In The Poetry

I’m going to close with a poem I like to end with sometimes – it’s called ‘Night Club’ and it just makes a little reference to a singer named Johnny Hartman – I hope probably many of you know him. A singer most famous for jazz ballads and also famous in recording history for doing [...]

The Dug-Out

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled.
And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadow’d from the candle’s guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head…
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And [...]

This was the first war cemetery I ever saw, at Bayeux. It gave me a terrific shock. I lost my father as a result of the First World War and I’d never been in a British war cemetery. I don’t think I’d ever been to France before. That’s what promoted me to try to write [...]

Washing the Coins

You’d start at seven, and then you’d bend your back
Until they let you stand up straight, your hands
Pressed on your kidneys as you groaned for lunch,
Thick sandwiches in grease-proofed bundles, piled
Beside the jackets by the hawthorn hedges.
And then you’d bend your little back again
Until they let you stand up straight. Your hands,
On which [...]

In the Evening

Three hours chain-smoking words
and you move on. We stand in the porch,
two archaic figures: a woman and a man.

The old masters, the old sources,
haven’t a clue what we’re about,
shivering here in the half-dark sixties.

Our minds hover in a famous impasse
and cling together. Your hand
grips mine like a railing on an icy night.

The wall [...]

Jairus

So, God takes your child by the hand
and pulls her from her deathbed.
He says: ‘Feed her, she is ravenous.’

You give her fruits with thick hides
- pomegranate, cantaloupe -
food with weight, to keep her here.

You hope that if she eats enough
the light and dust and love
which weave the matrix of her body

will not fray, nor wear [...]

This is the first poem in my very first book, and it’s called ‘Love Poem’.

There is no question
of choice, but it takes
a long time.

Love’s vacancies, the eye
& cavity, track
back to embraces

where the spine bends
& quietens
like smoke in the earth.

Your tongue, touching on song,
darkens all songs. Your touch
is almost a signature.

June Jordan – just a couple of years before she died – wrote a memoir of her childhood which was called Soldier, and that was what her Dad used to call her, “little soldier”.

Elegy for a Soldier

I.

The city where I knew you was swift.
A lover cabbed to Brooklyn
(broke, but so what) after the night shift
in [...]