Poems

Her end of terrace up for sale I lift old photos off the wall,  leave three sun-faded patches where no face looks down to judge or care which dresses, blouses, skirts I drop in bin bags for the hospice shop or, delicately cavalier, sort lipsticks, powders, underwear, chuck peep-toes, slingbacks then throw in high heels for shoebank, boots for bin, until, boxed up, price-tagged, risqué, I find, unopened, tucked away, sheer stockings, slips, pink camisole, a Charvet scarf, Kashmiri stole, knocked off, long hidden in this drawer illicitly still waiting for that starry night, that final fling time larcenously failed to bring.

The moon trails its glitter in the Thames. A Welsh Elvis sings If I Can Dream and the party begins.                                              The old slip away to soft chairs, drink tea.                                                    The young spin with the silver globe’s stars on the ceiling, arms raised, in the current of their joys as if love had ushered them downstream through arches to the sea.

Prisoners of war and victims of hunger they reach for food through invisible bars. Their homeland a prison, they gather together wherever aid workers arrive in the street. Their empty bowls are upturned helmets held at arm’s length as if begging for peace. Victims of war and prisoners of hunger, either or both are a world without end.

We pause while he takes out the window from his shop. The fancy way he handles your likeness makes us stop; the way his violet glass reflects your better side, sharpening with sunlight the tongue in cheek you hide, until two yellow gloves release you from the glare, tip you out, conceal you up sleeves of dusty air, where either I must follow or, back before you’ve gone, be thankful that he’s left me this frame to rattle on.

We shall both have hats showing we are wonderful,And mine will be big and blue as the sky,And yours will be the same colour as the daybreak,And on the moment that we die,We shall hang them on the peg whose name is HeartacheAnd never for one moment stop to wonder whyWe both had hats showing we were wonderful. So I shall to the hatter and you’ll go to the milliner,And mine will be a hat of sturdy felt,And yours will deploy all manner of fine fabric.And while we’re waiting for them, we shall meltInto each other’s head without a panicAnd learn all of the places each has dwelt.Yes, I’ll go to the hatter and you will to the millinerAnd we shall both have hats showing we are wonderful. Wherever we shall walk, the people will say ‘Ah,There go the fancy couple in their hats!

For D.M. Your morning caller on your corkscrew willow,  herald-on-high, swaying on the tip-top branch, purveyor and articulator of the drear backyards and garages of the new-build housing estate,  a mad planner’s rash, built spilling-out,  in bricky flood over the salt marsh. Trilling exultant blackbird, who,  when you buckle under baleful neighbourly   pressure to prune the tree, that looks endlessly  a free-flowing fountain; (the only tree anywhere to be seen) is gone.  And the morning is bare, silent, empty.  And what is a morning without song.

We take photographs of snow falling, but all we capture is the aura of feelings, abstract and ill-defined, the sensations of snow, of falling, of tumbling and dreaming, obscurely. We glimpse childhood in fragments, gleaming, a memory of you standing in the doorway, glances, leaving, coat on, bags packed and ready for denial. The falling snow can’t hide that look on your face, joy of departure, pleasure of dancing snow angels, a sense of delight, betrayal in the smear of ash. A blanket of perfect white before the stains came, a perfect life, marked, patented and forgotten, just photographs of snow falling, trying to capture obscure beauty, ephemeral and all too fleeting.

We are all, you might say, waiting for those barbarians even though we lack particulars, even an approximate profile, mug-shot, card-index summation, press cutting.

What magic is this, to elucidate the stars? Dawn chorus erupts with a thousand yarns, a thousand memories, wishes and desires, an avian Arabian Nights furnished before us, loves, losses and the lyrical space between, adventures told with a spectacular orchestral score, imagine if we’d never heard any of this before, we’d be in awe, dumbstruck at the beauty, seeing the impossible elegance of this world a million times or more, instead we yawn and fall asleep again, enemies to the beauty, outsiders to a world so stunning and profound, we miss all that should make us so spellbound, forget the wonder, but wonder never forgets us.

Winter, 2022 I Apartment blocks stand stiffly like Swiss cheese, Pale walls sliced through with holes that let them breathe. Elsewhere a single wall looks wafer thin. The water is unsafe, it breeds disease. The crunch of popping shells unnerves the skin. Faced with this daily diet , people seethe Remembering those laid in shallow soil While cooking pots in basements stew and boil. II These images are peppered with the sound Heard by the hungry huddled underground. And, sadly, we have seen this long before In Stalingrad, the ghetto in Warsaw. What does it take to move our numbing feet, Dogs gnawing bodies lying in the street? If this is food for thought, then have we lost The taste for action, counting only cost?

Last night among his fellow roughs, He plotted, schemed, and swore; An anxious statesman of the Bluffs, Who never looked before. To-day, beneath the foeman’s frown, He stands in Charles’s place, Ambassador from Britain’s crown, And type of all her race. Rich, reckless, posh, well-born, well-taught, Bewildered and alone, A heart with leftish instinct fraught, He yet can call his own. Ay, tear his body limb from limb, Bring cord or axe or flame, He only knows that straight through him Shall England come to shame.