Category: Poetry

If music be the food of love then poetry may just be the language of emotion. Home for my own words and those of others who in some way inspire, inform, entertain or educate me.

Shaving

I see him still, his face in mine.
In this grey hair, that laughter line.
Me on a chair to match his height
Dad shaving in the morning light. 

Reflecting back a boy and man
The man now gone the boy a man
Dip the brush and whip the lather
Foamy-faced now I’m the father

And on the chair stood next to me
A little boy his dad to see
Now wet the razor scrape the skin
From neck to jaw from ear to chin

This morning though I’m all alone
The boy’s grown up and left our home
But when I look into the glass
I never let the moment pass

I see three faces not just mine
Young shavers standing in a line
Across the years and out of time.

The featured image is of my father, Brian, with me and my sister, Joanne, I think on holiday at Swanage, Dorset, in the early 1960s. Clearly the photograph was taken (by my mum I’m guessing) well before I started shaving. But sadly I don’t have anything other than mental images of the daily ritual that unites fathers and sons everywhere (or certainly those who aren’t bearded)!

Swift

First south and west, then north and east, I quarter up the sky.
I’m watching for your sickle wings to scythe across my eye.

I look, I look, then look again and listen for your scream.
But bar the clap of pigeon wings there’s nothing to be seen.

The mewl of buzzards overhead, spirals on upward air.
An aerial feat, though quite a treat, no answer to my prayers.

And still they go unanswered though the grass is growing long.
And the swallows and the martins have joined the heavenly throng.

I love their eaves-slung mudhuts and their lineups on the wire.
But you dear swift, my absent friend, you set my heart on fire.

So I look and look again for gracious airborne crescents.
Vesper flights in evening light please grace us with your presence.

And then you’re here and I thank god for sending you to me
Although I never crooked my neck the vicar’d church to see.

You are my priest of summertime. Your pulpit is the skies.
And when you leave and head back home a bit inside me dies.

The cock cranks north, the wind is cold, your ministry I need.
My neck cranes south beyond the spire I’m wishing you Godspeed.

The modest spire of St Peter’s Church, Coreley, across the orchard from our Shropshire home inspires many of my equally modest scribbles. This poem was written for when the weathervane swings back to the south and heralds the return of one of my favourite birds.

We shall sight them on the beaches

They didn’t want to be fishers of men
Women and children first hauled from the sea
And laid out on the deck like a prize catch
Gently by hands that are roughened by salt
Calloused but not callous softened by salt
Tears that fall from the blinking eyes of men
With their own women and children ashore
Where with warm feet firmly on the dry ground
We catch “chuck ‘em back in” on the air waves
Crashing hopes and dreams into a fine sand
Which next summer we will make castles from
And stand watching the fishing boats set sail
Disciples of cod not fishers of men. 
Red hulls, blue skies, white cliffs. Gulls in the wake. 
Christ! More people flock to a stranded whale 
Than this half inflated greying carcass
A little ship of Dunkirk lifeboats then 
But now no Newhaven, no safe harbour
From wars that are not finest hours but yours
You fight them on your beaches. This is our 
Landing ground and we shall say that this was
Our coarsest hour. 

This is a work in progress. So forgive the rawness and the rough-around-the-edges anger. But I wanted to post it while the inspiration is still fresh in our minds and on our news bulletins.

Since I wrote this draft the first victim of the mass drowning in the English Channel/La Manche off Calais has been named as Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin, a 24 year old Kurdish woman from northern Iraq. She was texting her fiancé in Manchester as the flimsy boat carrying her and 28 others began to sink. All but two perished.

Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin

Biology with Mr Fisher

Lesson one: let nature be your teacher.
No scrape of chairs indoors, no blackboard chalk
For him. Classroom fields. An outdoor creature
Who smelled of earth and planted with his talk…

Elms. Galleons afloat the pasture seas
But scuttled by scolytus. Now un-helmed
Hulls, boreholed by the scurvy of disease,
Sink. Memory leaves where landscapes are un-elmed. 

Above the broken hulks the ravens croak
While ivy-anchored masts are felled and fall
Then flare in pyres whose embers spit and smoke
On sunflower heads inclined towards the pall.

To school, to chairs, to books, to bells, to learn. 
Through windows daydreams fly like birds and yearn.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mr Fisher who taught me biology at Parkfields School, Toddington, in the early 1970s. My time there coincided with Dutch elm disease which ravaged the Bedfordshire countryside. He lamented the loss of these majestic landscape trees but turned arboreal tragedy to educational triumph by using it to explore nature in a way that has stuck with me ever since: up close and personal. Me and my classmates peeled bark to reveal the boreholes of the scolytus beetle larvae underneath. We examined the fungus the insect carried (the real killer) under microscopes. He sowed seeds in fertile young minds. Those seeds took root. There have been many fruits since. This poem is but the latest picking. Thank you Mr Fisher.

Dr. Mary Gilham Archive Project / Flickr / CC BY 2.0

Night farming

Furrows the Plough ‘cross the field of night.
Bellows Canis at the owls out of sight.
Callow Orion unbelted his might,
Shallow-breathed Virgo sowed without fight.

Sorrows the brow, Cassiopeia the queen.
Mellow the music of Lyra, unseen.
Hero Perseus his sword broad and keen.
Hallow’d Aquila surveying the scene.

Meadows by daytime all scattered with red.
Billow the poppies no sign of the dead.
Fallow the ground it was all in my head.
Fallow the woman beside me in bed.

Footprints in the snow

Eastern ashes astir aglow
As new moon lips mouth morning’s breeze
The arc then melts like springtime snow
Unshackling Earth from night-time's freeze.
Nocturnal creatures can’t be caught
By hieroglyphs to leaf-lined lairs 
Their secrets safe in shadows short
Billowing steam in sunbeam snares.
By eve the hearth coals shrink and cool
What was blunt is keen to sharpen
Penumbra from the blacksmiths tool
Hammer gripped and sinews stiffen.
The western foundry’s gutt’ring flame
Is sparking stars for night again.

At night the stars leave tracks in the sky and animals leave tracks on the ground. By day they disappear. Only to reappear as the sun sets and the moon rises. This poem was written as an exercise in sonnet form (ABABCDCDEFEFGG). According to convention each line ought to have ten syllables (the five “boom BOOM” heartbeats of iambic pentameter). This has only eight per line (the 2 x 4 of iambic tetrameter). I’ll let you, the reader, decide whether this disqualifies the piece as a sonnet.

Still Life

Shackled by time slippers shuffled
Stooped to the high-backed seat
Queen throned, grey crown ruffled
Prince and Princess at her feet 

The Prince takes a marbled hand
But a child’s touch cannot reach beyond
Their birth to a foreign land 
To retrieve lost memories fond

In her realm time and place are a synaptic jumble
Behind curtained lids sightless pupils dart
O’er a past decaying to a mumble
As mind and body part

On a pedestal a not-still life 
Head set in stone yet body moving
To the heart beat of a mother and a wife 
Her monumental presence soothing

This poem came to me after visiting my mother in her care home with my sister, Joanne. It was our first visit in six months because of Covid restrictions and only the second time we’d seen her in a year. I had originally planned writing about how hand holding is central to human relationships and that holding hands through surgical gloves is wholly inadequate – perhaps surprising given that latex is thinner than a sheet of paper. But it turned out there wasn’t much poetry in PPE 😷 and I was stumped until leafing through Poems of Today, an anthology of poetry I serendipitously discovered later that same day on my mother’s bookshelf. In it I was struck by Midnight Lamentation by Harold Munro and in particular by the last verse:

I cannot reach beyond
Body, to you.
When you or I must go
Down evermore,
There’ll be no more to say
-But a locked door.

The locked door image resonated as a metaphor not just for death but for the death of memory that is dementia. Another book on mum’s shelf (and on mine too) – A Shropshire Lad by A E Housman provided the metre.

Please make your selection…

Guinness, lager, shandy, coke
(You can go your own way)
Wisecracks, quips and sexist jokes
(Go your own way)
“This chair taken? No feel free!”
(You can call it another lonely day)
“Your shout Dave I need a pee.”

Please make your selection…

Fleetwood Mac then Britney Spears
(Sometimes I run)
Singles, doubles, mixers, cheers
(Sometimes I hide)
Earnest chats in cosy snugs
(Sometimes I’m scared of you) 
Pimms for toffs is served in jugs

Please make your selection…

ELO then Squeeze and Bread
(Mr Blue you did it right)
Abba, the Ungrateful Dead
(And then came Mr Night)
“No of course I ain’t been drinkin…”
(Creepin over)  
…on his phone to mum while winkin’
(Now his hand is on your shoulder)
Red braces clipped to pinstripe suits
(Mr Blue Sky)
Blokes in work-stained jeans and boots

Please make your selection…

The pound coin drops it’s Motörhead
(The ace of spades
The ace of spades
The ace of spades)
The juke box dies. The sound goes dead. 

I scribbled this on a soggy beer mat in a noisy, sweaty north London boozer pre-Covid and have only just rediscovered it. Reminds me of happier times – apart from the ending which, with hindsight, appears prescient. I hope you can “smell” the atmosphere too.