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Spooked
Their tender hot shadows
Will make horses start.
“It is you,” I cried to the old pony. “You!”
To the young tawny mare. Yet they shied, would not stand.
One is dead, one alive. The streets stretch to summer.
Who walks grey, through shops’ warm glass?
I raise a shocked hand.
(Published in "The Times Literary Supplement")
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Heatwave
There are strawberries in the fields
Girls are wearing almost nothing
The washing blows in fragrant folds
Neighbours of the endless evening
Spray watermists, calling, chatting.
I am out, in the dipping grass,
My worn skin glows brown through my sleeve,
The burnished clouds glitter and pass.
As late birds, the tired children leave,
Gold fills my throat. I cannot breathe.
(Published in The Rialto)
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Counting
Once money flowed round us like friends,
Salaries, gifts, dividends.
A gurgle. The long party ends,
Each bank account dry as a throat,
Each rustle of bills a new note,
Alarm, as the rabbit meets stoat.
Wide headlights sweep on. Out of glare,
The bruises fade. Time to repair,
To count up loose change on the stair,
To queue in Co-ops with quiet old men,
Hoards slips for razor blades, find them
Flashed cheap, in corner shops you spurned.
It is a losing game, you feel,
With money lost which oiled the wheel
(At each slow crank the rust cogs squeal).
One post, a sudden legacy
Might cast this time to memory
A grey-lit dusk slid under sea,
When days of drudging wore your mind,
When walking’s warm wind blew, unsigned,
When neighbours spoke, when you were kind.
(Published in "Poetry
Review")
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Joggers
You could easily run them down.
Some are slippery in yellow, as fish
Slice the dark’s waters. Others strip down
To a flicker of cloth, a wish
To pound still further. Some are jowled,
Mottled by age. Some race, so young
You scarcely remember that energy
A trap will shiver, sprung.
Although I can picture the tendon’s tear
Though I feel in my own knees the grind of worn bone
I am stirred and moved by their flight to air
From the choke of the traffic, the silence of stone.
(Published in "Critical
Quarterly")
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December 25th, 12 pm
No, honestly, we are more organised than we
look.
The piles of clothes are all washed.
I have fed the birds, then the cats.
Now the cats are out: catching birds.
It starts to unravel. The cream will not whip,
It mocks the whisk in white hissing waves.
The cat flies the long grass, scattering wings,
The creased pale blouses shiver and fall.
Time, I think, to drink, then wander
The flooded footpaths, to waver and call
And Christmas, and Merry, and to you all.
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Relics
I have come to see the angel
With her worn stone nose.
She came from the old church.
No one knows
Why it burnt down.
Knocked candle? Cromwell’s men?
The Victorians’ vestry
Raised her into rain.
I have no right to come here.
Their God and I are strangers.
They pinned her to an inner wall
Out of the weather’s dangers
Out of the wind of lime-flower
Out of the sunlight’s tide.
I drink her gaze, then leave her.
She hobbles at my side.
(Published in "The Rialto")
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