My poem “Nelly” has been posted today at Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.
It’s a poem about my Grandmother – my Nan – her funeral, and my imagining her as a young woman leaving the place where she was born and grew up to start a new life. If you’ve visited my “About” page, you’ll already be acquainted with her and with the origins of the title of this blog.
My thanks go out to Autumn Sky Poetry Daily editor, Christine Klocek-Lim, for choosing to publish the poem.
You can’t imagine the time he’ll be an old man,
and spend warm evenings folded into park benches,
cursing the aches that crept up unannounced, wiping
a brow whose furrows grew when no-one was looking.
His face will have become an onion, cheeks weathered,
and his nose broadened, all skirmished with veins.
The mustard hair will long have turned bone-white,
but his eyes will have stayed the same giveaway blue
as his superhero cape. With luck, the smile will still be
written through him, like his name threading a stick of rock.
first published in Right Hand Pointing, issue 105, 2016
Up here is where I’m sure it was, all the
muted fluttering, on the ledges shouldered
beneath the newly-converted mills, lording it
over the gritted teeth of the stone-dark town.
I followed her, behind by a breath that still
tasted of kiss, enjoying the view, through a
chain of fields thigh-deep in flowers, the sky
both scrubbed blue and punched with bruises
at the same time. She seemed to know
all their names, the cornflowers, loosestrife,
pointed out the ragwort – poisonous to cattle –
and the liquorice-striped caterpillars urgently
stripping its leaves. I fell back, now winded
with the effort, rolling their names on my tongue.
She seemed to know everything that mattered,
all except what was hatching away inside her.
first published in Firefly Magazine, issue 10, 2017
…it was almost exactly two of those
old-fashioned, pre-decimal years later,
on the other side of the world, and I was
nursing a rusted old dragon of a truck
down a red road you could see streaking by
through the lacy floor of the cab. And it was
just after midday, because the shadows
were mean and riveted on, and I don’t
know why, but all of a sudden I realised
you’d actually meant what you’d said,
that they hadn’t been just giddy, disposable,
2 a.m. words you might say to almost anyone
at all, to be laughed off the next day, like dust
from a mirror. It was possible that if I eased
further off the gas, I wouldn’t get back until
everything was already picked and safely in
the chiller. And I wondered if those brahmans,
drawn and incongruously skeletal in such a
fleshy, civilised country, would be nosing
around in their paddock again, grazing on
fresh air, amazing me that they survived.
First published in San Pedro River Review, Spring 2017
A life’s script runs abruptly out of lines. No need to worry.
Neither dropped bottle nor platform smash as they collide.
The broken man has drained away in overlapping episodes.
A final seizure rattles the jawbones, breaks two teeth,
and the sorry bladderful seeps down the shapeless trousers,
painting its temporary stain across the concrete.
Only God hears the silent, glacial cry. This and other things
are and will be over. Turn your head. No need to look.
Life has eaten dignity all away, leaving death to go hungry.
With the night’s invasion complete, the men who come
from nowhere will come, scrape up the flaccid corpse,
leaving bottle and platform behind, and disappear back
into the unspoken shadows. The collective memory is reset.
No need to dwell. Our Metro is still warm and efficient.
‘Attention,’ says the sober voice. ‘The doors are closing.’
first published in Here Comes Everyone (Transition Issue), 2016
at Durham Cathedral
They built their God a house
to shoulder the heavens,
demanding all of the sky above
the broad loopings of the river,
where it slowly pinched its banks
into a single, swollen drop.
Above the waterline, where its
sprawling founds tread the stout,
bread-coloured rock, jewelled
chains of toadflax rope themselves
into ancient niches worked by
the insistent, scouring rains of
ten centuries; like hermits
riding out a life of storms from
a lonely Atlantic cell, their
ivy-leaves shrug off the beat
of each droplet, dipping their
solemn heads in prayer.
first published in Bindweed Magazine, 2016
Sometimes there is no sign of a struggle.
Perhaps they are brought to the house already dead,
molested a little, and then abandoned.
They seem more forlorn this way, inert and muted,
like they simply fell from the sky and managed
to land underneath this particular chair in the kitchen,
or in the middle of apparently random spaces.
It’s different when they’ve put up a fight, however
futile; the scattering of fragments will spread
to several rooms. The heavier feathers
hang like jetsam, beached and unmoving,
while the down, with its filigree whisperings,
takes flight whenever a door opens, almost lighter
than the air it would’ve been used to capture.
first published in Mad Swirl, 2016
As it’s Father’s Day, I wanted to repost this.
Me and dad sometimes fished a murky stretch of the Brant,
marshalled between levées of belly-high grass and nettles.
Unless you’d pulled one out yourself, you’d never know
the river hid writhing knots of eels in its catshit-coloured waters,
that barely moved as they searched the edges of the fen for
a gradient to follow, still forty pancake miles away from the sea.
It was always hot. Everything was a shade of green, yellow or blue,
and the man at the Royal Oak would swap a netful of live ropes,
with their angry, pinprick eyes, for beer, and a lemonade for the lad.
first published in Message in a Bottle, issue 30, 2016
I’m delighted to report that my poem “Process” has been posted today at Poppy Road Review, one of my favourite online places. You can find the poem here, along with another – “4 a.m.” – which appeared almost exactly a year ago.
Huge thanks to editor Sandy Benitez for her support.
It was autumn in my endless year. I was under-ripe,
an empty bucket. So I bought an overcoat belonging to
a dead man. I gave a five pound note to his crushed-up
daughter, and released it from where it was hanging,
all limp and unwanted, in a hidden closet, next to
a woollen suit and a defeated army of collared shirts.
The sweetness of the lining against my shaved neck
offered a first kiss, the stretch of bottle-green cloth
across my unsteady shoulders, an embrace, of sorts.
Wearing it with black shoes punched with silver buckles,
and a shirt whose tight cuffs never quite stopped making
my wrists itch (though I was glad of the distraction),
I toyed with a bashfulness easily mistaken for arrogance,
took the first, tiny steps in a long, unmapped journey.
first published in Bluepepper, 2017
