From The Years (Arc Publications, £8)
I can still see them all, as if they’d just
gathered in red and grey for morning roll call
and fifty-five long years had never passed.
Walwyn who says little and spends his spare time
winding wire round gaudy plumes to hook
imaginary fish. Barnes from Tripoli plagued by
asthma who has a seraphic singing voice.
Rana, the athlete from Nepal, now stocky but
somehow the same, exporting cigarettes
and tyres to China. Timmi, a gentle Yoruba,
the tallest boy by far, who died of AIDS
seven years ago, a famous photographer.
Griffin, hard to look at he was so
unbearably beautiful, who once stopped me on the stairs
and decided “You don’t like me, do you?”
I hadn’t the heart to say it wasn’t so.
I can still see their names engraved in the register:
Lashkari, Maw, Sajadhi, Sewell, Singh –
the hockey captain who was spared the barber.
We all began in gladness regardless of
the louring prisonhouse we’d been confined in.
