Poems of the Decade Page 2
but the blade became choked with soil or fouled with weeds,
or what was sliced or split somehow closed and mended behind,
like cutting at water or air with a knife.
I poured barbecue fluid into the patch
and threw in a match – it flamed for a minute, smoked
for a minute more, and went out. I left it at that.
In the weeks that came new shoots like asparagus tips
sprang up from its nest and by June
it was riding high in its saddle, wearing a new crown.
Corn in Egypt. I looked on
from the upstairs window like the midday moon.
Back below stairs on its hook, the chainsaw seethed.
I left it a year, to work back through its man-made dreams,
to try to forget.
The seamless urge to persist was as far as it got.
Tiffany Atkinson
Zuppa di Ceci
In chipped English she told me
that to get mine like hers Well
I’m just too flash-in-the-pan
These things take time Chick-peas alone
must be soaked overnight then simmered for hours
while you stand at the stove with a slow spoon
skimming off scum only then a hope in hell
you’ll get the rest of the ingredients to sit
on the right staves Though
what this has to do with you
slipping out in the crease of night like
a dropped stitch I can’t think just
the kitchen window’s black slab
where I stand sucking cream from the lip
of an old spoon a platter of reheated stars
and last night’s moon served cold
Ros Barber
Material
My mother was the hanky queen
when hanky meant a thing of cloth,
not paper tissues bought in packs
from late-night garages and shops,
but things for waving out of trains
and mopping the corners of your grief:
when hankies were material
she’d have one, always, up her sleeve.
Tucked in the wrist of every cardi,
a mum’s embarrassment of lace
embroidered with a V for Viv,
spittled and scrubbed against my face.
And sometimes more than one fell out
as if she had a farm up there
where dried-up hankies fell in love
and mated, raising little squares.
She bought her own; I never did.
Hankies were presents from distant aunts
in boxed sets, with transparent covers
and script initials spelling ponce,
the naffest Christmas gift you’d get –
my brothers too, more often than not,
got male ones: serious, and grey,
and larger, like they had more snot.
It was hankies that closed department stores,
with headscarves, girdles, knitting wool
and trouser presses; homely props
you’d never find today in malls.
Hankies, which demanded irons,
and boiling to be purified
shuttered the doors of family stores
when those who used to buy them died.
And somehow, with the hanky’s loss,
greengrocer George with his dodgy foot
delivering veg from a Comma van
is history, and the friendly butcher
who’d slip an extra sausage in,
the fishmonger whose marble slab
of haddock smoked the colour of yolks
and parcelled rows of local crab
lay opposite the dancing school
where Mrs White, with painted talons,
taught us When You’re Smiling from
a stumbling, out of tune piano:
step-together, step-together, step-together,
point! The Annual Talent Show
when every mother, fencing tears,
would whip a hanky from their sleeve
and smudge the rouge from little dears.
Nostalgia only makes me old.
The innocence I want my brood
to cling on to like ten-bob notes
was killed in TV’s lassitude.
And it was me that turned it on
to buy some time to write this poem
and eat bought biscuits I would bake
if I’d commit to being home.
There’s never a hanky up my sleeve.
I raised neglected-looking kids,
the kind whose noses strangers clean.
What awkwardness in me forbids
me to keep tissues in my bag
when handy packs are 50p?
I miss material handkerchiefs,
their soft and hidden history.
But it isn’t mine. I’ll let it go.
My mother too, eventually,
who died not leaving handkerchiefs
but tissues and uncertainty:
and she would say, should I complain
of the scratchy and disposable,
that this is your material
to do with, daughter, what you will.
Edward Barker
Crystal Night
In my father’s house
paper was always at a premium.
I arrived one night,
it must have been raining for weeks
and even the floors were soggy –
like those of a used ark.
It had a way of provoking images, references,
this house, uncontrollably.
He was sitting by the fire.
I sat down on the broken armchair
next to him – the light of the flames
flickering in his stone-age cheeks.
He tossed another book into the fire.
I smiled, and glanced at the woodpile –
what was there was sodden, unburnable.
No one had been out to gather wood.
He was burning selectively, a kind of literary
criticism. Trying not to appear fascinated
I checked the burnt and burning spines,
I remember there was a Heyer and wondered
if he had gone off her. A couple of phone
books. Fortunately no history.
He was enjoying himself. I saw a Gideon
on the pile next to him. I said nothing,
not wishing to give him grounds to provoke.
So far no poems in the fire either.
We sat chatting. I wondered whether he
remembered. Suddenly I remembered
he must have been 21 when it happened.
Not likely he would forget.
I also realized I had seen
the same newsreel that he must have,
the one with the ruddy faces
cheerfully throwing armfuls of books
onto the bonfire, the campsite songs.
And I knew his was a coded message,
a sort of Mafia communication.
As we chatted of this and that
I tried to work out what he was saying:
could have been – we’re living through
it all over again – but that was too crude.
Or – you’ve abandoned me and this
is how I survive now – but he was too
proud and different for that. Maybe he
was showing me what it was like.
But he was just enjoying himself.
The books burned on.
It seemed as if the words, released
by the flames, flew up chaotically
into the chimney. It was clear
letters and phrases, scorched,
were getting stuck in the blackened
brickwork and creating entirely new
patterns, even poems.
From a distance I imagined
you could see the house, its chimney
spewing words in clouds over the
fields, into the stream, the trees.
A truly literary house.
Judi Benson
Burying the Ancestors
I
I’m tired of being crooned to the tune
of old Aunt Liza’s dead goose,
lullabyed in those cotton fields back home,
roused to Dixie, swamped in the Sewanee River,
hearing Mammy say hush chile ,
you know your Mamma was born to die .
The one they called Morning, born into the light,
taking her mamma’s life. Hush chile. Hush Mammy .
I want the repeat names to stop repeating,
all those Henry fathers, greats and grands,
uncles, brothers, cousins intertwined, intermarried.
Juniors, Seniors, and all those Roman numerals, just delete.
Set fire to the tissue-thin letters of fine penmanship
and not much to say, weather’s fine,
coming home in the covered wagon .
Clip the stamps, give them to the collector,
then burn baby burn.
Burn all their blusterings, their justifications
for blistering others’ skin in the relentless summer heat,
while they wrapped themselves around shady porches.
I know to honour this blood flowing through me
is to say nothing. Don’t mention the wills
begetting slaves and all their increase, forever, amen.
Sadie, Cicely, Moses, Caesar, and the one they called Patience.
Chains around their necks, chains around their ankles,
chains around their hopeless hearts,
all for the increase of those who refused to work the land,
whose hands were forbidden to touch dirt.
But my tongue wants to be released from its stays.
All those big hats bouncing with flowers, tossed in the wind,
pale faces unveiled, finding a trace of the darker hue hinted at.
II
Let Eugenia in her ball gown go waltzing
back out the door. Stop fanning her lashes at the Judge,
begging him to pass the Secession Act on her birthday.
Pretty please Judge, I’ll be 19 . And so he did,
slicing Georgia off from the Union.
And then what, and what if only Johnny
had come marching home again.
Eugenia, dead of night, bundling her babies
into the flat wagon, crossing the rising river,
just before the bridge gave out,
whipping the horses and cursing those damn Yankees
she’d never forgive, nor all her increase.
Eugenia always seen in mourning-black,
burying her father, her babies, her husband.
Rocking on her porch, silver-haired,
a black ribbon round her neck, glint in her eye,
sure the South would rise again.
III
Soft people, hard people, lines crissing and crossing
the economic divide, rattling at the edges of china cups,
hands cracked from hard work, soft hands slipping into gloves.
Ladies and Gents, rebels and ruffians.
These strangers: Benjamin, Lydia, Josh and Jasmine,
flattened in the black and white photograph,
sitting stiffly, even when casual,
suspicious of the man under black cloth
the little box with the sudden Pop !
Smile? Say cheese? What’s that.
Meat? No one’s had any in months,
cracked corn, bucked wheat,
and always hoe cake, though once
it was told, syrup.
Once the land was fertile.
Then grew to be like its people, over-worked, exhausted,
tobacco, cotton, corn, thirsty for rain.
The great greats and not-so-greats
with their sharp pulled-back hair,
tight knots, tributaries of trouble
running across their faces,
bending their mouths down,
bones edging through the little skin.
Even the old-eyed children
clench an angry desperation in their faces.
Left-overs, that was all some could afford to rent.
All they had, they’d inherited, the feather bed,
one scrawny mule, three slaves and all their increase.
Just another mouth to feed.
IV
Planters, plantation owners, preachers, politicians,
doctors, lawyers, artists, teachers, n’er do wells, drunks,
do-gooders, glamour girls posing for Coca Cola ads:
Camille, Vally, Lamar,
naughty girls seen smoking in public, racey women,
swell men, bootleg whisky, speakeasys, suicides,
insanity, vanity and humility. Anecdotes and ancient history,
all it boils down to. Stories told, changed in the telling.
Henry was driving through the back roads in his Model T,
so fast he killed a bunch of chickens on the dusty Georgia clay.
‘Hey Mister, you gotta pay,’ shouts the irate farmer.
‘How much?’ ‘Make it fifteen bucks.’
‘Here’s 30 cause I’m comin back just as fast.’
Little Henry, Big Henry, dead Henry.
Some lost to sea, some to land. War heroes,
influenza victims, gamblers, ladies’ men,
loose women, tight-laced Baptists, Huguenots,
shouting Methodists,
Klan members and Abolitionists,
Suffragettes and Southern Belles,
side by side now, bones mouldering together,
mixing up the arguments, leaving all that love hanging.
V
They were just people, sugah , father said,
they worked hard and were honest. Religious folk,
never played cards on Sunday, never mixed with coloreds .
Amen. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,
pass the succotash, pass the buck, cross yourself,
swear to tell the truth, pray the Lord your soul to take
and all that hate: Absalom, Walter, Kitty, Caroline,
Dolly with the hole in her stocking, dance with her,
dance with all her dead. Jason with the hole in his head, fix it.
The named and never named, the never talked about one
who ran away with the chauffeur, the older one who stayed,
the one forever missing in action,
the ones whose minds flew away.
VI
Go away then , I tell them. Stop your whispering in shadows,
plucking at my scalp, sucking at my conscience.
Half-words almost heard,
how my hands are too soft and my thinking too,
how we’ve all gone soft.
They puzzle over the flushing of the loo.
Wonder why we waste the rich soil
they gave their lives to,
growing flowers that bear no fruit.
Lena, Ezekiel, Liza, Jebediah.
Names without faces, faces without names.
Go back to Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland,
Virginia, up on over the border to Pennsylvania.
Go back over to the side you should have fought on.
Change the colour of your uniform,
change your vote, change the fate, un-buy those slaves,
uncrack the cowhide, unlick your lips, that hunger
you have for black skin to lash, your tongue a weapon,
quoting the Good Book, washing your hands clean in holy water.
Leave the land to the Natives who know how to honour it.
Get back on that ship to England,
cross the channel back to France.
Take the Master out of Mister. Take off the H
you added to the family name. Return to your mother-tongue,
parlez vous again in the city you came from,
before they chased you out, or the grass got greener,
before the drought, the flood,
before some great great named John
went down with the ship called Increase,
before the long bitter of it all got passed down,
before the going down to the frozen ground
of the one without a name.
Call her Peace and let her rest. Amen.
Kate Bingham
Monogamy
I blame it on the backlash: free love
in the Eighties was for hippies, no one
liked Thatcher but monogamy
seemed more efficient, comforting to State
and individual alike, less last
resort than a celebration in bed
of the right to choose, not make your bed
and lie in it so much as a labour of love
we willingly fell in with, certain at last:
I wanted you, you wanted me. Alone
for the first time and in no fit state
for company we didn’t see monogamy –
dumb, satisfied, unsung monogamy –