Nothing I write will be as durable as the rhyme for remembering the genders of third declension nouns, stuck in my head ever since Miss Garai’s Latin class. Masculini generis I used to fancy I shared it with generations of English schoolboys, the colonial servant dispensing justice under a tree in the African bush, are
Intimacy these days discomforts. More our style is the park or the pub, or three-minded chess with young Kasparov. A bracket-dash-colon smile implies we have no longings to confess. Always, though, I’ll text a bunch of preset flowers on the eve of her six-month scan. ‘Thank you, dear heart, for remembering.’ Then come the hours
Scarborough 1939 Mum’s slipping on her see-through dress. Outside our council house a chauffered Rolls is waiting. It’s a beautiful summer. There’s been so much yearning. At the Floral Hall violins are fainting and the black-and-white minstrels have ripe red lips. I’ve won third prize for my Bluebird sand- carving. Soldiers are wrapping barbed-wire round
the english foxhound likes to bay his enemy is the wind instead of grief he feels relief at every innovative gust
Two poems in memory of Mick Imlah 1. ‘Hardy and Housman lived round here,’ I said, slumped in an armchair in your flat. ‘Compared to those two, we’re small beer — Hardy and Housman, geniuses crowned here! No blue plaques for us, who’ve gone to ground here… We’re pygmies, compared to giants like that, Hardy
I was in love for a whole week after Episode One: Your voice so tender, so knowledgeable, your slender hands and feet. In Episode Two, doubts crept in. Were you hogging the camera or was it just that the camera loved your profile, your man-of-the-people T shirts, your breeze-ruffled hair? Episode Three opens with you
Lapwing leans against the wind, First hint of changing season Come to turn the soil to stone And bring the blanket snow. Until the gentle snowdrops show In the hedgerows, And the fields grow green again, In the warm summer days.
As I make my way to the greenhouses a seagull kills me in its pure white throat. Quiet in the tomatoes. Quiet among the beans. Soft dark patches where the rain leaks in. Can I come home? Has it been too long? Tall weeds growing through the coils of hose.
He was there again in the small hours: not this time in a dream, but in a dream of dreaming. Even so the two of us looked aside, stuck for something to discuss that was not a matter of life and death, so we fell back on football and the elections. Then suddenly he started
Whatever savants say, the world is flat, not round; the ships that crowd the bay are for its limit bound. Their cargoes likewise, all consigned to one address, at the world’s waterfall plunge into nothingness. The brightwork, the white sails unfurled against the sky, the million knots and nails for such a voyage, why?
My love arrived with tulips, ‘ten for a fiver’, picked up from the supermarket at the end of the street. Fresh off the plane, perhaps he would have preferred to wash his hands but stood in his coat in the kitchen watching me cut through the cellophane and crush the stems with the stainless heel
All in the half-dark, we watch the dead playing the parts of the living, in roles we have seen before: The Quiet Man, or The Song of Bernadette. A stranger in a blue Thames van came from somewhere to the west as night drew in, to unload the big, flat cans with reels in them
Feeling my age, too soon too tired, Whatever gifts I had no more required, I am a hireling called in to be fired. Time was I was ambitious, heretofore. Not any more, not any more. Ridding myself of papers, pots, coins, books, No longer vain about what had been looks, The broth boiled over by
And then a dozen Muddy miraculous hares Sprang out of the suitcase, Bounding round and round The hotel suite, Drumming for their wild Crochety queen Back home The moon Above King’s Cross.
Oh take a break at Bleeding-under-Wychwood Away from all the city noise and grime; Where the harvest moon shines bright and the knocking in the night Is the undertaker working overtime. You can dine quite cheaply at the Pig and Whistle On the roast beef of Olde England, rare and lean, But I don’t advise
He had not recognised me or I him. The place was crammed and rackety, and our eyes Took each other in, and we didn’t realise… We stared, and we ruled each other out until After several glassy seconds I found the will And the nerve to speak. Well — it must be! — He knows
Here the homeless queue for motherly nuns to dish out meat and veg, for showers, clothes, central heating, company, conversation, medical attention, to use computers to apply for jobs, to borrow blankets against the cold, suits for interviews, an address for housing waiting lists: economic migrants, demobbed soldiers, the divorced, mad, alcoholic, unemployed, unlucky from
Black swifts in the sky ascend, soar and glide. They turn all about, seem not to collide. When feeling great joy they scream and they sing. They swoop and they love to mate on the wing. And we on our flight are feeling the same. We eye up the crowd and drink our champagne. With
Like the machine the day had churned in dark circles, But when at last I came back the whole contraption Had stopped too soon, all its baggage had halted In a stubborn wish to stay there and nowhere else. I wouldn’t know when this had happened, Maybe some time in the first half-hour while I
(for Aidan Williams) After a difficult week at work, when I was trying too hard on a short fuse, I suddenly knew that all the hurt would have a certain way of being released, Googled stables in the centre of town and telephoned, but not to book a ride, just to have five minutes with