A Moment Please
‘Can you give me a minute on my own?’
And he froze like a statue, head inclined,
Gazing across the downs, seeing nothing,
But owning a moment of open space,
Thinking nothing, but feeling to his skin,
Absorbing nine decades of this and that.
‘Ok, thank you, we can go now’, he said.
Skies
Remember when we were young,
When we sank to the ground,
A blade of grass between our lips;
And we nattered urgent nothings –
And mostly heard ourselves.
Lie down now while the sun shines.
See the blue between the waving boughs
And empty your mind.
Nature will fill the vacuum
With wondrous and coloured things.
There will be sketches from the past,
Snatches of vying futures,
And above all fantastic dreams
Of unearthly shapes and life beyond
The Cherry, the Medlar and high
Above the Holly and through the Ash
To skyscapes of myriad utopias
To set imaginations free.
There is innocence of absence here,
And desires and yearnings too
In the whispering, soft-white, drifting
Blues too tall to touch and tame.
Stories of the Night
Marker gone, the book drops,
The page lost, and with a jolt
The eyes open and there is a pause:
‘Maybe a page or two more?’
The battle is lost,
The body squirms awhile, searching
For a womb of repose;
A brief wakefulness interrupts
Then falters, fades and dies.
He is gone now, oblivious;
But there are Dahl-like stories
Unfolding, surreal adventures
Of a restless mind.
It is burrowing dark now,
The unconscious is at play.
His teaching is done.
He is in Charing Cross Road:
Is that Leicester Square tube?
He will be late and must phone
Because his mother is cooking
And she is old now.
The ranks are full, expectant faces,
But his briefcase is missing:
He has neither slides nor notes;
No matter, he will wing it.
But how?
Where is his room?
This staircase is a dead-end.
He has to change trains here,
But which platform?
He will have to cross the tracks;
The train is pulling out,
It is late, the station is closing.
All is uncertain, open-ended.
The plots recur, topped and tailed
By yesterday’s details;
But he knows little of this.
Abruptly, mid-scene, the play is done.
His eyes are shut, but the chilled air
Is sucking deep in his throat
And compulsively, he swallows.
The alarm chirrups, and the ceiling
Of planked-wood appears above his bed.
He reaches for his spectacles
And another day begins.
Bluebells
Pale green saplings in a buzz of blue,
Newborns amongst the sculptured Ash.
Let the bluebells sing, and let their hue
Sooth and calm the troubling crash
Of tumbling feet and snapping bracken.
There is joy in the pause of the moment
Of stillness, in the cleansing purity
Of the Earth’s fresh fare, and its foment
Of life’s vigour, a mat of silken surety
In an era of speed, no leave to slacken.
Storing Books
This is the thing, you see.
They’re neat indoors, sorted and shelved,
Arrayed and displayed in serried rows;
But they’re not so easily tamed in the study,
Where they gather in chattering groups
And occasionally topple, clumsily, in rebellion
Against the ranking of their relevance.
It’s true there are shelves there too;
But mostly there are riketty stacks four deep,
Piles here, piles there; towering high,
In precarious, tilting, multi-coloured heaps.
And what if you need anything specific?
Where to start? Where even to look?
Somewhere, hiding, is a volume comparing
The philosophies of Marx, Habermas and Bhaskar.
I know, because I read it; it’s here somewhere;
Maybe it’s in the corner, fifth up from the floor
In the fourth stack back from my desk;
But that’s an hour stretching, scrabbling, rooting!
Perhaps just buy it again; but then
There was that time I bought the same book
Four times: a quartet of unerring sameness.
The thing is, when I rummage, nudge, dislodge,
It ends up in creased pages, bent spines
And thirty pained minutes of rebuilding.
The obvious cure is a clear out, a massive cull,
Of the dated, obscure and arcane, a retreat
To the new, topical and to orderly shelving;
But – there’s always a but – for every thousand
Inspected and scrutinised, only ever the one
Is so tenderly removed and marked for dispatch.
Best by far to live with the mess.
When Strangers Die
Death is always here, creeping up on us,
Clandestinely, stealthily, unexpected even
When quite expected.
But it’s different when strangers die for us,
Gunned down, all DIY PPE, lifting unprotected
Heads above hospital trenches, completing shifts
In abandoned homes, caring to abrupt endings;
They are like family then.
Words are never enough, though poems
Have licence to get close: they can break
The rules of articulacy, allude to intrepid,
Anxious souls hovering over patients’ beds
And, the ultimate gift, holding dying hands.
Sit so still, do not try to ‘make sense of things’,
Just stare, let thought dissolve into feeling,
Admit all strangers into families of your own:
The nurse is your father, the doctor a sister,
This carer the daughter fresh from school.
Then, when feeling’s work is done,
Dwell awhile on the politics of health and care
Till the blood runs hot once more; cast away
Politicians’ talk of ‘heroes’ and ‘badges’
And vow to fight for the care of all for all.
On a Clear Day
It was 2001 and Lake Baikal stretched shimmering
To the horizon, deepest pool in the Siberian waste;
It was the sun, prancing, dancing, brimming
With kaleidoscopic light, ripples making haste,
Chasing, a slick, sharp geometry of movement.
The eye of the camera missed all this, blunting
The rolling, frolicking edges of the lapping water;
But the lens of the human eye penetrated, hunting
Down each sun-lit lip and dip that sought a
Jumbling space to make its own and rest awhile.
There’s a moral here, for the obtuse man-made lens
Stands for the thoughts and words that find their way
Into ink, onto pages, while the world they ape sends
A different image, tells a truer story, turns grey
Into infinite, coloured patterns of complexity.
Know this if you write, offer a treatise for sale,
Spell it out lest you betray them, place fool’s gold
Into innocent open hands; its contents will pale
In the glare of the day, all that seems so bold
Will fade, signify less, just a few pieces of a jigsaw.
Absence (or, no need for a transcendental ego)
Just for a second sit statue still,
Hold your breath, freeze all thoughts;
Close your eyes and loosen all ties
To the world you knew an aeon ago.
What some call the ‘natural attitude’
Is no more and you are unencumbered
By all that you took for granted,
Suspended in this timeless refuge.
But wait, there’s more: being too has gone,
Ceding its privileges to non-being.
What was present is now absent
And infinite possibilities crowd in.
Now at last we are ready to begin,
Released from what is thought or exists,
Freed up to imagine novel worlds
That could have been or might yet be.
It is in the counterfactuals of absence
That alternate futures are conceived
And might, with care, be transcribed,
Blueprints, utopias for a better Earth.
Now You See Them, Now You Don’t
Three of us in a wheelbarrow
Pushed by my father to the allotments;
A one-handed catch, jumping high
To my right, a buzz of physicality;
Waiting to be caned for touching
An inkwell after we’d been warned.
Fleeting glimpses into decades past,
Resurrecting people long gone,
Touching, feeling images, projecting
Onto a screen random episodes
And reliving their intimacy, gazing
Into the living eyes of the dead.
The chuckle of my granddad, nudging
My toy soldiers with a slipper’d foot;
A teacher of Chaucerian English
Giving nasal voice to The Pardonner’s Tale;
Saturday evening chatter on the church
Wall on our endless way home.
But what when I’m gone too?
Who then will raise these dead
Protagonists, flittering in and out
Of my mind like actors on a stage?
Is the final scene drawing to a close,
And will the curtain soon fall?
Few are immortalized by the public
Gaze, though some leave traces,
Slivers of themselves in writings
And photos, in the jagged crannies
Of faded ruins that once were homes;
It is the legacy of death to disappear.