Poems
Poems
A new poem is upload to my blog each month, click here to visit my blog.
DEMETER DREAMS OF JAM
Demeter feels the nights draw in
and dreams of jam. It’s hardly light
she’s out there in the garden picking fruit,
pulling at the brambles,
scram-marks up her weathered arms,
tearing branches, berries, leaves and all,
till every piece of Tupperware she owns is full.
Demeter turns the kitchen into hell.
Before Jim Naughtie says Welcome to ‘Today’,
she’s reached the setting point.
She lines up rows of Kilner jars; ladles in
her glut; scribbles labels; slaps on lids –
no time for them to cool.
Demeter hardly registers the lethal heat,
holding up a jar, convincing herself
she’s trapped in what she can of summer:
sunlight; sweetness; leaves and thorns;
a wasp or two, wonderful and venomous –
the essence of the Upper Ground.
Demeter fits as many bottles as will go into a box,
stands it next the cases in the hall,
and waits until her daughter wakes
to pack the luggage in the car, and take her back
to what they now must think of as her other home.
Published in Obsessed with Pipework
DOUBLE ZOO.
Loreto Oxbridge girls have double zoo.,
their chaperones are Sister Gertrude and forty jars
of bloodless specimens preserved in alcohol.
Quick hands make heavy work of spatchcocked frogs.
The air is three parts chloroform, one dust.
Indifferent insects couple in their tanks.
Time’s an elastic thread, that snaps at last,
releasing girls from class (and navy drawers).
They hitch their skirts mid-thigh, cadge cigarettes,
en route to the Kardomah coffee bar
to raise the heart-rate of Xavarian boys,
and see first-hand the surge and flush of blood.
Published in Mslexia
The mice are back. His neck-hair bristles as
they do the polka over table-tops
and leave their evil foot prints pressed into
the butter he forgot to put away,
deposit guwna on the quarry tiles.
The peppered mice are back. He feels alive.
Time was, he’d swat them with a broom, or catch
a cat to fight them, Coliseum-wise.
His cat entrapping days are well past now,
but crafty still, he sets off for his shed.
Among the boxes of carbolic soap;
a winter’s worth of cabbage; balls of twine;
the gears and wheels of broken bicycles;
behind encrusted tools, he finds the heap
of snares called little paws – this takes all day.
That night, the man whose life has been defined
by enemies – the Nazis, army rules,
the Russians; no-good Łempki from Ukraine –
lays mouse-traps all along the kitchen floor.
The man who witnessed Stalin’s son quick-marched
through Krakow, understands revenge, constructs
a vision of himself, his fist outstretched,
displaying lifeless myszy by their tails.
Though, if he were a more reflective type,
the man who does things in his own sweet way,
he might think that other people had a point
and baiting traps with food would do the trick.
Then, had he been the kind to think things through,
he would have come to England, like his wife,
with solid gold to pay their way. Instead,
he hid thick wads of saved up of dollar bills
below the floor-boards in the hall. A space
the mice already called their own. They thanked
their benefactor for his handsome gift
of such fine stuff to line their nests with broods
of mouselings. So many generations
he swears that they will witness his last rites,
this worst and best of enemies, the mice.
Notes:
Tadeusz - pronounced ‘Tad-ay-oosh’
guwna - ‘guvna’, shit
peppered - English translation of a Polish oath
little paws - literal translation of the Polish for mousetrap
Łempki - ‘Wempki’. The ‘no-goods’
myszy - ‘mishy’, mice.