John Webster: Ancestral Skulls

Author photograph by Sudeep Sen

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John Webster was born in 1953 and lives in Oxford. Involved in independent publishing and music since leaving school, his work in music has produced an album of songs with lyrics by the Romantic poets Keats, Shelley, Byron and Leigh Hunt called The First Fab Four and an album of his own songs, Finding a Way Through. Since 2020 he has published three books, revolving around poetry: a verse account of his 1970s overland journey to India, The Rime of the Asian Highway, a comparison of the Romantic poets with The Beatles The Closest Thing in History, and most recently a collection of his own poems The Rough, the Smooth and the Quirky: Poems for a Complicated World. Thanks to his marriage to Premila he has travelled regularly to India since 1988. Details of his work can be found at his website www.johnmwebster.co.uk

Sudeep Sen, Poetry and International Editor

Somewhere in This City, Chennai, 2014

Somewhere in this city
Is a boy whose life has changed,
Somewhere a loving mother
Who will never more be found;
Only three years old
He knows he’ll never see her more,
For yesterday they laid her in the ground.

Let us hope that boy will now
Be gifted kindness as he grows,
And finds some constant caring
From his own community;
Let’s wish on him a loving wife
And children of his own
To make his own supporting family.

It’s hard to feel that absence though
That sometimes will appear,
In the morning, night, at mealtimes,
Or in sudden playground tears;
Can we hope it will be balanced
By a type of growing strength
That will then serve to sustain him through the years?

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Beatles Ashram, Rishikesh, 2014

From this source of purest song,
Near where a myth-bound river flows;
In the hollows of the hills,
Came William and his Bungalow.

‘Dear Prudence’ she was here,
In her quarters she did hide;
‘Sexy Sadie’ came to light,
From a trusting, then sardonic mind.

Monkeys mating in the dust—
‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’
‘Piggies’ clutching forks and knives,
In their dinner clothes.

And the Queen of all the brood,
Those ‘airy children of the brain’;
‘Julia’, that floating spell,
That told of loss, but also gain.

For days I stayed some miles away,
Even at that distance feeling blessed;
The landscape that I looked out on,
With wit and beauty still impressed.

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When There is an Onion Shortage

When there is an onion shortage
India is so on edge!
It’s downright existential:
The politicians rush to pledge

That ‘action fast will soon be taken,
Imports aren’t ruled out,
Soon things will return to rule,
There’ll be no more onion drought.

No, no more dearth or scarcity,
There’ll be a glut in fact;
Because we know we will be gone
If you haven’t seen us act!’

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Don’t think ‘Black’, don’t think ‘White’

Don’t think ‘Black’, think ‘Unfaded’,
‘White’ should just be ‘Faded’ rated;
‘BAME’* is lame and bureaucratic,
A view of folk divisive, static.

After all, at human dawn,
Dark skin would protect from harm;
When some moved to northern climes,
Their black pigment did decline.

Otherwise the vitamins,
Partly admitted through their skins,
Would be seriously deficient—
Isn’t Nature so efficient?

Divide us not by skin colour,
Difference comes from money, culture,
Not to mention geography,
Which distributes unequally.

So don’t think ‘Black’, think ‘Unfaded’,
‘White’ should just be ‘Faded’ rated;
Don’t resort to that word ‘BAME’ —
In human terms we’re all the same!

*‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic’

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Ancestral Skulls: Nairobi National Museum

In the cradle of humanity,
Where our origins are found;
And records of our primal past
Were lifted from the ground

Presented there in standing case
The skulls which show just how
The adaptations had occurred
To cheek, to skull, to brow

Which led to that capacious brain
The home of human mind,
Which now explores the universe
Its ambitions unconfined.

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Just like a mighty warrior

Written after attending a memorial service for Professor John Carey, Oxford academic,
critic, teacher, Booker Prize Chair and champion and analyst of literature and poetry.

Just like a mighty warrior, who had adventured far,
In outside lands, and made a change where’er his foot did fall,
And in one mighty battle, had vanquishėd the foe,
So where its writ had run so far, no longer could it go.

Like in a Viking forest, where a champion was lain,
And with fire and songs and rituals deep his feats were felt again,
And chieftains hailing from afar had come to honour show,
And ancient words were spoke and sung that touched the very soul.

But old stained glass enfolded us, we sat on wooden pews
The choir in laundered linen fine, the priest with words that soothed,
And ancient words were spoke and sung that touched the very soul,
And his feats were there remembered as the ceremony flowed.

Unlike the Viking warrior his deeds were of the mind
Remembered for his gentleness, perceptive too and kind;
The care he took to aid the young, to help them on their ways
And they were there to honour him, now lengthened in their days.

We heard George Herbert, Philip Larkin, Ecclesiastes, Keats
John Donne, Shelley, Richard Dawkins, Shakespeare, Melville, Yeats,
Reading is like the sea he’d said, refreshes when you swim
Releases, frees, makes bright the worlds that previously were dim.

Our carousals were more decorous than the Vikings’ long before,
The roof was beauteous hammerbeam, while theirs had been the stars;
Yet we were somehow there at one, both sad, uplifted too,
With the fundamental sensed and our purposes renewed.

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For Those Unborn

For those unborn, as yet unloved,
Direct your labours now and here,
Though they may be out of sight,
In time they will for sure appear.

And then you will be strong for them,
Foundations sure well-built to give,
And in the long-term destiny,
Making space to help them live.

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A Maxim: All I Can Do

All I can do,
Is all I can do,
And all I can do is enough;
To sleep well at night,
At the end of the day,
At peace with the world
And its stuff.

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