Poems

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.

When I was young, nobody ran, unless, behind them on a dark and lonely road, they felt the breath of some misshapen thing, the aspens quivered and the willows wept; or if they’d spent their bus fare on warm beer, and they were overdue where duty called. Accoutred armies hurtle through our parks and boulevards, no good to ask them where’s the fire. Health oozes from their every pore. The race is to the swift, though only three ascend the podium. The rest are also-rans, way down the field, not troubling the judge. But now my ears are pricked, I pick up speed. There is the flag, and there the finish line.

There’s a magical muddle that clings to the pagelike mist to a meadow. No help in the hurting, no truth in the light,just haze on the harvest. I’ve cancelled my comeback and chosen insteadto be cloistered in clover. In the blare of the body the spirit lies mutelike a book in a bottle. I’ll hunker in hollows where wisdom is vagueand history can’t happen. There’s a heaven of honey in hives of friends’ hearts.They’ll humour my headstone.

                           1950s I Black as newsprint and round as bowler hats Tall chimneys puff away like cigarettes, Away, away... until the time that lets Them crumble or replaced by council flats. But smoke still tumbles from some chimney tops, A television set glows in a dark Room lit by coal. How long will time let park An armchair by a fire until it stops? II But furniture is changing, too; brand new With pine and plastic sitting in a room As pert as house plants that now people groom Beside the gleaming radiogram on view.

The house lights dim again: Willy Loman, Vanya, Lear talk to the dark before their eyes – while you glance sideways at your neighbours, who’ve brought their lovers, husbands, wives to sit beside them (or to occupy their minds). What do they want to see? The play goes on, into its last deciding act. A few will leave early: their spirits rise apologetically and drift toward the doors. Some women weep, some men feel anger at their own bald age as Lear is lost in grief. Applause is ferocious at the end. How can they leave? There must be more. What’s next? The pages of the programme have gone blank. ‘Shall we go round to see the people in the show?’ To find the dressing rooms empty, bare.

World’s stock of afternoons is running short And summer’s light is turning golden brown – It’s time to summon up our winter thoughts Since poetry will always be our sport And images, once mothered, won’t disown Our afternoons, though old, though running short, For in mind’s shadows metaphors hold court And new dreams swarm. We fully own It’s time to conjure up our winter thoughts, New entities of if and how, the sort That make us glad to live in winter towns Whose broken afternoons are falling short.