OUR SOLE SURVIVOR?

https://www.hsj.co.uk/quality-and-performance/government-counts-mailouts-to-hit-100000-testing-target/7027544.article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56145492 

So – like an interminable drone

of phone-on-hold muzak –

Right Honourable member for Potemkin West,

you were kept, from one Handcock-up to the next

hanging on by your lizard fingertips.

 

In the build-back-better days to come

you shall not be remembered,

even as Bozo’s useful monkey.

Rather your ‘mate’ down the pub –

grown fat on the contract

you slipped him under the counter –

will reconsider.

                           Come to think

your brain, your past, your skin

and your future to be

the colour and consistency

of stale wallpaper paste.

And, after all, about as much use.

 

vi. 2021

 

PRESENTS

 

I am using up what we could not bear

to throw away in house clearance:

the smell of your chic shower gel

is rosemary for remembrance.

We guess you took pleasure in its fragrance

but never got to ask. And never gave

this hand-made honey, eaten now

but never spread on toast to savour

at your garden window. Those plants held dear,

whose names I never did recall

from one told visit to the next:

almost to the end you could name them all.

 

v.2021

 

fridge poem for May Day 21

Between Culver and Dunnose …

… is where my eye would fix you still,

marking the play of waves

in tranquil gaze across the curve of bay.

There, edge-bound broom and gorse

reach out their yellow-loaded limbs,  

north to the sweeping height of chalk.

 

Turning south, with a sleight of hand,

dog rose tumbles over the groynes.

Like some figure of speech

a poppy hides in cow parsley.

Face to face, these your pictures hang.

We talk perspective: how sometimes

 

one must exaggerate a speck

to show a billowed sail.

How wrists strain with expectation of insight,

yet stay their execution,

from the blank page of beginnings

to our last dreamt stroke of colour. 

 

 (for Eileen Cassidy, 1928 - 2020)

i. 2021

 

South 66 October 2020

FESTIVAL

I knew I wasn’t

the most embarrassing Dad

when I saw the guy in cargo shorts

and a fake Fair Isle tank-top.

One of those jumpers

with a shirt sewn in.

He was trying to hula hoop.

 

v. 2020

STAND ON YOUR OWN TWO FEET

 

Pull yourself up

(as we’re all supposed to)

grasping, for support,

whatever furniture comes to hand.

Feel your leverage strengthen

in a newly visible horizon of legs:

four-square chairs, a table, grown-ups.

Tumbles become fewer

and plastic bones will rarely fracture 

in the forest of hardened verticals.

 

Make your entrances matter

(each year is merely a fleeting stage).

From one small step go further –

run, leap, dance – quick then quicker,

only slow when you near the brink

of falling down.

Windows in the sky

are not for climbing through;

even should the breaking waves below

sound like paradise.

 

Just keep going

(old people say this all the time)

and second guess the hazards:

kerbs and slopes, stairs and rugs,

spills, pets, darkness.

Risk grows in likelihood and consequence.

Don’t clutch at old regrets with flailing limbs,

take an outstretched hand.

When you reach that place you can no longer stand

better to have walked there.

 

xii. 2020