(22 November 1915) Four bombardiers were on their wayTo a small village in the rearLayers of dust had turned them greyThey’d joined up earlier that year They quietly spoke of other yearsAnd gazed at the vast plain aheadA shell coughed near the bombardiersNot one so much as turned his head Their talk was all of
I’m pretty sure that death will wipe me out, though some cosmic way I don’t yet know about may have a different say. The only thing I sometimes think about are the times that go when my own time runs out, how nobody will know the reckless things my grandmother would say when no one
My brother in the evenings, long after his death, would take a corner seat and sigh under his breath. Yes, sigh, and mutter things that I could almost hear. Then, like a painted house, he faded over years until his image and his whisper both were one. There was a final dream, when this small
i.m. Ian Jack (1945-2022) I feel awkward owning up to it, Ian, but I find I’m skimming the news pages. To bask in the light, listen to music, watch geese fly over and tulips glow doesn’t feel as if I’m selling my soul. Not that I skip the bullet points – bombs falling, democracies failing,
(after Saint-Amant) Mastered by laziness and melancholy,I dream in bed like a boneless hare en croûtestewing in its own juice, a delicate brute,or like old Don Quixote in his holy rage. I don’t care a hoot for the latest cause,the count palatine and his royal descent,but consecrate a hymn to the indolentmood in which my
A man walks the black soil of a reaped field. He pauses to kneel and parse the earth for old coins or unearthed aluminium. He is twenty-two. He is fifty-eight. He’s not a man but a child with a dog. He’s my boss. He’s a gamekeeper, he’s a bailiff at my door. Three buzzards form
I wake for work and work for pay.The morning is not morning yet.My body is a rented lump of clay. The swollen clouds oppress the day.The cold pierces like a bayonet.I wake for work and work for pay convinced my inner life has gone astray.I gain a wage by pointless sweat.My body is a rented
To start with there was an odd word left like a fridge on a street corner, not where you’d expect, but easy enough to explain. Then we noticed whole sentences being wedged into strange places, a collection of beer cans glittering in an otherwise ordinary winter privet hedge. Flocks of scattered thoughts began to sweep
holds no truck with comparisons. Holds no truck with anything much besides sunlight and dust swirls and the breezy clip -clop-clip of heels upon endless parquet. The Second Longest Corridor does not deceive itself. Knows there are sidelong glances, spindly remarks (also-ran, windy thing) from those who complain that it drags on so — can’t
For G.D.M. To walk around Dreamland and not take the rides: not much of a plan but the man’s face changed all that, took me back to a candy floss summer when I learnt to spin sugar from a boy who looked the same as this guy who stood by the sign ready to start
Thick furry balaclava’d neck. Shaggy charcoal pelt. A cream hairstreak, wings fringed with cork, and feathery snow-shoes on its head. It came in a gale – fooled by a moony lamp – and stayed a week on the sill outside the chair you’d take. With gale after gale more of the moth was lost, antennae
Two tables pushed together, the beer coming in timely and convivial rounds. A song, a chorus joined and hilarious failures at games we played. And then you plucked from the air an offence in a foreign theatre of war and I caught in your group-beguiling tone, the note of the Commissar prepared to burn a
Sometimes mending a poem can feel like freeing a large fish from a caul of plastic netting, working away with only a pocket knife while the fish thrashes about, suspicious that every saving cut will end its life; but then the fish turns out to be a turtle with gashes on its verdant mottled limbs.
‘Mais il fut flottant, mon berceau’ – Corbière Sleep, sleep, my floating boy!A plunge of Northern gannets ridesthe air above your head; collideswith silver fish that shoal below.Let these ravens’ krok-kroksooth and lull you as you rock –sleep, sleep, my floating boy! Sleep, sleep, my floating boy!The herring-hunting humpbacks soundand ring their bubble nets aroundyour
My father has become an old Aegean King peering out anxiously, scanning the horizon full of foreboding. So I phone him before I leave to say I’m on my way. I use light words, ‘coming soon’, ‘around that time’, promising words that hover and play, allow him to drift in and out of sleep while
Women aren’t allowed in so we lurk on the threshold – wives, mothers, lovers waiting for our men to appear in their new changed selves. Prime among them comes the boy, trying on his new blue suit for next week’s prom. At once we recognise the occasion, know it’s not a suit he’s trying on
Some of us are not cut out to be happy. Our role is to suffer undramatically, quietly, at home, while the world goes by outside. We are the ones who pay for your daily joys. Our marriages fail; our health; our wealth; our prospects turn to dust. If we pluck up the courage to
Naming these things is the love-act – Patrick Kavanagh Brighton House and MerrendenRoslyn Villa by Milford House Arthur Cottages one at AnnanElmwood and St Leonards meet Charnwood and the Park View HouseMalvern is three down from Cedars Shakespeare nods down to MiltonLike Poplars on a Holly Bank Tennyson knows the Lindum HouseFern Bank and Carew
Their eye-stalks unfurl the way you turn socks right-side-out, the eye a surprise at the end, so to picture a snail dying — not pierced or gouged or caved in like a church, but dying of natural causes, its little foot crawling, brainless, hoping, like your blood, to one day feed a forest floor —
How many years since we ate here – nine, ten? We called it the smoky café before the ban, took the kids upstairs for pasta each time they stayed with us. Now they wake inside their lives, miles away, and we (who feared this place had shut) share pizza on our return: olives dotted over