Archeologies by David Swarbrick

About Archeologies by David Swarbrick

From disco to disappearance.

Publisher

David Swarbrick @ The Ceylon Press

Category

arts · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

3 Jul 2025

Latest episode

7 May 2026

Latest episodes

12 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 May 2026

   Greater Still: 1979 - 1993

   1. NOT HERE Still dark, thin curtains resist a taut March sky; my room is uncompleted – unoccupied; my possessions shrink beside books, clothes, stuff left here by others – and because you are not near - not in this village or the next – not in this thin doctored place so far from the southern Weald – because we are not here – my body moves, a blind man, proving the place, calculating distances between here and there – a bleak, discordant siren enticing me to stay, with a nonsense song: that there is no other way. BEDFORDSHIRE, MARCH 1979 2. EDGE Ploughed fields force me to the edge – a destitute land, barren and friendless – hedgerows of briar and blackthorn stiff as razor palisades, a slammer of bare trees, flooded ruts thick, greasy, drowning mud and a thin, slashing horsewhip wind to keep at bay my breakout. BEDFORDSHIRE, MARCH 1979 3. CEEDED i Light haemorrhages, bleeds through brooding trees, though copse. We await the storm. ii Sound of the quiet moor – small hours of dark certainties, sleepless, terminal. iii This, the toughest place, a night long anvil smashing every dream that comes. iv He has let the room – and now a watcher steals everything he knows. v Come and commandeer this world, that world, take them all - we have an excess. vi Lift, scatter, dust, wind down the ragged station cold, strangers ever stirring. vii Blue electric crown – by the sky, I bring you close: it covers us both. BEDFORDSHIRE, MARCH 1979 4. CEASELESS A cloudless blue invites a house, long-lost, white - honoured guest, seated, air still as whispers, friends dining in candlelight; a record playing, photographs shuffled -- as if a kindly cardsharp dealt redeeming kings LANGOLD HOUSE, SUMMER 1979 5. BOMB Green fists of bud lurch towards summer – bring me to Sussex downs laid on chalk, cut sheer - tracks to the sea. I lie - toes out, following patterns on the waves; following people spreading towels; following families sweating in a salty breeze – sun pilgrims, returning with plastic bags and floppy hats. The day has killed their talk; there is only the sexy grass beneath bare feet – vast smooth fields below a prosperous sky – a measureless ocean – the smell of summer, spreading like a blast. BEECHY HEAD, JUNE 1981 6. SCHOOL Overnight, our schools have become strewn streets in ruined cities - lessons taken by looted shops, gutted cars – classrooms reached down roads burning with debris from the night before; the playground, a hearth of petrol flames shared on television; the curriculum recast by ragged warriors in cities north to south – even unobtrusive towns have traded in their silence for slogans, as if all this could ever start a new term. LANGOLD HOUSE, JULY 1981 7. BUSTED This room is busted – this house is broken – bolted, a trail of bricks and masonry. Barbed wire, red with rust, defines the edges of a disappearing drive Birds call - boundlessly friendless. LANGOLD HOUSE, JULY 1981 8. PETITION Forgive us – say a prayer – let’s dine on blood. Give us this day our daily bread - the man haemorrhaging his life on bags of spilt basmati rice. All kingdom come - unhallowed bodies bobbing downriver; lepers trespassing the garden gates (dry to the right, wet to the left). The Power and the Glory - the corpse delivered from evil on a jute bier of marigolds, weaving through traffic. Ever and ever - scraps of horse and jockey minced on earth by a Naxalite bomb, bound for heaven, Thy will be done. LANGOLD HOUSE, JULY 1981 9. TRIBUTE i This makeshift air, choked. The dreams the old men held dear, mountains poised to rise. ii Tapers are unlit; the alter is empty now, its trinkets packed away. iii Summer twists the knife – leaves an unwieldly wilderness, a wreath, remembered. iv Still he assails, as if love would ever be an explanation. LANGOLD HOUSE, JULY 1981 10. FICTION Why let him dream when really – he cannot; why let him think that he will live without end, that he will draw the flame from fire, that he can take it to the shadow – to the silver in the dim – to burn forever more? LANGOLD HOUSE, JULY 1981 &nbsp...

2. 

   7 May 2026

   Waking

   WAKING DAVID SWARBRICK 1 Waking, I dream of the tattered ends of magic: flame trees, a white house. 2 How could others count? On the biggest rock of all I hook my leash. 3 I read the torn photo, the boy, entering a car, beneath frangipani trees. 4 Ice blocks melt on lawns, the dinner party long over. Now the dawn crows caw. 5 I made my garden with the mali, plunging twigs into watered earth. 6 Deposed now, the queen sits above the Adyar with her transistor. 7 Nothing is missing, the supermarket stocks all. And, plastic Buddhas. 8 Only fireworks - no gunshot, bombs, villages circled by spiked heads. 9 Always she is there - airports, stations, quay, car parks, angel without wings. 10 This, my bomb helmet, my dog that sleeps skull-to-skull. What else would I need? 11 A millennia ago armies crept through these hills, razed the grand kingdom. 12 An easy trick to play – that nothing matters at all but what matters most. 13 Dawn. The babbler calls, and the small niggardly things fade into the night. 14 Pub, party, shopping – all entrapment, is it not, forgetting what’s next? 15 Licking each other, all day my dogs show their care. Ah, if we could too. 16 Jungle hills confuse which way is north, which path leads to the shallow sea. 16 The tea Wiji brought Cools fast.  I have spent too long dreaming in my bed. 17 It will not complete – the four-sided perfect square that doesn’t quite meet. 19 This is my tally - the long day burdened with scent of sapu flowers. 20 They had no daughters, just sons who learnt not to speak, but come, go and go. 21 Tiny waves recall last movements of a great storm far out in the sea. Written in a moment between 6.30 and 7.30 am in bed on 5th January 2026,

3. 

   6 Nov 2025

   Songs Without Music

   So Watch So watch my flesh decay and see how beautifully it goes; like something asking to be loved; like you, too shy to ask me to your room; marks that will survive are marks on skin and mind: not you with me, not face to face; and only this, a last decay pitching to hide itself when each has gone their way. Cause Under empty skies air finds no flags; people march but the banners are burnt; the world is bleeding into  hell, and into hell the world betrayed. My fist is flat, the truth is traded; there is nothing left to kill for or to honour. the world is bleeding into  hell, and into hell the world betrayed. Angel I bought a glass palace in Paradise with a pool and fifty rooms; and off its slender flagstaff I can fly to the moon. I’m god in the city, god in the town, I came from hell but I’m here; from nighttime to nightfall my parties do not end. I’m alive and free so look at me I dream at the top of the sky; my fingertips are strips of jade - there’s no way I can die. I’m god in the city, god in the town, I came from hell but I’m here; from nighttime to nightfall my parties do not end. Welcome, roll up, welcome, watch kings and princes sigh; they beg to use my golden wings. they beg to learn to fly. I’m god in the city, god in the town, I came from hell but I’m here; from nighttime to nightfall my parties do not end. City of Fear Last night I flew over the city of fear; dark coated people came down the streets; they had angel eyes and shrank from light; they looked at me and wished to fly - but they couldn’t grow wings. And in the end it’s the end that living’ about; they do not know how to go they can escape no more they have turned to salt inside the doorways of this city of fear. Moon high, my rocket feathers carry me free I see the late night-clubs open up, the curtains of private room drift apart; the battle’s over, but in coloured light, the battle starts again. And in the end it’s the end that living’ about; they do not know how to go they can escape no more they have turned to salt inside the doorways of this city of fear. People wait with wet wide eyes but the gods have gone, the night goes on; coins rattle in their mouths the gates have closed. And in the end it’s the end that living’ about; they do not know how to go they can escape no more they have turned to salt inside the doorways of this city of fear. Heros Come kill the heroes, tear the faces from the walls; there’s no misleading leads us closer to Hell. In every street, in every room their faces stare, they take the air, they grin and cheat and stir us; they’ll do anything for us; live our lives the way we want, the heroes. Pictures in magazines blow up their public lives; the roles they play kill for us and lie. In every street, in every room their faces stare, they take the air, they grin and cheat and stir us; they’ll do anything for us; live our lives the way we want, the heroes. Wars won in cinemas are all we never were; and all we ever are just turns to dust. In every street, in every room their faces stare, they take the air, they grin and cheat and stir us; they’ll do anything for us; live our lives the way we want, the heroes. River Night-time holds me down and empty open to the flood; nothing stops the river breaking in, stops the river breaking me. Not sleeping, not waking, I’m trapped in the dark – cold shadows surround me closing around me; it’s the dream world of a lost world of a world that never was. Faces, and the colours tasted turn the years I have not lived; take the lost road back, take the road unsaid. Not sleeping, not waking, I’m trapped in the dark – cold shadows surround me closing around me; it’s the dream world of a lost world of a world that never was. Cold City In rooms and bars the city through I see you face the same; every word and touch we make recalls our needs again. There’s no time for holding back no time enough for fear, and if you wait forever there’ll just be nothing there. Yet when love moves and speaks its eyes are flat and closed; and every time we want to give it suddenly lets go. There’s no time for holding back no time enough for fear, and if you wait forever there’ll just be nothing there. We scare of loving, loosing dreams with this love that must not say with this love that cannot ever declare itself again. There’s no time for holding back no time enough for fear, and if you wait forever there’ll just be nothing there. So hold me on your fi...

4. 

   1 Nov 2025

   Pilgrim

   1 in tight lines a dozen houses line the winter wheat – already: frail bungalows with front lawns, at the village edge; homes, already, transitory as inns, and clamped to a new access road that slices though the down. diggers have quarried the chalk - upended it; torn out the clay beneath - heavy, dark, greasy as abattoir meat embedded with flints, clewing to a long-departed sea. in a web of cul-de-sacs, of silent gardens of chipboard walls history is being forgotten; the land is practicing how to die. SNODLAND, MARCH 1977 2 clouds clog the river’s fallen level - a dry day at the furthest edge of summer; at the month’s almost-final, almost-end-point, flat and still; indestructible. hay, cropped in silent meadows rests in long gold lines; the battles to be fought are far away; nothing is corruptible; now is all there is. THE RIVER BEULT, AUGUST 1977 3 wade in the corn waves undisturbed; come home - there is no toll; the hip-grass will conceal and recall; fearing no fall, the dusty green will restore the world, its marks, its scars - bring it to a field of sun - to this home, crushed out within it. NEAR CRANBROOK, AUGUST 1977 4 of course there are grander things than this Victorian rebuilding of medieval stone; but not for me. for eight years i have been its steadfast visitor, a pilgrim of sorts, returning to a place where nothing is urgent; where custom points, like transepts, to the enfolding fields and woods first written in Doomsday. THE CHURCH OF ALL SAINTS, BIRLING, MARCH 1978 5 amongst the few remaining leaves of last year’s autumn, daffodils shake in a slight breeze; they lord it over the wilderness - the stone angel drowsy under moss; the mausoleums, rectangular, preoccupied; the crooked tombstones, dreaming of places other than this; the sleeping columbaria spread between the shot green shavings of recent trees - defiant, redeeming. BIRLING CHURCHYARD, MARCH 1978 6 winter rain has darkened the hayrick’s sides; now a nine-hour sun expands upon it, restores it, saves it with lengthening days; returning all. SNODLAND, MAY 1978 7 only on the road between the trees; only on Birling Hill do i evade the day; slip the sun under leaf; freewheel on the scarp, believing only in Cistern Wood and Coney Shaw, in Stonebridge and Ley; in the fields that flit by, worshipping only the swift dark woods, the down’s allegiant oak, and beech, and chestnut - saved by speed each time i turn into the ceaseless haze. ON BIRLING HILL, JUNE 1978 8 now the cool weaves white; the high day ends; the ridge simplifies; the downland tightens – a narrow gate, darkly green - trees open to an ageless sky; a time for nightjars, nightingales, sparrowhawks; and i am washed away. TROTTISCLIFFE, JUNE 1978 9 this is a road for sunday walkers, wanderlusters who go just so far, their communion curtailed by an absence of magic, fitted in between reading the papers and lunch, as is customary now. THE SNODLAND TO BIRLING ROAD, JUNE 1978 10 clouds shift; over the hill the moon swells, the grass, dark this side, lights up - ignites a sudden thoroughfare showing me the way, night by night, as i cycle sections of the old pilgrim road, all difficulties shattered, past fields of clover, cowslip; past Blackbusshe, Badgells Wood, past the Battle of Britain cross,

5. 

   27 Oct 2025

   Border Lands

   march 1981 having this, no fantastic hate can rob you; not devils, not warriors, not demons; nor even angels, spying from their steep slopes, nothing, truly nothing can rob you – nor even this town, that has a history of theft and mutilation: the churches empty, the homes neglected the parks choaked with weeds. you do not need to stay. you do not need to pay. april 1981 i’ve not words enough to say - i saw you walking on the road today, nor eyes prepared to follow: folly , prey. may i 1981 eclipsing streets, a steady shore, an ordered crash of waves; through sunlight, shafts, marbled clouds a far, far out horizon, unreachable; unbreachable. may ii 1981 i am in envy of love; i am in envy of these two figures strong as the sun. i am in envy. june 1981 how far do seas stretch? here, my love; beach, sand, dunes, and rocks, rising, cliffs, rising: we sit, hidden in stumpy heat-drenched grass; a high hollow, spread with towels, a picnic, cigarettes: and two tight bodies curled like babes observing visions. july 1981 on this shore – on every shore the sea rolls, spreads, swobs expands explains but we – you and i – we are fastened like limpets. we cannot  leave. september i 1981 the waves of last night’s storm linger, loiter insist endure: they stir still; they stir now, white, wild, whipping the heavy sea is not becalmed; it slaps on jetties, smashes the sea walls, breaks up the boats; and we must shelter. september ii,1981 i have come to meet myself again – to catch up. find fault, find favour. it is the same homing, bleak sea, the same empty horizon blotted out by mist. my heart gives into it; beats like a forbearing tide. october 1981 behind me a television tower feeds the air, feeds a hundred thousand unseen homes; feeds them all, gannets razorbills, gulls greedy as Ahab with a rattle of stodgy voices i cannot hear, mayday signals for the dying day for the yearning empty night. november i, 1981 november. the pebbles are smooth, grey, oval, wet; they slide, roll, rattle; children gather driftwood; build bonfires. the inlet – south beach - lies under a muscle of white cloud; wheeling waves whiten, spread a pale disappearing line; we breathe air no city has maintained; i sit on a washed up tree trunk greatest of all. november ii 1981 just above the line thrown by the strongest wave; just at that point where the sand shelves, where it is wet, softer, darker just at that point – that is where the people group where the people watch, where they walk throw stones; the pensioner too, in his fawn coat, we are just at that point – each day, same time, same place beside the shifting sea. december 1981 hallo there. hey! hallo! i see my face under the street light; i see that when this passion has gone the shop’s glass window will remain reflecting it all back; everything bloody thing but hazy, sticky with salt, it is my father confessor my witness to others who walk, like i catching their faces, in this unkind abrupt way long before they are ready to own up; catching their features too soon in the vast unending night. february  1982 lean mountains rise seaward, rock on rock; thin fields stretch, taut as canvass the first light gilds the couch grass across Swyddffynnon, fills the hollows from Pontrhydfendigaid to Ystrad Meurig runs gold over Cambria. march i  1982 unspeaking, we’ve watched the day wake and slide unfelt; old room in an empty house. our bodies lie still, unspent; under the huge grey sky there is no trade. march ii 1982 briefly i remember lying in your lap, my stock against the night electrically charged, incriminated; my fingers familiar each contour known as my own, the warmth and texture of your feckless flesh. april  1982 her eyes coil around a world i cannot see; in her head are the smiles of friends, and elders, smiling sadly, as they will smile when she is dead. may  i1982 living by the sea we have missed the first graffiti of spring, the scrawl of buds on bush the harsh soft hasty green the pebble beach is our park, cold and hard untranslated, unpreserved, seen in flashes moment by moment without memory. childless, parentless. may ii 1982 but for this there is no other world; this is the magic of your face, the fascination, the hidden sea - waves rearrange the light; currents coil beneath like massive ropes encrusted with barnacles wrenching the water dragging it this way and that dragging it into a warren of rolling whitecaps. this is the only place for love; this time my heart will take its ancient path unseen. may iii 1982 somewhere, somehow, something will end; just not be there; we’ll wonder why we ever looked; adjoin, ajar, elude, escape – the door will never close again. will never. may iv 1982 remember that old image of summer; the blooming trees, heavy with green; the flower crowd and scent – someone sitting near the house; someone playing the music of old scores on the piano? it never was. get up and go; the door is open. may v  1982 i cannot see it in your eyes, the lover, mistress, master - it is only the ocean i see – the eternal cross of light dimming in the depths late as the latest night-known dreams the trances and delusions – the truth. june i 1982 this cold magic has – as possession – every length of time, has the fascination too, and the light it steals: oh, how it steals the light – dragging it beneath the waves with such dark grace only a fool would not follow. june ii 1982 stay in. we are cannibals together; adequate, sufficient. all we need is all we are. june iii 1982 she dreams with her eyes; shapes of ships and long dark seas; a diviner, a first time diver, going places - such places as you never saw and being all he is, he is all hers and she dreams on. june iv 1982 apart from casual pain he will never walk disarmed, as if always into ...

6. 

   25 Oct 2025

   At The Volcano

   ONE Wholly beautiful, this is a remote withdrawn unsaid place; knowing nothing, wisdom held unaided. The volcano, burst, blistered, blasted before time, rises above savannah, autonomous. Nothing of what I have left behind has followed me here: no bars, or clubs, or safari parks swarming with mutinous animals; there are no buildings here, no cables, no pylons, nothing. There is nothing, nothing; there are no roads even, nor walls, bridges, hospitals, barbers, butchers, pharmacies; museums are absent; and shops, and markets selling fruit and sentimental knick-knacks. TWO Even the ruins around this place have still to be built, lived in, fought for, destroyed by monsoon rains, by dead and dated wars, and rebels hiding from the recent defeats of old conflicts that never end; there are just trees; just podo trees rising like citadels around the titanic flanks of the volcano; trunks thirty feet round; their branches forking low, twisting, arching into artless beams, hewn lintels, giant joists; a stronghold, spontaneous, animate, built in a high lapsed land, soaring above borders that have worn into wasted lines, pale snaking imprints woven invisibly between every spur and stream, climbing the sides, between ridges and peaks, vents, conduits, lakes – the crater, cloistered, limitless: every inch of every border remembered in old, disputed books in archives in Nairobi and Kampala; in the stories the tribespeople tell each other every breaking day in villages far, far away. THREE Mostly though, there are no people here: no trippers; no travellers, tourists, not even residents; just me, and one bemused young driver smoking through a pack of Marlboro lights. Especially, there are no houses, no homes or gardens; no streets or settlements. In this place - in this place here – no cars sound no buses blare their loud exhausted horns; there are no windows to open for music to escape from; conversation to drift from no drilling, grinding, crashing, crunching, no barking dogs or phones, no people talking, shouting, singing, nor even passing each other, to pass the day with a nod, a “Hi,” a “Humm”. In this place here there are no rooms filled with the ordinary things of life or of objects passed from one generation to the next. In this place here it is the trees that talk, that chatter and discourse in sudden winds; it is the birds that speak, confer, negotiate, the buzzards, bustards, cuckoos, kites; and the waterfalls, slapping over a hundred meters of rock, the hot springs bubbling, and hyenas baying at a cornered buffalo. In this place it is the sounds you cannot hear you notice first and last: the stealthy leopard, the bushbucks, cobras, lizards. This is a place that leaves no trace. FOUR I have climbed here quite alone, leaving the jeep where the level ground ran out. At the end of a ragged tread of off-road tyres the bush rolls, scrub to forest; long burnt grass - the colour of lions – reaches to the forest on the mountain’s sheer as tombstones sides; the slopes narrow to a lawless green, strip out light, break space into an elaborate maze only animals can navigate, following the antique paths made by wild elephants. You hear them, travelling by night, scouring the salt caves, their tusks - like the claws of massive diggers - carving deep channels into the volcano’s heart. Jungle defends the cancelled land, morphs into thick shadows, repeating and repeating all that it is; fugitive tracks - the tread of wary animals - blur and disappear, snaking off in the sombre light, the measured lunatic murmur of insects twists in tail-winds. Colobus move. FIVE Python creepers curtain from forty-metre trees; camphor, redwood, juniper, rebuff the shrinking sun. A hungry old insistent night begins to fall; and in the evening mists the volcano appears and disappears; floats, through the turning years since before the day was late; a temple over the world it made; a dreamland built in fire and ash in tephra, cinders, lava, a guarded shangri-la whose gods have names now quite forgotten (if they were ever known at all). Here, the jehovahs are perfect, imperfect, perpetually lingering on heedless of permissions craving not to know what to know before the world was finished. SIX &nbs...

7. 

   4 Jul 2025

   The Jungle

   David Swarbrick and Max de Silva explore the themes of hidden secrets, enduring words, and memories of happiness within the text of "The Jungle."

8. 

   3 Jul 2025

   Elegies for my Father

   David Swarbrick shares a series of elegies reflecting on his father's aging, frailty, and the emotional experience of saying goodbye, capturing the poignant moments of their relationship.

9. 

   3 Jul 2025

   The House We Share

   David Swarbrick's poem, "The House We Share," explores themes of loss, memory, and enduring love through poignant reflections on illness and mortality.

10. 

    3 Jul 2025

    The Cartographer's Art

    David Swarbrick explores the art of cartography through poetry, examining how maps evolve, memories shape perceptions, and forgotten histories resurface in modern life.

11. 

    3 Jul 2025

    After the Ball

    David Swarbrick's poem "After the Ball" explores themes of observation, unspoken desires, and the complex relationships between individuals at a formal event.

12. 

    3 Jul 2025

    The Summer Fortress

    David Swarbrick's poem, "The Summer Fortress," evokes vivid imagery and explores themes of memory, love, and loss through evocative language and personal reflection.

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