(After Simon Armitage)
Walking home: A Neighbour in the Ward
Peter, grey, oxygen starved, with one unmasked word “Peter”, and
a wave of a hand
I couldn’t help listening to the encouragement
“You are getting better, but
well for someone of your great age
it will take longer to get stronger.”
Suddenly Peter decides to get up
There is a chair beside his bed
Out of nowhere a nurse helps him turn and sit.
Another decision.
I last saw him heave himself to his feet,
grasp a frame: step by step he walked towards the toilet
and towards home.
2 The Story of a Dog in the NightTime
She lived in deepest Oxfordshire and decided to hire a van to take a much needed bed to London for her son The trip involved an overnight stay. She could not take the family dog with her, and so she asked her husband, immobilised with MS, and his Personal Assistant (PA) to look after the dog and feed him in the morning.
A friend helped her to load the bed into the van, and so she set off, with her husband waving goodbye and the dog contributing a yelp. The bedtime PA came in the evening, fed and left both securely locked in the flat (which adjoins the house) to watch the tennis on TV and go to sleep in their respective bed and basket. The tennis almost sent both off to sleep, but he noticed the dog was restless, padding about and scratching the door. He woke at about 3 AM in the night to hear a dog in the distance barking. He thought to himself "That sounds remarkably like our dog!". He called him with no result. Not wanting wake the neighbours, and being confined to his bed he worried the morning away, until he heard his PA unlocking his front door. "Guess who I found sitting outside?" How did the dog escape, and come to be sitting outside the front door of the flat?
A prize will be given for the correct answer.
5
At a Tangent
We found ourselves in a promised land
once met we were as one.
Directions? You had it all in hand
I was the planet,
and you were my sun.
Held by your warmth I regained my youth
or maybe I slept in the shade?
You certainly took the rough with the smooth
I’m sorry my dear;
it seemed custom made.
Frustrated now – you have cast me adrift
to wander about, to plot my own course
Elipsing I hope, so we’ll each have a shift
but I flounder in space:
oh my kingdom for a horse!
Perhaps you felt our paths were too close?
It can’t have been my wayward thoughts
they were much too casual those
or could it be that my careless life
might land us up in the courts?
Had our time together begun to cloy?
It couldn’t be washed from your hair?
And life was needing some other ploy?
We cannot throw them away
those memories still there
4
Abbey Street
Abbey Street
Bald becassocked monks process down here.
Ahead, their humble abbot Aelfric.
Five centuries later in my mind is Abbey Road:
“He got joo joo eyeball
He one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Come together, right now, over me”
The procession is in tears.
Our Abbey is to be torn down
Our Abbott defrocked
His habit summarily torn down
by orders of Henry,
King by divine right.
Then Aelfric spoke: “Keep Calm and Carry On.
Brethren, the people of this village henceforth
will find and revere those broken stones from our dear Abbey"
6
Being
Not to find the dawn unfolding with me
as I stretch myself from sleep.
Not to be greeted by blinks of reds or golds among the branches
nor every now and then by watchful garden birds.
Not to savour autumn words from Keats or Hardy or Ali Smith
nor
Not to feel the pleasures of communal life
That would be the death of me
And what would fill the gap
once occupied by those images, things, moves or feelings?
Some thing, some thoughts or some one new?
Perhaps a manifesto, an aphorism, a gesture, a quote,
or something blown on the wind?
One less to protest “you do not do this in my name”?
One less name to be ignored by those in receipt of petitions?
No.There will be no gap. We have been overtaken
by those new generations who dance along with their words.
But yes, the wind will carry some pleasures,
some causes joined and yet to be joined.
Something found in those images and those words.
7
For Lewis on 13 July 2022
Besides Happy Birthday, I did not write anything for you on your 18th birthday, nor on your 21st birthday,
although I do have a painting being framed for that.. So here is something for your 22nd birthday:
For Lewis on your 22nd Birthday.
We tried and tried to find you:
we all kept missing each other,
so we stopped trying so hard
and of course you showed up
signalling your presence with two blue lines.
Your stay with Trish
was a time of great happiness
for all of us.
And then, pacing around, she could not believe
you were on the threshold until she was ordered to the Labour Ward.
Hanging on for dear life, shocked by your imminent ejection,
you decided to stay put
and had to be coaxed into the daylight.
All over the world you were loved.
In her arms, your grandmother Eileen showed you round Australia
Back home we used to sing to you in your bath
Soldier, soldier will you marry me
With your musket pipe and drum?
You put up with us – and seemed to enjoy your part.
“Bring back that little boy” commanded
your Lieutenant Colonel grandfather from his Care Home.
When it was time to go to school I loved taking you there
on my knee, on the power chair across the village
and back again to collect you in the afternoon.
Your hugs remind me of those times.
Bartholomew’s. You knew you were good at maths but
not wanting to be singled out, you opted to stay with the crowd
and not with the ’Geeks’. Was this an early socialist sign?
At play in the village, was this why you joined a campaign
for a bigger, better designed skateboard park?
Astonishingly, one birthday, you had got a lot bigger.
For a surprise, we were to meet you and your friends.
Casting around: where were you? I looked Up
and there you were: confident, beanstalk boys.
That summer, quite prepared to join your schoolfriends
for a swim in the river. I was envious.
A-levels: I was so pleased that you involved me
in your English Literature. Keats, Arthur Miller et al.
You were A-starred. I was better educated.
Amidst all that, your friend contracted cancer
in-patient and out, you supported him
you had grown up. I was so proud.
Now you have flown the nest, chosen engineering:
a family tradition.
My heart goes with you in all your choices, Lewis
From Dad with love
8
I don’t know why I’m here, you said
I called you at Oaken Holt
You picked up the phone
I don’t know why I’m here, you said
Or was it: I don’t want to be here?
It amounts to the same awful words – or does it?
You could have been wondering, like Eve:
Who had planted you on the planet
And why?
And why didn’t you want to be there?
I had something of a solution to both questions:
Let’s sing a song
We’ll Meet Again
You sang and I sang and you sang better than me.
We enjoyed it, and we enjoyed each other’s company
Together, we were finding the answer
9 It Might Have Been
There was no hurry:
At that time, no one hurried along the Kings Road.
Style – looking for something stylish
in the shops, on the street.
What had brought me there?
London had brought me here
Not much else to do, when you’re trying to pick up the odd A-level.
there might be something: didn't know what,
but London put me there.
I joined the shoppers walking towards: World’s End?
Towards me was a girl. For a moment, our eyes met
of course I turned to follow. In one window she found some lovely clothes
oh, I wished…
10
It’s Not the End of the World, You Know
There will be no other end of the world
wrote Milosz, as long as a rose is visited by the bumblebee.
Tis the gift to wake and breathe the morning air
sang the Shakers as they turned.
It’s not the end of world, you know
I said as I sat tight around the stove
with the measles and my sisters.
The world had not ended. We’d all slept the night on it.
Next day, we sat there still, folding in the warmth,
counting the sheet-mica stove windows
and counting the time to the end of quarantine.
Since then, time and time again;
one year it’s The Flu, next it’s Bird Flu. After that it is the Swine Flu.
One time they call you in, next it’s while you wait. The next you have to ask.
Now, there’s no jab. ‘No vaccine’ I am stuck at home.
‘You’re over sixty years and ten.
It’s a virus. Like a limpet mine. Hate’s men’.
‘You’re vulnerable’, they say. So I keep away
watch the sun and the rain, paint rainbows and pray
for the carers, read beautiful words, write poetry.
11
Jenny
A poem for Burns Night 25 January 2020
So free of care, I see you still
door cast aside and down the hill,
your flying skirt and mostly legs
a vision of who? – my heart just begs
Silly St Trinians – so full of go?
Happiness brimming, head to toe
or those giggling girls down there in Portwenn?
it takes me back again – and again
oh Jenny dear, we were so young
those days would sing if they could have sung
fair lines of Burns are haling me yon
but those days are past and now foregone
12
Lost Word
How does a word get lost?
Was it foolishly mislaid?
Or is it hiding someplace at a cost
on a shelf, behind the marmalade?
Some words are from endangered species:
perhaps it’s becoming extinct?
Or maybe it’s just one of your theses
in which case you shouldn’t have winked
Association might help –
plumbing the depths of your mind
what’s there amongst those neurons – just kelp?
Or things for which you’d be fined?
McFarlane talks of bramble:
could it be behind those thorns?
Then should I take a gamble,
caught upon dilemma’s horns?
Magpies will cackle,
Attenborough make merry:
the word, released from it’s shackle
is just a sole blackberry
13
Lovely
I'd printed off some leaflets trying to interest Conference of Socialist Economis CSE members in merging their and the Socialist Society's newsletters, and took them round to their offices which were in a kind of warehouse building in Islington. A young woman opened the door to take them. Her face, framed in a mass of chestnut curls, radiated sun and warmth; her body language conveyed an openness rare in downtown lines my personal London diary at the time. I instantly liked her. So far in the capital, with its vast numbers of stylishly dressed attractive women of all ages inaccessibly on display, I had not met anyone half as lovable.
A couple of weeks later I turned up to a meeting at the CSE office, and she was there! At the time of course, I was over attentive to my magazine – and shy into the bargain; I pretended that her presence did not distract me, and she was friendly enough. I think I was wearing my uniform of the time, which was an old mack of my father’s, to which I had added red buttons, and a badge which proclaimed ‘I'm red and green, it’s only natural’. Tricia, surrounded as she was by fairly conventional academics, must have been attracted to a person who was going to wear that kind of thing – or perhaps I somehow betrayed some of the testosterone pumping round my body when I looked at her.
After that meeting, she was always surfacing in my mind. Terrified of making a fool of myself, with the excuse of an invitation to a Sandinista Evening at Lambeth Town Hall, I went back to her office. She wasn’t there, but her friend Kate was. I knew Kate, an intelligent, sinuous, pretty young woman who had worked in another office at 9 Poland Street, and so, stupidly trying to be casual, I asked her to come along too. But she gathered I think from the awkwardness of my invitation, that my interest was in Tricia and she got the message to her. Tricia called me. She couldn’t come to the Lambeth rally, but we arranged to meet after work at a pub near Poland Street. As I put the phone down, I whooped for joy and my feet left the ground .
We met and told each other about ourselves – she was quite different from anyone else I had ever been out with. She was from a large Queensland family, had joined two of her sisters in London, and was a lot more confident than me in talking about herself. But there were no barriers. I was instantly in love. What next? I’m not a big drinker, so I asked her:
“Shall we find somewhere to eat?”
“No, I don’t think so – I’m not hungry.”
“A movie?”
“No.” Nor did I.
“How about finding another pub?”
“No.”
“Back to my place?”
“OK.” I could not believe my luck.
14 plus
Regret
It was in 1979 that the unspoken compromise between myself and my wife came to an end. Neither of us had been able to talk about the steadily increasing pressure that my membership of a post-1968 Trotskyist cult put on us. So the marriage fractured. Stubbornly, I refused to accept my wife's eventual ultimatum. "Either you leave your party or I leave you". The marriage did not end there, however; for a year we carried on living a lie.
She moved from Rotherham to a new job, in television in Manchester, spending weekdays over there. I took the opportunity to renew my acquaintance with our two children, Simon and Zoe, who were both in primary school. On the long summer evenings, I would drive out to Roche Abbey with the children and play hide and seek in the ruins, or we would go up into the Derbyshire hills.
My wife had the children at weekends.
But it all had to end, despite some token revenge resistance from me: when I told her "I want to keep the kids", she physically launched herself at me. It had taken this to make our separation real. Very soon afterwards, I confessed that I had just been being provocative.
I drove the children over to their mother, who had lovingly cared for them for the nine years since Simon had been born. On the way back through the stepped, reservoir-clad mountainside which served as a watershed for both Manchester and South Yorkshire, I fleetingly considered a dramatic end by driving off the road and down the precipitous Pennine hillside.
I am now happily remarried, with a second son.
Some of my friends have stayed in unhappy marriages: for the sake of their children: perhaps I should have done that?
Long Mead Meadow
Can you sing happy birthday to a field?
This Meadow is one thousand years old
faint greens, the straw of at least thirty kinds of grass
and precious flowers:
Yellow Rattle, Devil’s Bit and the Great Burnet
elder brother of the spicy Pimpernel
could this be an age-old birthday song?
They seek it here, they seek it there
Those farmers seek it everywhere
Is It in heaven or is it in hell?
That damned elusive Pimpernel.
But we are told that the Scarlet Pimpernel
which closes its petals when the sun goes down
has been known for perhaps one thousand years
as the Poor Man’s Barometer.
No need for a birthday present then.
I don’t know why I’m here, you said
I called you at Oaken Holt
You picked up the phone
I don’t know why I’m here, you said
Or was it: I don’t want to be here?
It amounts to the same awful words – or does it?
You could have been wondering, like Eve:
Who had planted you on the planet
And why?
And why didn’t you want to be there?
I had something of a solution to both questions:
Let’s sing a song
We’ll Meet Again
You sang and I sang and you sang better than me.
We enjoyed it, and we enjoyed each other’s company
Together, we were finding the answer
Thames
Growing Up
We Found the tiny Dikler stream,
which meets the Windrush,
and runs into the heavy river Thames:
the watermill at Upper Swell
why was it staying put behind those bars?
Walking past the church, I did not know.
Nor did I know that the lake
beside which I used to sit in retreat,
around which with Kathryn I used to ride,
that it was once a millpond.
Riding amongst those hills and bridle ways
we came across a ford through
another tributary: the river Eye
to the mill at Lower Slaughter,
a name derived from Slothre
meaning Muddy Place
(something else I did not know)
There they made bread,
devoured on our way home
Then cotswold men arrived at dusk
with rounded platforms made from wire
“Catching crayfish luv” they said
and baiting them with smelly fish
sunk their traps into the stream.
Back next day, they found their catch
each wire world inhabited
by one, even two crustaceans
“Brill” I thought.
Since then, I wondered
“What did the crayfish think?”
A photograph reminds me
of walking three decades later, with Claire,
our children and their cousins
to a wooden bridge over the Dikler…
In turn, I am reminded of convalescence from school
with my dear mother amongst the raspberry canes.
London – 1950s
Pimlico, staying with my Aunt Betty.
Her flat had a balcony and strange furniture
and outside, trains making soot in the night.
She took us to shows – and films. I fell in love
with the South Pacific girl up the mountain Bali Ha’i:
the song still goes through my mind
Interlude: years of social and political adventures, marrying on and off, conceiving and bringing up children in and out of London and in Oxford
Two London poems, one ancient, one more modern.
Chelsea, 1963
It Might Have Been
There was no hurry:
At that time, no one hurried along the Kings Road.
Style – looking for something stylish
in the shops, on the street.
What had brought me there?
London had brought me there
Not much else to do,
when you’re trying to pick up the odd A-level:
there might be something: didn't know what,
but London put me there.
I joined the shoppers walking towards: World’s End?
Towards me was a girl. For a moment, our eyes met
of course I turned to follow.
In one window she saw some lovely clothes
she turned in
oh I wished…
Brixton 1981
Coldharbour Lane
Saturday night
Coldharbour Lane: a street where, on a normal day,
the shoppers come for chicken grits and pies and eels
and fish and chips,
where if you’re black and out of work
you stand and wait outside the boozer
or the car-hire.
Coldharbour Lane’s become a Lane again
where people stroll and size each other up
and up
A lovers Lane, its shopfront image exorcised;
instead we worship one another there
where Africans and young black girls and white ones too
and running boys
and all in clothes that aren’t too straight
parade
The street that became a stage
where every act was lit by flames
where we the audience now tread
and, curiously, the costumed stars
intrude
A street retreat, a void from city time
where brick on plastic pleasantly resounds
and fresh reflections struck off rounded
helmet, angled shield
give Autumn night a continental look
where private drivers sniffing trouble hurriedly reverse
leaving alone, bereft, an upturned, fire-blacked Ford
Capri
Tonight’s pedestrians, declining cumbous, huddled force,
have time and space to ebb
then flow
Sunday night
Last night there was security in strife
but now I walk through these still watchful streets
in sweaty fear of my companion
– a person who assumes me to be
human
no one
Oxford – Northmoor
Winter Walk
With the pleasant scent of cows and cow parsley
along the track towards the river
and over the Christmas-frosty, crunchy vegetation
the black dog Azmadeus cannot smell where he is.
The floodplain is filled with a bedspread of ice;
through it we can still see the soil and grass,
looking like specimens in laboratory glass.
“It’s not dangerous” so hesitantly our boots
crack the canopy: we keep calm and carry on.
But where is the River Thames? It has gone.
What is a river, without its banks? The brows
of philosophers will stiffen at this question.
We send a scout to find the wheres and hows.
So we skate the problem of where we walk
we tread the frozen fields with joy
and thankfully Azmadeus returns: “Good boy”.
Looking Upwards
Most weeks I watch The Repair Shop
enjoying the crafts, the engineering,
the family progeny of the items brought in
a teddy bear that is worse for wear
a clockwork train
they don’t make ’em like that anymore
in the main, it is said.
A mandolin that won’t work
or a wireless oddly needing wires
but they know, these craftsmen and women,
know how? They nod yes they have the know-how,
the expertise – after all they are paid by the BBC
turning turning, moulding moulding, and hammer, hammer
till their charges are as good as new.
Made to look their age they say – as a reminder.
The owners return
to be reminded, to be amazed
they hoped it might be so – and it is.
Just as they were when they were a child,
their grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers, fathers had use of them.
Do they approve? They wonder
as they look upwards.
Looking upwards…
Is it just a gesture?
Nurtured in us since childhood?
Or do some of us still think of the dear departed
seated happily on a cloud waiting for us
with a nice cup of tea?
Who will be there? Perhaps a favourite aunt?
And they/we speculate
are they up there or are they down below?
I think the answer is simple
they are hiding out inside of us.
no one
Tank
We’d crept from fitful sleep below our flat
momentarily to ignore the distant war
our daughter pulled the blind and said “what’s that?”
A tank was parked in the street below our floor
I felt my breakfast drain to my boots – “They’ve shat
on us for days: we will no longer implore!
We’ll blast that tank so the whole street hears
Resistance! That’s joy to our ears.”
My partner took the kids away
So long as they’re safe; but they will be missed
perhaps they’ll find a place to play
Will we see them again? Putin’s on my list
of criminals and come their day
I’m sure that they will be kissed
by a death worse than the suffocation
they have meted upon our strangled nation