I send you this bouquet, which my own hands just culled from the marvellous bed; if spring’s not gathered tonight, I said, tomorrow her beauty will have flown. Let its light serve as a sermon then, how your charms flourishing their fair May shall soon be invested with frost-grey and, bit by bit, become
Firm pillows stacked high for hope to rest on, each calling out against nightmare and fear. Courage has determined this towering resistance so may it hold firm and remain until dawn for the light to discover a mended nation whose cities awake from their troubled sleep.
Let me be baroque in death as I’ve been practical in life. Let six black-plumed stallions draw the black-gloss carriage wherein my black-gloss casket rests upon a maple plinth festooned with lilies – outrageously frilled and huge white lilies exploding from every crevice, their syrupy musk clagging the air for miles around. Let us halt
The end of a perfect summer’s day – we ramble down the canal path, past Pirate Castle and the shopping arcade where confetti sale signs camouflage lives mired in quiet desperation. Harassed shoppers go about their business, wearing their mask of disappointments discreetly. Everybody is dreaming of being somebody, preparing to be
Caught out in the wrong shoes, I choose to join the spiders in a crevice in the old park wall. To them, all weather is the same; all time is time to do some work. I watch them working, watch their old webs breathing as I breathe, now tilting brickwards, now tilting
and stare perplexedly into the middle distance with one crease, one particularly characterful furrow knitting my brow, not an old lady furrow oh no something about the way I hold this furrow in this ongoingly perplexed stare will imply a whole panoply of barely suppressed emotions, a gamut even, simmering away under the surface of
In summer, when light’s fled, narcotic scents are poured out from ten thousand blooms; we doze with shut eyes but ears which only half-close, immured by sleep of a strange transparence. Soft shadows and the stars subtler, less bright; vague radiance tints that eternal hall, and the sweet pale dawn, awaiting her call, seems
for Gail McConnell I How much of what we scribble down survives – Sappho’s miraculous bits and pieces, Dialect words for kitchen utensils, See-through dresses, moonbeams – somebody At a busy street corner advising Where to shop for chickpeas and mascara. II Let blank spaces between parentheses Be annotated thus by me and
In the days when I loaded goods trains for a living Out of love for you, and no small concern I felt cold and tired and clean My throat pulsed slowly with the cold air’s burn Down on the silvering frost-lit rail Balanced with risk on the oiled sleeper Pushing upwards against the weight Of
Life together began when you hooked your shirts on the rim of my bedroom mirror — I liked having someone mess with my neatness. We’d skirt the notion of settling down and fly a kite on Parliament Hill. If the walls crowded round, the smoke too thick from each cigarette we lit, we could take
Kew Gardens, March 2022 Late-winter dawns the larches start to sing their conjuring of bright green coronets like miniature elvish party hats strung along hanging shoots in sheets of song – notating, emoji-like, clean morning notes. And then you see scarlet-and-green mitres, miracles of meticulous enamel artistry, as your mist of breathing clears
I suppose you’re right and breaking up would be quite a good thing, but staying together would be an equally good thing, so whatever we decide to do it will be all right. On balance, I lean towards doing nothing, but whatever happens we’ll go on seeing each other, won’t we? I suppose it
Agnes B. Marshall, née Smith, of Walthamstow, practised at Paris under Viennese chefs, had visions of snow-capped mountains, stiffly beaten peaks, set in glassy dishes. Not for her the Penny Lick. She knew life wasn’t a rehearsal and set about chipping away at Gatti’s glaciers: Norwegian ice kept frozen under London clay. (Liquid nitrogen later
when an unexpected whirl of wind tosses grey veils of rain across the Common; gobbets of roof-tile moss and mud plop on my doorstep. The parakeets, no doubt bewildered, flung among new-leafed trees, are blown to destinations never planned for. Flowers I planted yesterday fight for their lives in sodden borders. The sky turns dark.
Come, pop -ology of psych, Beam yourself into us like Headlights through lightheadedness. Come, nanny of nanny states, Come, hour of our hourly rates, Come, heart of our heartiness. Consolation of a prize, Soothing sight for see-sore eyes, Sooth, and say, some truthfulness. In developments a rest, In first worlds a second
It was the largest mass of wood I saw Stacked on a siding, clambered on by weeds, Parts drooling pitch or tarmac long before Someone had laid them there like water reeds Cut for a roof; and as for rafters, these Were sawn too short, and far too chunky, piled Up like an ancient
and I’m dead set on a fire: the year’s first. Barely cold, but I want to ball paper, lay kindling, strike a match, smell autumn. The same as a boy: the sleepovers, bike rides, fishing trips – always the next thing, always tomorrow. I’ve got good at this – wielding an
The old upright shopping bicycle has the wrong saddle, a racing one, more like an iron bar than a saddle. I perch on one side or the other, carrier bags swinging from the handlebars full of provisions for the weekend. It’s hard work pedalling uphill in the rain, but after a while I
won’t be deterred, though her cough clinks and rattles like a bottle delivery. The porch covers her; rain and shine she sits cross-legged on the doorstep, not watching while the street happens, coughing to punctuate life’s sentence. Somebody should tell her the fifties are over, that no one’s going to photograph her
When I get there, my friend is fast asleep with nail clippings scattered on his knee in the dayroom’s baffled light. I wake him gently. ‘I don’t know where I am.’ ‘You’ve been asleep.’ Homes Under the Hammer is on the BBC. We manage, once we find his stick, a turn around the block.