Selected Poems (12 page)

Damp sand that smelled of graves not Morecambe Bay.

Air Raid Precautions out of
Kensitas
.

A Victory jig-saw on Fry’s Cocoa tray.

Sandwiches. Snakes & Ladders. Thermos flask.

Sirens, then silences, then bombers’ drone.

Long whistles. Windows gone. Each time I’d ask

which one was the Jerry, which our own.

How close we were with death’s wings overhead!

How close we were not several hours ago.

These lines to hold the still too living dead –

my Redhill container, my long-handled hoe.

I could count to a ragged 20 but no higher.

The flocking birds she taught me numbers by

so crammed church roof and belfry, cross and spire

their final taking off blacked Beeston’s sky.

There must have been 10,000 there or more.

They picketed piercingly the passing of each day

and shrilly hailed the first new light they saw

and hour after hour their numbers grew

till, on a Sunday morning, they all flew away

as suddenly as her 70 years would do.

The day that fledged her with the wings of night

made all her days flock to it, and as one

beyond all sight, all hearing, taste, smell, touch,

they soared away and, soaring, blocked the light

of what they steered their course by from her son,

the last soul still unhatched left in the clutch.

‘The atom bomb was in manufacture before the first automatic washing machine.’

(Tillie Olsen,
Silences
)

They took our iron railings down to dump

on Dresden as one more British bomb,

but mam cajoled the men to leave a stump

to hitch the line she hung the washing from.

So three inches didn’t end in German flesh.

It was the furthest from surrender when she flew

a rope full of white Y-fronts, dazzling, fresh

from being stewed all day with dolly blue

in the cellar set-pot. Her ferocious pride

would only let quite spotless clothes outside.

Washes that made her tender hands red raw

we do nowadays in no time by machine.

No one works so hard to keep things clean

so it’s maybe just as well she’d got to die

before the latest in bombardments and before

our world of minimum iron and spin dry.

The judder of energy when I jump

I laugh to see immediately pass

into the titmouse wired to a mossy stump

who taps his blunt beak on the dusty glass.

She wants me to leave ‘this minute’ but I won’t

drawn to the faded feathers in glass cases

where grown-ups see what toddlers like me don’t,

imposed on stuffed creation, their own faces.

Say bye-bye, our Tony, that’s enough!

We’ve got to buy some liver for dad’s tea,

Say bye-bye … sanderling, bye-bye … ruff!

I won’t say anything, and wriggle free.

Sensing her four-year-old’s about to cry

she buys me a postcard with the dodo on it.

43 years on this filial sonnet

lets the tears she staunched then out: Bye-bye!

A droning vicar bores the congregation

and misquotes
Ecclesiastes
Chapter 3.

If anyone should deliver an oration

it should be me, her son, in poetry.

All the family round me start to sob.

For all my years of Latin and of Greek

they’d never seen the point of ‘for a job’,

I’m not prepared to stand up now and speak.

A time to
… plough back into the soil

the simple rhymes that started at her knee,

the poetry, that ‘sedentary toil’

that began, when her lap was warm, with ABC.

Blocks with letters. Lettered block of stone.

I have to move the blocks to say farewell.

I hear the family cry, the vicar drone

and VALE, MATER ’s all that I can spell.

When I want some sort of human metronome

to beat calm celebration out of fear

like that when German bombs fell round our home

it’s my mother’s needles, knitting, that I hear,

the click of needles steady though walls shake.

The stitches, plain or purl, were never dropped.

Bombs fell all that night until daybreak

but, not for a moment, did the knitting stop.

Though we shivered in the cellar-shelter’s cold

and the whistling bombs sent shivers through the walls

I know now why she made her scared child hold

the skeins she wound so calmly into balls.

We open presents wrapped before she died.

With that same composure shown in that attack

she’d known the time to lay her wools aside –

the jumper I open ’s shop-bought, and is black!

It was a library copy otherwise

you’d’ve flung it in the fire in disgust.

Even cremation can’t have dried the eyes

that wept for weeks about my ‘sordid lust’.

The undertaker would have thought me odd

or I’d’ve put my book in your stiff hand.

You’d’ve been embarrassed though to meet your God

clutching those poems of mine that you’d like banned.

I thought you could hold my
Loiners
, and both burn!

And there together in the well wrought urn,

what’s left of you, the poems of your child,

devoured by one flame, unreconciled,

like soots on washing, black on bone-ash white.

Maybe you see them in a better light!

But I still see you weeping, your hurt looks:

You weren’t brought up to write such mucky books!

Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough

to make you ashes in a standard urn.

An envelope of coarse official buff

contains your wedding ring which wouldn’t burn.

Dad told me I’d to tell them at St James’s

that the ring should go in the incinerator.

That ‘eternity’ inscribed with both their names is

his surety that they’d be together, ‘later’.

I signed for the parcelled clothing as the son,

the cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress –

the clerk phoned down:
6-8-8-3-1
?

Has she still her ring on?
(Slight pause)
Yes!

It’s on my warm palm now, your burnished ring!

I feel your ashes, head, arms, breasts, womb, legs,

sift through its circle slowly, like that thing

you used to let me watch to time the eggs.

My father speaking was like conjurors I’d seen

pulling bright silk hankies, scarves, a flag

up out of their innards, red, blue, green,

so many colours it would make me gag.

Dad’s eldest brother had a shocking stammer.

Dad punctuated sentence ends with but …

Coarser stuff than silk they hauled up grammer

knotted together deep down in their gut.

Theirs are the acts I nerve myself to follow.

I’m the clown sent in to clear the ring.

Theirs are the tongues of fire I’m forced to swallow

then bring back knotted, one continuous string

igniting long-pent silences, and going back

to Adam fumbling with Creation’s names;

and though my vocal cords get scorched and black

there’ll be a constant singing from the flames.

I

My father haunts me in the old men that I find

holding the shop-queues up by being slow.

It’s always a man like him that I’m behind

just when I thought the pain of him would go

reminding me perhaps it never goes,

with his pension book kept utterly pristine

in a plastic wrapper labelled
Pantihose

as if they wouldn’t pay if it weren’t clean,

or learning to shop so late in his old age

and counting his money slowly from a purse

I’d say from its ornate clasp and shade of beige

was his dead wife’s glasses’ case. I curse,

but silently, secreting pain, at this delay,

the acid in my gut caused by dad’s ghost –

I’ve got aerogrammes to buy. My love’s away!

And the proofs of
Pain-Killers
to post!

II

Going for pills to ease the pain I get

from the Post Office on Thursdays, Pension Day,

the chemist’s also gives me cause to fret

at more of my dad’s ghosts, and more delay

as they queue for their prescriptions without hopes

and go looking for the old cures on the shelves,

stumbling into pyramids of scented soaps

they once called cissy when they felt ‘themselves’.

There are more than in the Post Office in
BOOTS

and I try to pass the time behind such men

by working out the Latin and Greek roots

of cures, the
san
- that’s in
Sanatogen
,

compounds derived from
derm
- for teenage spots,

suntan creams and lotions prefixed
sol
-

while a double of my dad takes three wild shots

at pronouncing
PARACETAMOL
.

My writing desk. Two photos, mam and dad.

A birthday, him. Their ruby wedding, her.

Neither one a couple and both bad.

I make out what’s behind them from the blur.

Dad’s in our favourite pub, now gone for good.

My father and his background are both gone,

but hers has my Welsh cottage and a wood

that still shows those same greens eight summers on,

though only the greenness of it ’s stayed the same.

Though one of them ’s in colour and one ’s not,

the two are joined, apart from their shared frame,

by what, for photographers, would mar each shot:

in his, if you look close, the gleam, the light,

me
in his blind right eye, but minute size –

in hers, as though just cast from where I write,

a shadow holding something to its eyes.

Me a poet! My daughter with maimed limb

became a more than tolerable sprinter.

And Uncle Joe. Impediment spurred him,

the worst stammerer I’ve known, to be a printer.

He handset type much faster than he spoke.

Those cruel consonants,
m
s,
p
s, and
b
s

on which his jaws and spirit almost broke

flicked into order with sadistic ease.

It seems right that Uncle Joe, ‘b-buckshee

from the works’, supplied those scribble pads

on which I stammered my first poetry

that made me seem a cissy to the lads.

Their aggro towards me, my need of them ’s

what keeps my would-be mobile tongue still tied –

aggression, struggle, loss, blank printer’s ems

by which all        eloquence        gets justified.

I

All aggro in tight clothes and skinhead crops

they think that like themselves I’m on the dole.

Once in the baths that mask of ‘manhood’ drops.

Their decorated skins lay bare a soul.

Teenage dole-wallah piss-up, then tattoos.

Brown Ale
and boys’ bravado numbs their fright –

MOTHER in ivy, blood reds and true blues

against that North East skin so sunless white.

When next he sees United lose a match,

his bovvers on, his scarf tied round his wrist,

his rash NEWCASTLE RULES will start to scratch,

he’ll aerosol the walls, then go get pissed …

So I hope the TRUE LOVE on your arm stays true,

the MOTHER on your chest stays loved, not hated.

But most I hope for jobs for all of you –

next year your tattooed team gets relegated!

II

Wartime bunkers, runways overgrown,

streets named for the town’s two England caps;

cricket played with shovelblade and stone,

the daylight’s rotten props near to collapse.

HEALTH (H changed to W) FOR ALL

with its
Never Have Another Haemorrhoid

is all that decorates the tap-room wall

of this pub for pensioners and unemployed.

The Brewery that owns this place supports

only the unambiguously ‘male’

Northern working class spectator sports

that suit the image of its butch
Brown Ale
,

that puts hair on your chest, and makes you fight,

and when you’re legless makes a man of you!

The
Brown Ale
drinkers watch me as I write:

one front door orange in a row all blue!

Past scenic laybys and stag warning signs

the British borderlands roll into view.

They read:
Beware of Unexploded Mines
!

I tell my children that was World War II.

They want to walk or swim. We pick up speed.

My children boo the flash of each NO ENTRY:

High seas, and shooting, uniform or tweed,

Ministry of Defence, or landed gentry.

Danger flags from valley mills that throve,

after a fashion, on the Empire’s needs.

Their own clothes spun in India they wove

the Colonel’s khaki and the blue blood’s tweeds.

Mill angelus, and church tower twice as high.

One foundry cast the work- and rest-day bells –

the same red cotton ’s in the flags that fly

for ranges, revolutions, and rough swells.

‘Behold Land-Interest’s compound Man & Horse.’

                                  (Ebenezer Elliott)

Those bad old days of ‘rapine and of reif!’

Northumberland’s peles still seeping with old wars –