Tom Ling Music & Poetry

On Brighton’s pebble beach, patrolled by seagulls,
two women sat in white linen.
Each fingered the warm beach pebbles
feeling the last of the spring day’s warmth.

We watched as they stood, gathering clothes and shopping.
One draped a scarf around her neck
and placed her hand on the other’s head in a gentle benediction.
Printed on her bag was a simple instruction:

Find Heaven

Father and son play Gnaoua music
In what was once a palace.
The son holds his guembri
As one day he will hold his baby.
When he sings, his voice is far away.
Father, lifts his Krakeb, one in each hand,
Then, seeing there was work to be done,
Commands the stage:
Taka Bik Bok
Taka Bik Bok
Taka Bik Bok
The guembri plays a different beat
It shifts the flow
Taa ta tata ta, tata tat ta
Taa ta tata ta, tata tat ta
Taa ta tata ta, tata tat ta
Three beats play against two

Now krakeb lead:
Ta dila tat, ta dila tat
Ta dila tat, ta dila tat
Ta dila tat, ta dila tat
And over this vocals call
And respond
Call
And respond
And then once more.

Until at some unseen signal,
Father and son in unison,
Hold their music close,
Drawn into their hearts.

Then, before the final flourish,
Father moves us on again –
Son’s thumb slaps the guembri skin
Then krakeb go:
Dura dura, dura dura, dura dura
Guembri goes:
Doe du reera, doe do reera, doe do reera
Together they go:
Doe ra ro reera, Doe raro reera, doe ra ro reera.

This music atones.
Call, response, competing rhythms
Knock the edges off each other
Until all forms melt.
This is me, this is you,
This is our ancestors speaking;
And they speak in the language of song.
Those who came before
Dipped their cups in the same melodic well
Where we drink today,
Where the water is always fresh
And no two mouthfuls taste the same.

Nothing comes of nothing.
Slaves from West Africa
Brought their spirits to the Maghreb.
They met with Sufism in the musical garden.
Together they had so much healing to do.
They brought music, perfume, and colour to their task
And said all physicians shall be artists then
And all cures shall be sung.
All physicians shall be artists
And all cures shall be sung.

Anna
A birthday poem, March 2025

We all choose how we fly,
But there were times I feared 
That you would fly with Icarus,
Your hot feathers unstuck from their glue.

But then you found your song,
Your music soared over valleys
And hugged the tight cliffs – 
With just a few crash landings.

Your peregrine wings on jet streams swept the world.
Flocking with friends and resting in the eaves of strangers.
Avoiding lime traps and random guns,
One day you came home to England.

In an old mill, nested in hills, tides rise and sometimes overwhelm,
But when the sea retreats, the earth is soft and fertile,
The sun warms the ground and songbirds fill your room
Until it overflows with music rising in the strummed air.

We know that nothing lasts but nothing that is real is lost,
So, use your Icarus wings,
Find your sun-filled voice that sings
To the unstuck feathers.

This is a heist! An old-fashioned smash and grab!
Put your awards and prizes
Your glorious enterprises,
Those golf clubs and rackets,
Your fancy shoes and branded jackets,
Put them all in the sack.
Don’t expect to get them back.

This is a smash and grab!
You, take your child’s milk teeth out of your purse
And those photos of family gatherings – 
Years and years looking worse and worse - 
The beer mats from your first night out,
Tickets from that a-ma-zing concert
I want them all. Don’t just stand and stare.
You’ll be lucky if I leave you in your underwear.

This is a heist! You might think your day is going badly
But it just got worse. This is a day you may come to curse.
Hand over that cash saved for your bills
For all I care you can freeze and feint.
Your Farrow and Ball paint won’t cover up your cracking wall
Even if it is elephant’s breath modern eggshell.
The weavers who made your rugs from Isfahan 
Can’t stitch together your collapsing plan
Your fawning pets that you think love you
Will chew your face when they get above you.
None of these bring meaning back.
Put them in the sack.

This is a heist! Look at your fleshy, haggard face
Your tongue is too big for your mouth
Your heart is out of control
Acid from your oesophagus leaves a gastric hole.
Your blood thickens like tar
Your swollen legs won’t get you far
Lift your broken limbs from off the rack,
Put them in the sack.

This is a form of smash and grab
I’ll take your body from the slab
I’ll wash your dusty feet,
I’ll turn your sour breath sweet,
I’ll rub your limbs with unctuous oils
I’ll let you give me all your spoils.
Then at last sit naked, breath and rest.
This is a heist!
But perhaps it’s for the best.

This poem describes my travels during the summer of 2024. At some point towards the end, when we were staying in Hartland, North Devon, I realised that there was an unexpected connection in the poems I had written about each stage of my journey. I felt they worked best as a single piece and this is ‘Buried with Care’.

Buried with Care

The past is always with us
Is in skeletons in clay,
In bones and DNA,
In maps unused,
In love refused,
In bodies in abandoned mines,
In sandstone’s sedimented lines.

Kilmartin Museum
You: your re-constructed skeleton,
Spread out as if you are a lesson.
Two children stare at the bright display
At you, in your grave, today.

One child reads aloud from a pristine screen;
Explaining that detailed data from your dentine,
And the study of isotopes,
Tell the story of your life,
Pathology shows that your ground-down teeth,
Describe a scant diet endured for thirty years,
And your funerary artefacts
Confirm your status with your peers.

But science does not say
That you were buried with care,
Your body curled around your favourite tools,
Laid gently on a mossy bed,
By those, I hope, who loved you,
Perhaps placing on your stiffening lips one last kiss.
I am sorry I did not tell the children this.

Tom at Acharn
Your buried, ancient genes
Have not confined you to a wheelchair.
You far outstrip your element
As the dolphin leaps into air.

Largo
I leave my maps behind,
Their legends have no use here.
The roads of my childhood
As familiar as the lines of my friend’s face;
Each contour connecting people to people and people to place.

Cornish Tin Mines
Arsenic, copper and tin,
Kill both kith and kin,
Arsenic chests, copper skin,
Whole families made by tin
While in the Wesleyan chapel still they sing
With emphysema-speckled lungs
To praise a god
Who holds the whole world in his hands
And miners in their place
As tightly as the dark embrace
Of the mine’s collapse.

Totnes
To leave love behind when love is not entirely lost,
To curl life around that loss
Has a painful beauty.

The art and craft is rare
That can bury love with care.

Hartland
Carboniferous shales and sandstones
Are thinly bedded,
Folded, faulted,
By sea and slope eroded.

We, too, living carboniferous lives,
Are thinly bedded.
With grace we, too, are folded and faulted,
Are eroded by love and dare
Believe we, too, may be buried with care.

This is one of a few poems I have written in the Scots tongue – it just flows so much better.

Maya Angelou said this: “My name is Maya Angelou. I grew up on dirt roads… I was a mute. I was poor and black and female. The only key I had which would open the door to the world for me was a book. I read everything. I fell in love with poetry. And amazingly in a small village in Arkansas, I met Robert Burns.”

Whit can we dae wi sic a tender pairin’ as Burns and Maya Angelou?
She kens weel why the caged bird sings
He turned o’er the mouse’s hame and stood stondstill stairin’
At the fear that destitution brings
She sang tae all wi ears tae hear of things unknown but longed for still
With ivery picture in her ivery tale she keept her eyes upon the prize
She said ‘take my mouse’s earth but still, like dust I’ll rise’.

Hey Robin, she micht hae called ye oot on mony fronts
Just one poem aboot slavery and slaves?
She micht hae asked why you let your crazed an passionate waves 
Sweep lovers oot tae sea, who loved but once and loved forever.
But she never.
She never thocht you should be retro-fitted to oor age
Or asked why you didna see where her birds were caged.
She kent weel that callin auld acquaintance back to mind
Is what keeps us humankind.

Oh Robert, for all that ye were such a catch,
I think with Maya you’d have found your match.