Poems

Wednesday

Jack Warren

Song

I wake for work and work for pay.The morning is not morning yet.My body is a rented lump of clay. The swollen clouds oppress the day.The cold pierces like a bayonet.I wake for work and work for pay convinced my inner life has gone astray.I gain a wage by pointless sweat.My body is a rented lump of clay. At night I dream of disarrayof islands, oceans and a fishing net.I wake for work and work for pay and instead, I am a cast awayfloating as the calm sun sets,my body just a rented lump of clay. Tomorrow’s sullen hours will obeythe foreman’s belligerent threatand I will wake for work and work for paymy body but a rented lump of clay.

Caroline Smith

In Decline

To start with there was an odd word  left like a fridge on a street corner, not where you’d expect,  but easy enough to explain. Then we noticed whole sentences being wedged into strange places, a collection of beer cans glittering  in an otherwise ordinary winter privet hedge. Flocks of scattered thoughts began to  sweep in and out of conversations. Little fledgling starlings running criss-cross over a fast-food car park in shallow waves converging on crumbs, dispersing  dodging feet.

Wednesday

Claudine Toutoungi

The Second Longest Corridor in Europe

holds no truck with comparisons. Holds no truck with anything  much besides sunlight and dust swirls and the breezy clip -clop-clip of heels upon endless parquet. The Second Longest  Corridor does not deceive itself. Knows there are sidelong glances, spindly remarks (also-ran, windy thing) from those who  complain that it drags on so — can’t take a hint, can’t just politely  trail off. (The Second Longest Corridor has never trailed off.)  Wends its way along and down and past and up, watching  the unkind comments disperse around its furthermost bend.

Rebecca Farmer

Ghost train

For G.D.M. To walk around Dreamland and not take the rides: not much of a plan but the man’s face changed all that, took me back to a candy floss summer when I learnt to spin sugar from a boy who looked the same as this guy who stood by the sign ready to start the train. He was the boy who lived in the caravan and sprinkled candy sugar on his Weetabix because he liked to see milk turn pink. I watched him practise his three-card trick. And here he was, older but still his voice when he said because we were only two in the queue he’d make the train go slower. He pressed the button and the doors swung. With a scream we jerked away and towards ourselves in a gyration of mirrors and ghouls.

Susan E. Holland

December Moth outside a care home window

Thick furry balaclava’d neck. Shaggy charcoal pelt. A cream hairstreak, wings fringed with cork, and feathery snow-shoes on its head. It came in a gale –  fooled by a moony lamp –  and stayed a week  on the sill outside the chair you’d take. With gale after gale more of the moth was lost, antennae first. Scales flaked like pixels, quilted your brain cells –  a patchwork of negative space. By the end of the week the moth wore its wings off the shoulder like the net of dropped stitches in an old punk mohair jumper.

Wednesday

Adrian Buckner

well met last night

Two tables pushed together, the beer coming in timely and convivial rounds. A song, a chorus joined and hilarious failures at games we played. And then you plucked from the air an offence in a foreign theatre of war and I caught in your group-beguiling tone, the note of the Commissar prepared to burn a village, its music halls and fields of play.

Jamie McKendrick

Neither Fish Nor Fowl

Sometimes mending a poem can feel like freeing a large fish from a caul of plastic netting, working away with only a pocket knife while the fish thrashes about, suspicious that every saving cut will end its life; but then the fish turns out to be a turtle with gashes on its verdant mottled limbs. You might expect a modicum of gratitude though you’d be wrong. No sooner disentangled the brute turns tail and heads off out to sea.  But never fear. Someone with a turtle-spear stands ready to gaff the ingrate. Will you look, he says, at its clumsy flippers that aren’t at all like fins or feathers. The least we can do is put the poor thing out of its misery.

Wednesday

Suzannah V. Evans

Lullaby to Tristan Corbière

‘Mais il fut flottant, mon berceau’ – Corbière Sleep, sleep, my floating boy!A plunge of Northern gannets ridesthe air above your head; collideswith silver fish that shoal below.Let these ravens’ krok-kroksooth and lull you as you rock –sleep, sleep, my floating boy!Sleep, sleep, my floating boy!The herring-hunting humpbacks soundand ring their bubble nets aroundyour cradle as it pitches inthe waves. Their underwater howlswill take the place of Breton owls –sleep, sleep, my floating boy! Sleep, sleep, my floating boy!As sailors pass, you’ll hear them callto keep the timing as they haulthe anchor up from choppy seas.Accompanied by wave and spray,they sing out ‘haul-two, haul-belay’ –sleep, sleep, my floating boy!

Caroline Smith

Visiting

My father has become an old Aegean King peering out anxiously, scanning the horizon full of foreboding. So I phone him before I leave to say I’m on my way. I use light words, ‘coming soon’, ‘around that time’, promising words that hover and play, allow him  to drift in and out of sleep while he waits,  the way he did on the lake front that year, filling whole mornings just sitting, watching for the small island ferry. He’d listen to the early wash of pebbles the bakery opening,    the few passengers beginning to assemble. The lake was so still, so flat he could follow the ferry’s whole journey –   see it set off from the far shore, its flourishes in and out of tiny bays.

Diana Hendry

In the Men’s Changing Room

Women aren’t allowed in so we lurk on the threshold – wives, mothers, lovers waiting for our men to appear in their new changed selves. Prime among them comes the boy, trying on his new blue suit for next week’s prom. At once we recognise the occasion, know it’s not a suit  he’s trying on but grown-up-dom. A clutch  of mother hens, we bond in fuss and fret, dress him in our very best wishes. Now what colour tie should he wear? Which shoes? We’re all over him, our fledgling  with his acne, his awkward stance, his excruciating embarrassment, his beauty.

Wednesday

Don Rodgers

The Sad Truth

Some of us are not cut out to be happy.  Our role is to suffer undramatically, quietly,  at home, while the world goes by outside.   We are the ones who pay for your daily joys. Our marriages fail; our health; our wealth;  our prospects turn to dust.  If we pluck up the courage to venture  out into your world, we become  scarecrows to frighten the black birds  from your sunny fields.  How we make you laugh!  You think we’re pathetic.  At dusk, when we close our eyes, the birds  gather on our outstretched arms and crow.  This is the best we can do: to sing  along with the black birds at evening.  So you can find us funny.

Wednesday

Adrian Buckner

Arthur Street, DE1

Naming these things is the love-act – Patrick Kavanagh Brighton House and MerrendenRoslyn Villa by Milford House Arthur Cottages one at AnnanElmwood and St Leonards meet Charnwood and the Park View HouseMalvern is three down from Cedars Shakespeare nods down to MiltonLike Poplars on a Holly Bank Tennyson knows the Lindum HouseFern Bank and Carew too Ashwood House VictoriaThe Stamford and the Ashley Villas An East View of MorningtonPark stretches down to Woodbines Wardley Cottage by a Daisy BankElma and the Oban House Adolphe Cottage Fernly VillaMelbourne dreams in Myrtle Bank.

Jack Nicholls

Natural Causes

Their eye-stalks unfurl the way you turn socks right-side-out, the eye a surprise at the end, so to picture a snail dying — not pierced or gouged or caved in like a church, but dying of natural  causes, its little foot crawling, brainless, hoping, like your blood, to one day feed a forest floor — picture your held, worn socks, twinned in the dark interior of your sock drawer, waiting for you to unthinkingly warm them, the treasure you hide in one less-loved sock waiting, also, to be taken out and turned to wink in endless,  gushing light — though you are never coming home, and the drawers you closed once will remain always closed, their contents wondering  if love’s thin topsoil.

Wednesday

Robert Hamberger

Café Roma

How many years since we ate here – nine, ten? We called it the smoky café before the ban, took the kids upstairs for pasta each time they stayed with us. Now they wake inside their lives, miles away, and we (who feared this place had shut) share pizza on our return: olives dotted over cheese, as if minutes are mushrooms, aubergines like cities we love. Sure, the manageress behind the bar has a subtle map of lines across her face, though her hair-dye is red as history. The leaning tower fades on the wall above our forks. We’re old, not wise, savouring chips with mayo, crusts and wine.

Brandon Robshaw

Relief

If I were called in to construct a religion relief would figure prominently. Best of all the positive emotions: warmer than contentment, deeper than joy, intenser than ecstasy. Congregants would go to church in wincingly tight shoes which they could slip off once seated. The building would have toilets  but their use would be forbidden  until the end of the service.  Prayers would give thanks for droughts ended, and for dangerous illnesses recovered from, and for dismal performances in exams that somehow achieved passing grades, and chest-pains that were merely muscle-strains and hymns would celebrate dreadful might-have-beens, and terrifying events that never, thank God, came to pass.

Wednesday

Georgina Lock

A Moment in Mariupol

from 20 Days in Mariupol, directed by Mstyslav Chernov After the bomb burst the hospital, her wounds were incompatible with life, the life she should have had to include dancing and, when this is history, if not a piece of theatre, chasing her laughing toddler along the beach. Yet she had life to give. They filmed her stretchered to the ambulance, to bump off full speed for Hospital Two in Mariupol.  Having started, the story must finish. They did reach Hospital Two, outlined her scene one, guessing her thirty or so years. Gynaecology was noisy. Stretchers kept coming in. But a doctor grabbed a moment for the camera. ‘She was Irina. Shattered pelvis. We got her baby out and tried to make it cry.

Paul Birtill

Doing Things

What I don’t like about being alive is that you have to keep doing things, when really I’d prefer to do nothing. But you have to do this and that every day – endless little tasks and chores repeated again and again just because you’re alive. What should I do now – clean the toilet?

Wednesday

Siriol Troup

Watching my Mother on Pathé News

Somalia breaks off relations in 1963 so hurried packing is the order of the day and there she is in black and white swishing down the years in a gauzy frock past hat boxes and tea chests while servants hammer down the lids. Mosquito nets predict a breeze. The camera leaks her fear and sweat. My father won’t believe his eyes or ears. ‘And me?’ he roars, unable to account for scenes in Mogadishu where my mother is the star and he’s not even a prop or a walk-on part, just a scrap of footage casually dropped on history’s floor.

Wednesday

John Greening

Stone

Leckhampton chimney has fallen down’ – Ivor Gurney In fact, it’s still much as it was,if you can find it, and if the dogs(nobody walks the hill without one)will leave off for a moment jumpingto press their muddy scrawl on you. Out here, I’m protected, surelywith three jackets. I missed the bus,lost the path, then climbed the mostdifficult route, up the oldtram incline to this stack of limestone. Walking, he imagined its collapse,yet here it is. Smokeless. Solitary.A cenotaph for something quarried.Headquarters, chapel, school,government building, home, asylum. The Devil’s Chimney. Its partial viewof Gloucestershire makes it seema healthy peaceful place, but hardespecially on lungs. In Stone House,he walks and walks the level grounds.

Rebecca Watts

Multiverse Valentine

In your lit eyes I see other candles, other flames. On the stiff white tablecloth I lay out my jokes like the contents of a handbag. Your laugh, as mine, sounds far away. But the scene — how close and familiar it all is! Uncountable sweetnesses, tragedies.