Richard Westcott's poetry

  Silver   Second-hand silver coming in second after those greater golden moments   this borrowed light will never dazzle yet softly pulls me out to where   there’s barely a shadow, though all around are pools, fulfilled and cool.   No gilding here or dear adornment – Eldorado’s far away.   May golden youth   enjoy its day while sunbursts flare. Still silver gleams and I reflect   on unseen oceans drawn like me towards a power beyond themselves –   in light like this the first must give way to that which will follow, as we wax and we wane.          

    As I said, old as Janus was, I’m sure his view wouldn't have extended to prehistory. Or, come to think of it, to us here now. My poem for this month looks back that far, way past Janus, into a boggy place here in Devon. A quarryman working in Kingsteignton in 1867 found a little wooden figure which could be held in his hand. Preserved by the clay, this model man is some 2,400 years old.  His body may be attenuated and armless, but somehow he exerts an extraordinary power.  The eroded face, carved in the late Iron Age, confronts us – you, me – one face facing another. Was he a religious idol, a gift to the gods or just a doll, the archaeologists ask? We can't answer that question. And, if I may say so, perhaps it doesn’t really matter.  He is what he is – like us. What we do know is that one's encounter with him remains etched deeper in the memory after a visit to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum than many another far more beautiful, grande...