The Sisyphus Dog

Stones

for Dave Billings

I nearly went arse over tip on the footpath to Lundy Bay
where violets, primrose and spring squill were jostling
in the last of the sun with scurvygrass and speedwell.

I clambered over the boulders, with half an eye on the tide
that sucked and slopped in the hollows, as I looked for pretties
and paperweights – for stones are a comfort in sorrow.

And I turned up granite and quartz, flat skimmers of shale,
limestone smoothed by the ebb and flow, and a slew
of coppery pebbles tumbling down to the foam;

then heaved myself back up the cliff, pockets bulging with rocks,
as a stonechat sang in the tangled gorse and alder swayed
in the wind, while the boats out at sea held their course.

So I bring you nothing but stones and I let these stones
speak for me, that hold their own in the storm, keep faith
with the tide and the land; for we measure in millions
the years they have been here, and the years till they turn to sand.

Published: 10 February 2014
ISBN:  9781905208234
Pages: 79

“The poems of Stephen Boyce have an enviable assurance: clear, well-crafted and precise, they have an air of knowing where they are going, and invariably find their destination in an elegant closure. He is a master of the simple but telling phrase.”

Roger Caldwell

“In time of war, a woman ‘darns to the ticking of clocks’. In peace, a child sees through a telescope ‘all the life I ever wanted’. The music of Stephen Boyce’s brief, intense poems quietly reveals both pain and joy, ‘in the comfort of remembered song’.”

Alison Brackenbury

“Stephen Boyce is the master of surprising similes: carriages ‘jolting like the lurch of camels’, the hole in a sock ‘like a tonsured head’, a face ‘red as a pomegranate flower’. Written with considerable poetic skill and emotional warmth, his perceptive cameos of lives, nature and art are finely-tuned. The Sisyphus Dog augments Stephen Boyce’s rapidly growing reputation admirably.”

Robyn Bolam