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.
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.
