Poems
Perhaps the best cells are the ones we can't kill off,
a persistence of the fittest, although mutation's
always painful. It's two thousand and fourteen,
and I know no-one who has been
uninjured. It thinks in me,
this shadow. I put on sunscreen, and am surprised
to come in contact with my skin.
In the same day, I'm chatted up in a café
by an aspiring nove ...
for Ian
And suddenly:
the men
are holding beers
and standing round
the trampoline,
and not the barbecue;
turning over toddlers,
instead of steaks.
The women
make the salads.
Fiona Wright
Recording
for Eileen
The light's older
in these sandstone suburbs,
jam-thick.
A clipped-haired man held a dog leash
saying one of us is single,
and even the leaves
had hunched their shoulders
in the gutters.
A waiter, golden-brown as a bread loaf,
squirted water at the pigeons
that sat cock-headed at the tables. My tart
Strange, that there are sequences
we live as cinema, if I looked
over my shoulder
I might recognise the front wall
of my bedroom
opened out towards the camera,
my furniture as hollow
as a stage p ...
No name or rank supplied
We’re looking down the barrel of
a.303 Lee Enfield,
standard issue through until
the early 1960s.
The others in the firing squad
have all been cropped away, it seems.
He is an officer, we think –
that small, smart cap betrays him.
His hair’s well-trimmed and business-like;
he seems somehow unduly clea ...
Patriotism
‘... the last refuge of a scoundrel’.
Samuel Johnson
But here and there a whisk of it
does no essential harm:
an accidental win or t ...
Flags
January 26
The honours list has been announced,
recipients are ‘humbled’.
Three jet fighters, adolescent,
fly past proving nothing.
Fireworks later on are promised.
None of this requires
my serious attention.
How many million barbecues?
Our tall ships and our
sixty thousand years
attempt a sort of ba ...
Judgement
If all we’re told is right
how wearisome He’ll find it;
all those fine gradations,
those mitigating factors.
Psychopaths are easy
but who are we to say?
The virtuous are harder,
their sin of subtle pride,
their svelte self-satisfaction.
The normal are the worst,
one day a fine donation,
next day a little nip ...
The Notebooks
Thirty years of dreams are stored
in notebooks, written down on waking.
Her daughter’s kept them all,
imagining her mother moves
among those shimmering and scribbled
layers on a bedside table.
Those narratives live on, she’s sure,
in all their raw hallucinations,
their sudden runs of ecstasy,
their weird humili ...
Grammar Lesson
There should be a name for the special case
in which we say ‘the crowd marvelled’,
if the roar that rose
over the back of the stadium walls
over the rain-shingled streets
conveys the sense that what mattered
on the pitch, or the court, happened
in the eyes that watched it;
that indicates a place has changed
fo ...