CLIVE DONOVAN

Chains

Those early precious flexi-links drove buckets back and forth

to irrigate the terraces above the plains:

Egypt...China...Roma...with peaceful metal ropes got rich...

Who first in bondage groaned and rattled chains, we cannot know,

but slighter ones of gold were forged to decorate the chests

of top gentlemen and wives

—reminder of the force by which they ruled.

Then, that great time hopper, Da Vinci, sketches pictures

of a classic leaf chain with pins and plates,

centuries before bicycles.

Meanwhile, as we danced the brutal jig of Time,

cog chains turned machinery like looms and elevators,

thus kick-starting the industrial revolution,

which in turn exploited thousands of female chainmakers,

whose craft, at penny a yard, helped transport whole fleets of slaves.

Soundly welded in the Shires of the Black Country;

impossible to break with feeble hands, those iron bonds.

Far, far from rich and delicate gold and silver were they

—yet so linked, so black and bleakly linked,

so supple in their solid linkage.

Archaeologists in Crete

I have re-entered a world of very real stone:

A city of rocks jointed

As if by sweating giants

And as I walk, admiring logical streets,

I see how copper and gold is brought by ships to be shaped,

Hammered and granulated;

Factories spin clay, cut gems,

The writers carve their ideograms.

A quiet ghetto of mansions hoards light,

Courtyards hide where bare-breasted girls play

And mirror-pools invite small votive acts

 – A nod to the Goddess – a libation.

It has all tumbled down now, grass has grown

To smother the slab-paved streets.

Frescoes of ecstatic dance and feast have crumbled.

Olive trees, with strangling roots, distort.

We scrape it all off, our delicate trowels

Burrow into ancient grit

Where lodge compressed the drifted flakes of evidence.

We collate numerous bucket-loads

To see how they lived;

Those short, brown, energetic Minoans,

Determined to rebuild after each tragical earthquake;

Not giants at all, it seems, but dauntless

And, for a brilliant age, stubbornly enduring,

With their daring, triumphant bull-leapers

And conical cups that had to be held unspilled

Even as the buildings shook.

Clive Donovan has three poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021], Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and Movement of People [Dempsey&Windle 2024] and is published in many magazines including Acumen, Crannog, Popshot, Prole, Stand and The Lake. He was a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for 2022’s best individual poems.

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