40 YEAR FOOTNOTE (Good Friday, 1983)

On coach after coach after coach we came –

from the suburbs and cities, from hills, rivers and the coast,

and from every point between – spilling

into country lanes, all fenced and muddy.

A tide of sisterhood, brothers also,

to flood the nuclear valley.

 

We knew on which side of the wire we stood,

believed that arms were for linking.

Mostly the papers mocked us: Kremlin’s April Fools, they said.

And how we laughed.

With unfurled banners, chants and song

told awkward truths. Filled the air with agitation.

 

Each a cell in some larger mass, stretching

again and again, long like elastic –

palms fanned, out and downward, as if before a firing squad –

to line the fourteen miles:

Burghfield – Aldermaston – Greenham

fingertip to fingertip, source to end design connected.

 

There, in our Easter rising, a silent moment:

we felt the future slam into us, electric.

 

 

iv. 2023

The Visit

These tracks I’m riding now –

with every unsprung jolt familiar –

narrow to a distant pinpoint:

I go to seek

your never-reached remembering.

 

Sycamores line the station path.

On upstretched arms, their bare fingers

clutch at murmuration:

the skywriting of speckled black

on grey parchment.

 

Heavy with veneer, a bow-fronted chest

meets me inside.

Too large for the tiny hall it stands in,

too old a friend to be let go.

I rummage through its drawers.

 

Grey images on soft black paper:

from an album’s weighty pages

sepia thumbnails spill.

Fixed neatly once by gummed corners,

age has loosened them.

 

On their backs sporadic clues, faint

in pencil code;

its index though has long ago been lost.

I ask about the names and dates

you only sometimes know.

 

In drab gymslips, a school team holds

their year-marked ball.

Your in-charge smile sports modest confidence -

it's the season before you wed.

Plenty to stir our talk.

 

But times become misplaced,

a frown forms on your face.

Answers turn to questions.

For with each treasure brought to mind

another vanishes from view.

 

 

xi. 2017 – iii.2023

Observations from beyond a 'KEEP OUT' sign

Don't pound the pavement, hard and grubby.

Step away to leave behind its jarring slabs. Find

a yielding, muddy path instead.

 

See how an alder marks the way:

green and turning yellow, cones and catkins flower

together on a single tree.

 

Here are rot-proof roots, hanging on

where alarm-clock wrens punctuate the riverbank.

Kestrels in courtship overhead.

 

Recognise the bounds of guesswork:

marsh and willow races are, in the field, dead spit

unless you catch their voice distinct.

 

There’s the racket of parakeets,

brash as if they owned the place. That startled egret,

once exotic, now is everyday.

 

A black clamour of rooks, bare-faced

occupies the distant high-rise canopy. Shotgun

jackdaws seek refuge in numbers.

 

Hear woodpecker drums, trunk to trunk.

Guarded by barbed, electric fence, watch golfers float 

like swans across a private lake.

 

 iii. 2023