Comfort break at South Mimms services c.1985?

Lift the wooden lid with care.

 

Somewhere within, you think

there must be evidence.

Newer than sepia, but not yet colour,

the budget choice was black-and-white

back then, when everyone

was glossy, greyscale sharp.

 

Whose camera, turned through ninety,

brought you portrait

exactly at that moment?

Your flung-back head, throatful

of laughter. My bold proposal,

the very notion of it.

 

Found – not found. In programmes,

badges, postcards, letters

the past unpacks. Explore what’s been

interred and who you left behind,

before the stay rests back

in place. For just one day

 

see how we’ve lived so long

outwith this single negative.

 

 

iii. 2025

The tomorrow you worried about yesterday

In these dreich weeks, no-sun day follows no-sun day: mist clouds

the sugar factory steam, obscures its plume and presses down.

 

A bouquet of burnt roots, the edge of sweetness. When light cuts

through, low-angled, glowering afternoons lead to longest night.

 

We walk the shadows’ margin, forage for mistletoe, bring

the outside in. Shrubs in sackcloth guard our abbey flowerbeds:

 

hessian monks, bound and silent. O Come All Ye Bleak Ding-Dong

Gentlemen!  – hear the carols echo, inescapable.

 

Charity shopping for stocking fillers: the shock of Sambo

chinaware still on display, unwoken to empire’s end.

 

Scarlet-thick lips, whitened teeth you believed you should never

see again. Dickie bow collar of grinning servitude.

 

At least he wasn’t labelled Balthazar. That would be going

too far, even in a market town with genteel  self-regard.

 

The quiz of Christmas yet to come. Counting the days, we cut

new blinds to the fashion of old fabric. Black out false dawns.

 

i . 2025