kiss of an emperor
 

Arthur to a Minstrel

Sing them, then, a good, spine-stiffening song,
the kind we hear at dawn from the Saxon camp.
They have no need of your yearning after court ladies,
no good in learning new laments for their homeland.
I hold with Plato, more or less, that you chantorion *
do our polity more harm than good.  I want these men to feel
the keenness of the blade’s edge fate has set at their throats.
I want them to hear fear, and a few strict lessons in spear-thrust
as the just response.  Hold to these instructions
and you may dress it all as you please in simile and strumming,
but don’t get carried away; there was too much style
under Rome, and we know now where that simpering leads.
Finally, I want you moving from fire to fire,
rather than gather them at your feet on the mine-tip.
Show them you are asking their hospitality and patience,
not the reverse.  For these services performed as I see fit
you will be well paid.  I am after all your protector.

* Welsh: bards, singers.

Fowey Moor Song *

for once the west sea covered this land of Cornwall
and tides played with boulders

and once the land of Cornwall rose from the sea halls
to bake under a shrouded sunlight

volcanoes belched under water and the land’s edges
shattered and grew teeth

and the good land of Cornwall then lay back nude under wind
to be smoothed by the great palms of that god

and so it is that now by horizons of whale-heavy stone
stacked on tor and rounded and just still

at the junction of wind and gravity
I can find my way by touch alone in the land of Cornwall


* Later renamed Bodmin Moor by the English.  All the moors of the southwest are named for their principal river, and it is the Fowey (pronounced “Foye,” as old maps have it) that flows across the great moor of north Cornwall southeast-ward, zig-zag, to fall from the escarpment at Golitha and escape to the sea at the town of Fowey.
 

Arthur on Mercy

In great waves upon this island came the British people
each to overrun the strongholds and farmsteads
of the last with simple brutality, seizing among their meadows
and their women the choicest for fertility and pleasure

Why should we be surprised these days if other peoples
arrive on the southern and eastern shores and in sudden marches
shred our Christian life and sends us shrieking, stumbling
northward and westward, into the bleakest landscapes?

Only this Saxon horde kills with a special happy terror;
they bring a zeal better than that of our holy brothers
to their butchery—I have seen things done to living bodies
nothing in the suffering of Christ prepares us to endure

and they use our faith with genius: that praying little monk
I watched held up for nailing to an oak tree, his robes
burnt off his body, and his trembling belly speared open
from cross to scrotum—after his death they were bored

and rowed themselves drunkenly beyond the headland.
Then I knew there could be no life in peaceful enclaves
next to such men, and I accepted your king’s command
to raise this untutored army in the west, and stand you

in the cause of God against the invaders.  We will have
upon our captives Christian mercy, I have sworn it!
We must be better men than when we came here
or all the holy wells in Britain will not cleanse our hands

The Wind at Rough Tor

this sound is the home I have longed for
in the years of campaigns, goading many horses
into Saxon pike-bearers—this breath in my ear
of the lungs of the sea, and their salt-kiss
of coastal caverns, dripping lime and fear

it stills me, and bathes my wounds;
my knees ache from the longing to turn
southwest by the plunging cove-woods
into the first weaving tongues of fish-whiff
where the gannets are gathering and diving

and the thudding boats of my cousins ride
upward at the dripping prow;
they have come to ease my body to its death-place
and leave my boot-prints to the sweet suck of the tide

do you hear it, Britons, the womb sound,
the sound men make in gladness at their deaths?