Poems

Wednesday

Claudine Toutoungi

Before there were words–

words like acrimony and amertumebefore somebody came along trying to cram the hard graininess of disagreement into languagebefore all that, there were birds some really quite big ones—a rude person might say elephantine which would be harsh because the thing is they still flew, that’s the miracle of it —however wide of girth and unwieldy they were with their big, blocky heads these massive prehistoric lumberers   sailed upwards and coasted around on the westerlies and northerlies of ancient time — they didn’t feel gauche or non-svelte, they felt beautifulall airy and agenda-less, quite caught up in their meandering (sometimesbellowed) improvisations across vast expanses and serene — happy even in the knowledge they could be purple, if the mood took thembut a.

Claire Booker

In the Martyred Intellectuals Cemetery, Dhaka

i.m. Abdul Gaffar Choudhury Above us, sparrows are acrobats in dripping banana trees. A downpour hisses out of the white, suffocated sky.  People lined the streets when your body passed in its refrigerated van. Your image still hangs at the gates.  Water is falling, falling blindly, pooling along your grave. A stray dog drinks its fill. Thunder stamps the air in gun salute. Clay here is blood red.We stand by the uprooted marble of your plot, waiting for the spoil to settle.  Not for you, these street boys anointing themselves with laughter and wetness, nor the rapture of young women  skipping puddles in drenched saris of fire and mango. The earth is taking a cast of who you were.Already, moisture has begun to evaporate.  Note: A.G.

Wednesday

Graham Allison

The Ship of State

The Ship of State is rolling on,rolling on to its fate. The Captain is elsewhere.A cardboard mirage stands uponthe Bridge. Officers bustle round,looking important, achieving little. The Crew come and go,seemingly as they please, do enough, just enough, to keepthe enterprise afloat. But so much is automatic —and for the rest, the mantra is: avoid obvious danger,presume the conventional course. The Ship of State is rolling on,rolling on to its fate.

Christopher James

The Boardwalk on the Beach at Trouville (1870)

From the painting by Claude Monet  Look closely, and you’ll see sand in the paint from the beach at Trouville, where I sat with Camille that summer. From this, you would hardly guess that war was coming; that Prussia had lured us in; that the clouds were not clouds, but the report of cannon fire. Our flags would never fly so proud again. Still, give us enough sunshine, and we will forget the world. On the promenade, one can hide from history beneath a parasol. But we cannot run from fate, just as we cannot escape our shadows. The slats of the boardwalk, hot beneath our feet, were the duckboards of future wars, the red boats on the waves, blood spilling on the green fields at Mars-la-Tour.

Caroline Smith

Boat Trip

Eventually we get Dad down into the boatwhere he loudly invites all the elderly ladiesto a seat on his lap‘as the benches are so squashed’.He is talking too much –it’s the joy of a captive audiencebut he’s been off the boards too longand needs to rediscover his art.  The boat swivels off in a flourish,a dark caliper of water widening from his stageand him spot lit in a column of sun.He jokes that I will steal thewater spaniel’s muzzle to put on him,but his words come out jumbledand all the owner hears is‘She’s going to steal your dog’. I look for something to distract himbut the landscape is still and serene.Just waders stalking the estuary shorelineprodding and stuttering the mud.

Sally Festing

World is What You Touch

We no longer hold hands  because you use a walking-stick to stand.  Instead we slip together afternoons, stretch  across the double-bed we can’t use nights now you’re so restless. I lie fingers on your arm, toes against your skinny tibia  and it’s enough through seaweed feet  to slither deep, not to sleep  but into another world. My skin is listening to familiar haunting,  little songs tuned to body,  a pulse of openings and closings anchored where oceans form and dissolve, scatter and gather, changing as they remain the same.  I peer at the elemental  extraordinariness of lying there, chilly-boned, a flame passing through to do with all I breathe and am.

Wednesday

Ruth Padel

The Waves of Chios

As when a man who has been dementing for years –old friends burst into tearswhen they see the ruins of his mindold lovers in despairlook up the rules for Dignitas – when he dies at last, gently, in deep sleepand one by one for the rest of usthe memories sweep back,how he listened, how he believed in dialogueand held warmth in his heart to the end – so, looking down from the cliffI watch the wild Greek ocean-going waveswith their cargo of flotsam and saltroil around the rocks, fan up in spray, spread their all-embracing murmur on the shore, and never stop.

Graham Allison

Stone Island Archipelago

They appear to believe they’ve laid the patio of everyone’s dreams: beautiful, lovingly made, fashionably disordered. You can see from their faces they’re proud of their work, proud of themselves — though it’s a haphazard, crazed mess, compounded of slabs of different sizes that simply don’t fit together — gaps chinking through — some slabs broken, others cracked, or dribbled with paint. And they’ve put in no foundations, no hard- core, no sand, and it’s all just plonked down on the grass of their back garden. They tell me, it does what it’s meant to do, for them, it works well, it works fine.

Wednesday

Rebecca Watts

Procrastination Island

Some of us can’t see the wood for the piles of notes obscuring the windows – notes on paper, in the making of which the established view has had to be dismantled. We try another tack, bend our minds to an alternative approach, but down on the beach it’s high-note tide, the smooth and shiny stones all lost beneath a swell of notes. We construct an origami boat, roll up notebooks for oars and paddle staunchly to the horizon where novel observations are reeled aboard like minnows and several drownings are noted. Those of us who make it back to shore find much has changed since we set off – even the words sound different now.

Peter Mullen

With Love to Mozart

It is the fear by which all fears are fed, The certainty one day you will lie dead. Such fear is groundless, some might call it rot: Consider, where death is there you are not. Truly, this should have no power to scare, Like you, it will be neither here nor there. Just wait, the harmless truth shall be revealed, You flourished as a flower of the field. You won’t be struggling for a breath of air, Or fretting in the dust, still half-aware. Fear not, there’s no foul limbo in-between The fact that you once were and now have been. There is one who evokes this comedy Precisely and entire, most perfectly Don’t speak of hell or everlasting bliss, I simply want to be where Mozart is.

Christopher James

Solitary

For this to work, we must switch places so my cell, this window, these walls become yours, so now, in the blue night you can see the shadow of a bird as it flits across the moon and in the morning, feel the sun, like a jailor, pouring its light meanly through the bars. Listen, and you’ll hear faintly, the sound of children, snatches of song; on Saturdays, perhaps a violin or guitar. Once you’ve tuned your eyes to the dark you’ll see the damp on the wall  has grown into an olive tree. And after a year,  you might find the place where I bundled my despair; the loose brick where I hid my hope.

Wednesday

Ned Denny

Song (After Heine)

Who invented the clock, pray tell, time’s division, the ticking spell? An ice-cold man that hated song, who sat and thought the whole night long and listened to the starved mice brawl and beetles pacing in the wall. What invented the kiss? I’ll tell: a lovely mouth, you know full well, that kissed and did not think at all; it was in May, the wondrous call of bird and bloom adorning earth, the sun-god roaring golden mirth.

Wednesday

Tim Liardet

The Etymology Wars

Awful you were christened on the eighth daywith a name that was like any name the christener’s gift.   Awful you were christened because your actswere so awfully and obsessively oddand broke every law of the house.Who would have known you served another lawthat advised your awe-filled dreadof what on earth would happen if you didn’t flickthe switch ten times, or hide the keys?Who would know you brought to the houseyour many awful and unlawful actsso awfully lawfully, so awfully full of awe?

Tuesday

Fleur Adcock

Notice to Foxes

Take back your big green foam rubber balland the red one with teeth marks, and the shuttlecock. Take the leather sandal kidnapped from next door.Take your chewed KFC packaging, plus the sachet of sauce, the paper napkinand the surgical mask you scavenged from the pavement. Replace the mountain of earth you dug outfrom under the roots of our sycamores, and the panel of fencing you knocked overon the way to trampling my bedding plants, snapping off tall foxgloves at the root,and dragging down my Rosa Mundi. Go squealing and scrapping in some other garden,with all your trappings. You have ceased to be cute.

Patrick Hare

Wearyall Hill

(A legend of the Christmas rose) The old man on the Tor that morning Woke up, he said, to find his mooring Had overnight become a hill, The lake scattered with piles of land Become a valley. A lorry undid The tiny tangled road below. Where was his trading ship ? he asked, And the godchild who had travelled with him ? I offered to help him search for them. He did his best to follow me, Tired and stumbling down the slope. The stiles and precipitous ditches Pitched us above the landscape And his legendary journey. I looked back up for him. Far off He loomed above the shifting sky, The figure on a dipping prow Fastened to its endless quest. I never saw him in the town.

Rory Waterman

First-time Buyers

She dings the bell, a muffled chime from the gut of number twenty-nine, and both of us step off the step, survey. This place was quite a schlep from where we parked behind the bar we’d called ‘our future local.’ Ha! A couple emerges, whips past, and a suited lad is left; one hand grips an iPad, the other keys. He holds a smile, says ‘This way, please’ and leads us down a mildewed hall. She mutters ‘I think we’ve seen it all’ but, being English, we poke about. Two more stand ready as we file out. Two more stand ready as we file through the gate of number fifty-two which backs against the prison. Wire coils above the back yard, higher than anything the listing caught on film somehow, it seems. Abort!

Wednesday

Kate White

Unrequited Love

They’re trying to hold the shapeof their smiles while wrestling with their darlings who, it seems,would rather be anywhere than planted on their knees: mum and thunderous son,dad clutching daughter, as she flails towards something in flight.The photographer clicks anyway. They’ve made an effort: the knitsare new and ties are properly knotted. Poor parents. These are the cuckoosthey let into their cherished nest.

John Levett

Bottle

He wakes. Alive. No cash. No phone. Down from their ash trees squirrels nose through drink and dope enough to stone a wood’s astonishment of crows. He stirs and gives the crows a scare. Pinned up with lamps, tar paper sky flaps open at a corner where, tipped out of dusk, moths flicker by, skim rings around him, put to flight such stars as steel-capped boots might spark, shake out the red from each tail light before their wings fold into bark; its scabbed and corrugated face that mocks him as, still pissed, he tries to wave down cars or, flailing, chase light vanishing inside cats’ eyes, gone searching for an end, a trick with ampoule, vial or blister pack or, waiting for its twist and click, the white top of a childproof cap.

John Levett

My friend Proudhon

I painted beaches, seasides, shores or waves dashed on a harbour wall, a mackerel sky, a signature, to peddle to the gullible, until the seasons ran aground with darkly varnished fishing smacks or chalk-white gulls soared to astound the cliffs that threw their shadows back. My friend Proudhon said property was theft and so each rock and shell, each stone turned over by the sea, was never mine to lift or sell; as if I’d stumbled on by chance, light-fingered, dawn’s exuberance, pickpocketing, as morning came, sienna, cobalt, cadmium.

Philip Hancock

Turntable

On the yard behind Hanley Fire Station,   Jean-Claude from the French manufacturer is servicing the ladder. Bob, the chief mechanic,  hands slipped inside navy boiler suit   warm on his belly, purses his lips,  puffs his cheeks at Jean-Claude spinning in the operator’s seat like a funfair ride,  testing the turntable: sending the ladder  higher than the drill tower, maxed out;  then all sections sliding down, gathered into one again, compact. In the first floor canteen  they face one another in silence – Bob knows a spanner and a spindle but can’t do French, Jean-Claude  flummoxed by the local cuisine – both relieved they’re almost done, back on their feet, cheers, au revoir.