Love Poems

I would like to introduce this set of poems first by thanking The Wine Drunk Poetry Society - all of it’s wonderful rotating cast of characters, but particularly John, Yanni and Sam.

For once rather than having only five poems to choose from to create another oeuvre, this time I had a selection of three times that, therefore I want to explain why I chose to put these particular poems together. My original selection included two poems that reflected backwards, written retrospectively and rather unhappy in tone, two poems that I feel do not accurately represent the time of my life (last year June-November) during which the other poems were written. Despite being published months after being written, I wanted this set to have the urgency of the present, to feel like a true narrative.

I feel very much that we have reached a point where life is giving and taking away certain things from all of us. Whilst I was falling in love last year, my grandfather was dying. He had been ill for a very long time and he passed away in November. I want these poems to capture that tension that I felt between youth and age, between love and death, the guilt that sometimes pulls and the ecstasy of knowing that suddenly there is so much more. These poems are about love - romantic love, familial love, love between friends - in all its earthly simplicity, in all its celestial complexity.

Perch

What you hold on your palm darling,

Is a small, plain bird

Its whole body a pulse beating wildly

Breathing to the beat of an erratic rainfall

That fell from a storm cloud in the late spring.

It is but a little thing landed not long ago,

You still regard it with curiosity.

It regards you with utter trust, wide eyed and newborn

Terror is prowling hotly on the tail of trust

Both are bloodied and raw.

Keep offering your seeds

And of course it will stay, breathing faster and faster,

It tries to build a nest from the skeletal debris of the past,

You cast these bones from your holy palm.

‘Find something living’ you say ‘I am no nest for ghosts’.

It is but a plain hollow boned thing,

Look up and watch the birds of paradise float instead

How I wish I could float,

Instead I sit on your palm

A private paradise for when everyone else has gone home.

Let me rest here a moment darling,

Just a little while longer.

But a small plain thing

Forcing the air in and out faster and faster and faster,

Until I am nothing but air.

If He Leaves

‘If he leaves you with a car alarm heart, you learn to sing along’ - Sarah Kay, 'The Type'

We’ve been here before

And we’ll be here afterwards.

When he sets you back down onto the earth

(Please be gentle)

We’ll be here, we’ll have been waiting

Tilling the soil,

Keeping watch for the fires that break out

Late at night when it’s so dark

There’s nothing else to do but burn.

When the tide washes out,

Stranding you on the stony shore,

We’ll have been waiting

Anticipating that salt rush

That bitter taste his name leaves in your mouth

We’ll be here

To teach you new words,

New jokes new patterns new sighs.

You have been there,

And we will be there.

We have been here before,

We will be here afterwards.

A Visit

If the mind is a room,

Then my Grandfather’s is empty.

The decorators tried to keep things together,

Papering the walls with appointment slips

And stopping up the holes with handfuls of pills,

But still the draft blew through,

Insidiously forcing itself under the door,

Up through the floorboards, in through the bricks.

Sometimes the roar is so loud nobody can hear,

The wind stripped away everything, destabilised everything,

The decorators, in their white coats,

Declared my Grandfather’s mind unfit for habitation,

Put red tape across the doorway, handed us a stopwatch.

Sometimes he glances out of the window,

Waving just for a second.

But mostly he sits in the middle of that empty room,

Crumpled in on himself, not looking or hearing,

Just talking quietly, restlessly moving his hands.

I go to visit him in a room with blue walls

Which my mother has covered with pictures,

Cutting and pasting together pieces of her father’s life

So that these intimate strangers can watch over him,

A smiling man with white hair seems particularly alien,

He watches from the world inside the frames,

From the mountains of Austria, the streets of Paris,

He holds two laughing, chubby, red-faced grandchildren,

He laughs with his dark haired wife,

Sits surrounded by his family in front of a Christmas tree.

He lays now, surrounded by his family in that blue room,

Too tired today, he closes his eyes.

[Untitled]

If I take longer to say the things you say so freely,

It's because the radio inside me has been broken for so long,

I've been crackling static for eleven months,

I'm often surprised by the sweet silence now,

Not that it allows me to think clearly, oh no darling,

Instead I think of you day and night night and day,

Your life is seeping into the cracks of mine,

And I couldn't stop it even if I wanted to.

Everyone is worried, everyone is ecstatic, us most of all,

Watch the meteor burn its great split in the sky,

I wonder when the darkness will spill from that breach,

And when the summer ends, will you leave me,

Turning to go back to your own well worn path,

Wearing the shoes I crafted from my kindness,

They will see you well.

An ocean obstructs my path darling and though I know how to swim,

I may just choose to go down into the deaf silence,

Where I can't hear the radio, whether it be static

Or your voice calling me back to surface,

To watch that blazing meteor finally crash into the black water.

Love

My grandfather is a dying man.

And so he has been for two long years now,

His life is falling away from him in great pieces

Movement, body, mind, memory

Waste away overnight,

A different man upon each sunrise.

He and my grandmother have been married over 50 years

This is not what either of them imagined

Their lives would be like, all that time ago,

White veils and church smiles.

Growing old with someone

Does not mean graceful silvering and quiet evenings,

It is long hospital visits and hoping beyond hope

When the bitter world has already taken away so much of it.

“Will you marry me?” my grandfather asked one night,

“We’re already married” grandmother chuckles back,

“Then will you marry me again?”

He sees birds in the white hospital room,

Pointing them out to me,

A small eagle in the corner, a sparrow under the table.

When the birds have flown away,

When everything else leaves: eating, drinking, speaking, remembering,

I know that my grandmother will be the last thing to leave,

She will sit beside the bed and sit within the burnt out shell of his memory,

The last thing he sees before the shutters close on this life,

And the nest lies at last deserted.

Oxford to London 08:07

I would spend my lifetime on trains

If it meant having just five minutes with you,

I watch England's towns, cities and countryside

Tear away from me through the window

Pages and pages of stories ripping out of sight,

It does not matter: there is only one story now,

Let it all just fall away darling,

If I am with you then there is nothing else.

Storms Over Water

The span of time over which these poems were written is roughly nine months long. The subject matter therefore varies dramatically according to what was happening in my life at the time. For clarity I have split this set into two groups, Past and Present, according to whether the subject matter they cover was something happening at the time of writing, or something that had occurred previously. A few of these poems still look back over the ruins of my last published set (here if you want to read), it’s a grieving process that has taken months, sometimes seeming to leap forwards, other times I have found myself right back in the same place, asking again what is wrong with me. However, as I think the two final ‘Present’ poems will show, hope and optimism have steadily regained ground, and though some things will never leave me, they have at least moved aside for the moment. I feel as if this set looks more inward than my last, leans less heavily on a single outside influence and seeks to touch on a broader range of experience. The poems below are records of loss, belief and ultimately healing.

Past

Avebury Ritual (written Jan 2018)

This time last year

We drove out into the country,

Out of the smoky haze and into the bright;

Every so often when the ground rocks beneath me again

I still feel

That ancient west country pull.

The nature of the magnet I cannot be sure of,

Is it simply the pull of place, or of time?

You cast a long shadow on Avebury plain,

A human shape amongst the stones,

I understand why people worship what they cannot see.

Trying to see myself in your shadow,

Moving in that constant darkness thrown over me

To keep me questioning

To keep me confused,

To keep me near enough to be useful,

But not so near to allow me safety.

I think now that it was the golden light that had me confused.

I looked for myself in the wrong shadow.

Women do not find themselves in the shadows of men.

We are in the stones,

Gathered around in a circle

We face each other and know ourselves

Through the strength of our sex,

In the unashamed way

That we can always look each other in the eye.

The ancient circle of sisters resists weather and time,

Survives the wars and skirmishes of men,

Who have always been given care of precious things,

And who have always been reckless,

Always breaking, abandoning, forgetting.

Blow your empty gales around us,

Still our shadows are cast long and proud

On that great golden plain.

I wish he had left me something to burn,

A pagan sacrifice to my ancient mothers there

To cleanse him from that place and from my memory of it.

Yes, I still feel that ancient west country pull,

But now I seek the stone

Which was always warmer than the man.

The Many Lives (written Jan 2018)

I have been many things,

But chiefly I have been a fool.

Prostituting myself for morsels of bitter affection,

Prostituting myself for the cause, ever the martyr:

‘It’s a sad day when you stop believing people can change’.

A sad mystic,

I have drained the cold stars of meaning,

Completing my own resentful circles,

Meeting my younger self at the join,

Looking at the mirror, both sets of eyes sorry.

Desperate priestess,

A long rotten system of belief

That allows me to worship at the bloody altar

Of my own making, of your restoration,

Kneeling, I always hand the knife to someone else.

Innocence and experience come in waves,

One never keeps the other down for long.

What is the point of living and learning

When the learning stops the living

And the living is what we need.

Present

Sleeping (written Sep 2017)

These days I sleep in the centre of my bed, head on both pillows
If there's no space for anyone else, was there never space for you at all (?)
I do little things like this to fool myself.
I often go to bed with a hot water bottle now too,
Unsure if I'm like a child holding a doll or a doll holding a child.

Oxford November (written Nov 2017)

“He said ‘grab your things I’ve come to take you home’” - Solsbury Hill, Peter Gabriel

There’s a place in my mind

Where I keep uncorruptable moments

Everything seen through a solid glass orb,

Solid so there are no echoes -

Memories do not talk back.

----------

It’s bright mid-afternoon

Though I can sense the freshness of morning.

Faltering a few times

I fall into step with someone I no longer know.

We slept on a bare mattress

On the floor and I can still smell him on me

Bundled into two days worth of clothes

I am curiously light - it’s the heavy sunlight

Which pins me to the present

I would call him a ghost

But the scene is too substantial perhaps,

The sky the bricks the road

Myself

Awake for the first time since the wreck

I hadn’t realised I had been kicking

So hard to break the surface

Now I fill my lungs again and again.

Unshackled from my pain

For one easy afternoon.

Leave the magic at the door,

That’s not why I came,

Do ghosts chase away ghosts?

I doubt you’ll ever catch each other.

As for me?

Try to hold water in your bare hands,

You’ll understand.

Storm on Water (written May 2018)

“Thunder only happens when it’s raining.” - Dreams, Fleetwood Mac

The air is thick with it,

Heavy night under green canopy,

By black still water,

Steady stream of woodsmoke

From the lazy embers.

The air is thick with it,

Flashes are gaining ground,

And the great lurching roar

Is growing closer,

Breathing deeper, heavier.

With a great heaving boom

It is all around, inside outside

I wait with animal anticipation

For the sky to split

And spill it’s liquid sigh.

Animal senses: you smell it before you feel it

Hear it before you see it,

One, two, one, two

Running onto the boat

Find my human voice: “It’s here. Come.”.

Rain on skin is primal, wet on warm

Snarling at the sky, it roars back

And I open myself to the touch

A burst of light and noise.
Wait

There are eyes on me.