Archive for category Poetry
A LIFE
Esther Philips, oldest of thirteen, came
from Liverpool, had tea with Buffalo
Bill and, having siblings and her mother,
a drunkard, to care for, refused an offer
to join a chorus line. When I knew her, she
had no teeth, wore the same two black dresses
and munched Quaker Oats between meals. She cried
when I played ‘La Fille Aux Cheveux De Lin’
on the upright in the back room. She outlived
two husbands and four of seven children -
and died saying that she knew how Jesus felt.
SAUDADE
'Saudade', Almeida Junior, 1899
We sheltered in the lee of the lighthouse
at what was once the end of the world,
the caliphate, for half a millennium.
Lovers still, we watched the squall move eastwards,
obscure the Sagres promontory -
whose fort’s white walls hold the Navigator’s
stone anemometer: shaped like a compass rose,
big as a bull ring, grooved like a millstone.
His caravels outflanked Islam, rounded,
at last, Cape Bojador and made the Slave Coast.
Below us, hunched in crannies on the cliffs,
their rods like jibs, their lines like skeins, anglers -
descendants of Phoenicians, Romans, Saracens
- waited stoically for bass or bream to rise.
The rain lifted. A container ship passed.
Drake, Nelson, and Browning passed: ‘Nobly, nobly,
Cape St Vincent to the North-west died away
…how can I help England?’ In Ireland,
the black rot was already in the fields -
the coffin ships all ready in the roads.
Later, drinking wine the colour of sea grass,
in O Retiro do Pescador, we
watched our black bream split, salted, sizzled, served
with sprouts. Ah, home thoughts! And Mrs. Browning:
‘…a voice said in mastery, while I strove,
“Guess now who holds thee?” “Death, I said.”‘ We
smiled, as lovers do, and gossiped, as
lovers do, about our fellow diners
sotto voce: aging Caucasians
and a young Chinese couple with a child.
Somewhere, a radio played fado softly.
‘”Death”, I said. “Not death, but love.”‘
THE CLASSICAL TRADITION
'Lion', Babel, circa 583 BC
‘Arma virumque cano’ was birched
into pimply boys who ruled their thin red lines
at every degree. Till the sun set
on heart-shaped continents, DCs in the bush
carried Caesar in their khaki shorts. Gaul or
Matabele, order was where empire
prevailed. Rule of law is a state of mind.
Ovid exiled himself. Virgil wrote
two lines a day in his villa near Naples.
On unmapped plains, horsemen manoeuvred.
Their descendants herd goats. Power, I sing, and
illusion - managing a barbarous,
imperious language.
FREEDOM
Even at Goose Bay, Alaska, changing planes,
there were people to greet him. He asked
who they were. ‘Eskimos.’ Mandela
remembered the igloos in the textbook
at the mission school. ‘Ah, Inuit.’
He walked to greet them in their common tongue.
WISHES
For Evelyn b. 13.1.10
Born to good music by strong women,
Ella’s ‘isle of joy’, Nina’s ‘it’s a new dawn’ -
how you nestle in your parents’ untrammelled
love, how you suck with unrelenting hunger!
Born into a world of rubble, with children
buried alive, a world of chicanery
and hatreds - you have entered a difficult,
place, little Evie, somewhere remarkable,
full of tears and amazing kindnesses!
Born into a world of snow, a fox’s
nocturnal tracks in the white garden
of the tall, Victorian villa, a Blackcap
at the bird feeder, a Redwing sheltering
in the laurel and, away on the Downs,
boys and girls, freed from school, tobogganing
over the fossils and flints on the steep shore
of a Palaeolithic sea - how you squirm
with hunger, how you bask in so much love!
Three wishes then for you, little bird:
may you be lucky, may you be gracious,
may you always have someone to love!
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