Poems

Thursday

Hugo Williams

Leakage

Muscle patterns that show satisfaction or delightas opposed to a disingenuous smirkhave been identified by the Laboratory of Human Interactionto provide more information about suicidal patientswho want to check themselves out of hospitalin order to take their own lives.   The best test for a genuine smileis to look at the eyebrow and watch for skin droop.The skin under the eyebrow is lowered only in genuine smiles.Unhappy feelings show through false smilesfor about one third of a secondin what we term ‘leakage’.

Thursday

Stephen Bone

Cold

The heatwaves that would have filledmy tubs and cones never came.‘O sole mio’ falling flat as I drovethrough my hard fought for patchon the outskirts of Aldershot.The Whitby Morrison will have to go,it won’t fetch much, mouths to feed,another on the way and barely enoughto stretch to a penny lick. The collapseddream of a gelato empire with parloursof chrome and glass, has brought an arcticcoldness to my other half, nothing I door say will thaw her now, it would takean ice pick to reach her heart.

Jamie McKendrick

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle

From The Years (Arc Publications, £8)     I came to tend – I lie – to visit the grave of a friendand found an ugly shrub with waxy leaveshad made the plot its home. Since my last attendance   ten years had passed – doing I can’t think what,except translate a dead man’s words – and nowthe whole granite headstone was obscured   by brambles and weeds and this excrescence.All overgrown. My friend had somehow ended upin a thicket of Cyrillic, the White Russian sector   who have cared a lot better for their lost ones.Or so you’d think if love were judged like that.Now that I’m older than he ever was,   in far worse nick than he would have been,I dimly sense how we’re the wrong way round.

Daniel Hardisty

Funerary

The place was out beyond an old farmhouse,a path through woods,a clearing, sky; the others gathered close,bounded by what each of us withstood.The limestone scree tumbled down the hillsideintermittently, clouds covered the sun.I shook the crushed femur and fibulaof peppered ashes, watched them weightless glidelike spores, and faintly salt and taint the tongue,slow majesty of bone-dust candelabra.Your half-brothers, behind me, began to singin harmony –Christian, Bach – joining and gently weavinguntil they filled the improvised canopythat we, unchurched, brought to the blue hillside.

Thursday

Jonathan Steffen

Hearses

Like regrets drifting through consciousness,They glide through the streets of our cities,Untouchably themselves,Silently intent on their purpose,Counting eternities with each corner they turn.Belonging to no time or place,They appear in our hearts,Offering up the flowers we never sentAnd the words we never spoke,Only to disappear once moreInto the great flow of lifeAnd the great flow of death.I wonder what obsequiesAre spoken over themWhen they at lastReach the end of their own road,These discreet and faithful guardiansOf all that we have failed to be?

William Wootten

In the Park

In the park today,All that I found had a name.The black ball of a robin’s eye,The dizzy dart and dawdle of the sky blue butterflyWere almost just the same,   But I had their songIn my hands and lips,Like the grass I picked when it had beenRolled and rolled until the colour of its darker green Was now my fingertips,   So I travelled fartherInto the depth of the park,With the gumboot slickness of a slugAnd the tictoc waterboatmen out wrinkling the rug On the pond’s unblinking dark.   There were daisies’ yellow circlesInside daisies’ yellow circlesPiled on their slim white spoons,And I ran around and round and round and sang the tunes That all went round in circles.

William Wootten

On a Paper Napkin

In its translation, this poem does not rhyme,Nor do its lines possess much of a metre,And yet its lilt has something of the chatterTo be heard around the overpriced caféWhere its translator likes to spend his timeDiscoursing to the waitress on the wayHe matches sentiment to syllableTo convey the tang of the original.   ‘Ah! It must be wonderful to have such skillIn another’s language that one can translateIts poetry to ours and not to wait On tables’, says the waitress with a laughSo fetching he might overlook the spillOf wine between his glass and her carafe.

Thursday

Robert Saxton

The Broad Walk

Regent’s Park, November   I pick a tree, from all those rows,ruggedly gesturing, voiceless,braced for the fall of shaming snows,a captive in its stark undress.   At my feet the thousand-piecespuzzle in countless shades of brownattests to a handful of specieswhose leaves the recent winds brought down:   English oak, sycamore and plane,dropped from nearby if not above,plus singletons a whispering campaignseems to have carried from some grove-   cum-library of rumours from afar –silver maple, pin oak, liquidambar.

Ian Harrow

Last Word But One

The vanity of your insistencethat there is still time remainingto speak what words can’t sayon these most wishful of dayswhen, for you, the dying part is nearand still you want to believethe conversations will go onas you rest your handlike the hallucination of a handon files that nurse the latestshortfall in everything you made.

Wednesday

Paul Henry

Tauseef Akhtar’s Harmonium

Often it disappears – from hotels, harbours, airport carousels… but always it comes back to him.   Trusting in the umbilical dance of instrument and player he stays calm in its absence.   Amongst the cosmic flotsam orbiting Earth this minute There! Tauseef’s harmonium.   On the sea bed, flexing its gills for ghazal-hungry shoals Listen! Tauseef’s harmonium…   sometimes for years until, missing his voice on the air, it plunges through the atmosphere   or, surfacing back to the light, steals in on the tide’s concertina to appear at Tauseef’s paddling feet –   a child’s shadow through frosted glass after all hope has been lost.

Thursday

Daniel Hardisty

Phantom

The year after my brother died,I was out on my threadbare Vespain countryside south of Bradford.The day was warm and blue;I let myself get lost, turn by turn,until I rode solo along the lanes.Low, overhead of me, a plane flewwith a single propeller,its undercarriage painted cloud-like:its span the shape of a Spitfire,or other kin from boyhood books.I stopped in the road,cut the engine, and took off my helmet;and heard it made no sound.I was untethered in those yearsby grief that made my life unreal.I stood and beckoned to this ghost.

Claudine Toutoungi

We couldn’t get the parts to write this poem

Our metaphor container ship is dry-docked in Bratislava and our simile warehouse in Wuppertal has had to close its doors.   We apologise. Some figments, we believe, may still be in transit, but there are supply chain fractures due to disputes over paperwork.   We’re so sorry that we couldn’t get the parts but the task has not been helped by a generaldip in the market for lyricism in the West   and in the East by surveillance tactics to curb outbreaks of oxymorons, iambics, and randomenjambment. Rising divorce rates between   couplets has also been unprecedented and manyof the major manufacturers of pathetic fallacyhave changed profession, citing burn-out.

Thursday

William Palmer

The Suitcase

She said she dreamedthat young once moreshe walked a roadthat led from nowhere   into nowhere,and, stopping, placedher name-tagged suitcase down.The question asked   inside her headwas this: ‘Shall I go on,walk on. Or turnand stay a while?’   She turned, and leftthe suitcase standing thereto be reclaimedsome other day   when she would need no proofof who she wasor where she was to go,the handle forming to her hand.

Patrick Hare

Storm Force

The windows of the tight old houses bulgeAcross the fishhead cobble, a rope that moorsThe sea to a church with its back to the quay.The sky is stuck fast in the tower tabs.See now the worried wives, thronging and blocking,Peering and peering through swollen glassTo watch the catch of bodies hauled uphill,The dead from the sea laid out in the gate.The lids of graves are hatches propped right upBy ancient seamen, peering and peeringThrough swaying weed that hangs their bones and brows.Sea pearls are lodged in the o of hope, andAnno Domini is a rusted spar.Stained-glass and shipwreck light in the church;Heaven has rot, fish swim through the aisle interments.Into the tide the bridge of the chancel twists.In the tight houses panes writhe with faces.

Damian Grant

Deciduous

Inevitable autumnafter the excesses of summer:the year has simply nothing more to do.But look: the falling of each single leafis slow and indecisive, hesitantas if (like floating voters) they are notconvinced this is a good way to go;the necessary ending oftheir short aerial adventure – even asthey do the deciduous thing, andfollow the crowd.

John Fuller

The Basilica of the Holy Blood, Brugge

A squeeze-box performs outside:The tinny air is pumpingwThrough its half-forgotten song    Like a failing heart.   The sacred relic’s displayedIn its dull crystal and goldFor visitors to inspect    As they shuffle by.   The priests sit behind it, bored.They are no more concerned thanCustoms officials might be,    Suspicious of the queue.   The phial offers itselfAs contraband of a kind,A miraculous symbol    Taken from a corpse.   Who was this man, whose own songWe have taken for grantedOr heard only in snatches,    Worth his weight in blood?

Christopher James

Giverny (1887)

Thinking on it now, it was like living at sea beneath the whaleback hills, in those blue acres of lavender. Our house was a barge, its chimneys sharing our dreams with the sky. The barns were islands we would swim to through the fields, beyond the shoreline of the lane. Here, we would laze and snooze, sheltering from the unflinching gaze of the noonday sun. Marooned on our beds of hay, we would plot our escape – how one day we might slip away to Vernon, board the train to Paris and live as bohemians on the banks of the Seine, selling our paintings of the north, telling tales of the blue seas of Normandy.

Thursday

Siriol Troup

Just Desserts

Whit Sunday, blustery heat, and you in three-piece suit to read the Second Lesson.   The day before, I’d excavated Arctic Rolls from ice-shelves in the local store’s deep freeze.   We ate them reverently, like miracles we didn’t quite believe in.   I threw up first and stayed in bed. You soldiered on through hymns of praise   till hot air swayed the church and God stopped leading you in upright ways,   an almighty adjustment that left you face down in the Benedictus, eating dust.

William Palmer

Duality

One day, my fellowoccupant of our cell,you’ll cease to followin my steps, to tell   me, looking throughour single window,about whatever viewyou’ve chosen for the day.   Somehow, absurdly,I’d foreseen collapse,my deserted body,our almost rhyming corpse,   and that you might walk awayjauntily singingto eternity. But, on the day,you only whisper, ‘I’m moving   to another cell, my dear.I’m sorry that we’re losingtouch. The last sound you’ll hearwill be the door closing.

Thursday

Blake Morrison

Ladybirds

One summer I’d a plague of them –they looked so pretty in their red and black I didn’t mind them fluttering round but then I’d find one on my pillowor leaving smears across the panes.The boldest liked to totter on my fingerthen take me under her wing –it was lined with finest satinwhich she unfolded like a sheet.For months she hung around the windowtill a gust or rumour took her off. I remember the smooth curve of her backand how she’d tumble from the bed to fetch up madly wriggling on the floorhelpless as an overturned coracle.