Poetry | melshewan

Sometimes my pictures are illustrations of my poems in the manner of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. These are poems I have already used or intend to.

NORTH PACIFIC GYRE

Oh Creatures

These waters now

Are no more than an encumbrance.

Their currents have leeched words

Irredeemable beyond the

Scrolls of your skin.

Dearest Souls,

Is this to be our fashioning then,

Now extinction's paraphernalia abounds?

POEM FOR THERESE

As you know, old friend,

I'm not the sort inclined

To think that tree you love's got a mind,

But I could believe its configurations

May be ours as much its own,

Embodying in its form the roots we've grown,

Shaped by what we bring to its presence:

The thoughts that won't leave us alone;

The wearying sense that what we see

Is rarely anything other than our own.

But sometimes, Therese,

Someone like you will come

Beside a place and hear its word alone,

Making it yours

Without it ever being your own.

ON THE DEATH OF ELSA MacPHIE, WHO DROWNED IN

A ROCK POOL WHILST AT PLAY UPON THE STRAND

The wind sprang up from somewhere

And prettily fleeced the trees,

But it brought the sea

That brought the wrack

That entangled wee Elsa MacPhie.

Now there was matter there for reflection

But we had little of note to say,

As we buried the child alongside her father,

Who had died in a similar way.

And the priest said the words he said,

And the same wind took them away.

A SNACK

That sandwich was delicious,

And very little fat...

What's that?

Okay, well, the goat's cheese, but hummus...

There's hardly any saturated fat...

Just shut up will you,

Just shut the fuck up about fat

And this,

And that.

MARION RICHARDSON REFLECTS ON THE DEATH OF HER HUSBAND

The thoughts I kept to myself

Fashioned so much of ordinary living.

The years accumulating the everyday hate.

Mine's an old inexorable story.

Still, what am I to do now?

MEET THE MAKERS

McIver was invited to meet the makers but declined.

It wasn't that he didn't admire their work;

He just couldn't abide it when the fuckers talked.

ONCE I SAY LOOK

(On My Pictures)

Once I say,

Look

Then they're yours as much as mine,

But still, keep in mind

That between any work's reassuring birth

And assured dying,

Between salutation and superscription,

There's always something goes missing.

UNHOLY COMMUNION

Blood's wine now in Israel and Palestine.

And isn't it odd that Moslem and Jew

Should so invert what neither hold to be true?

I can only think

That if all sustains you is extremes

You'd need something strong to drink.

ASH DIEBACK

Quiet voices from her neighbours’ garden,

The clock, late Georgian, stopped at half past three.

Whether afternoon or morning she sometimes wonders,

Turns away, makes tea; looks out another window.

There’s not much left to see this side of the voices:

An empty corrugated lawn where three bulldogs lie

Below the ash her mother planted.

Davey, Buster, Truman,

Alongside two cats, Mum and Grey,

Unmarked,

She felt the ash memorial enough.

But yesterday she saw black on wilting leaves,

Lesions on the stems,

And fancied her own necrotic spores had spread

To even undo remembering her dead.

NEWS AT NIGHT

The anchors are often in short skirts or frocks

Great legs adorned by what they’ll argue

Could never be an acquiescent stiletto

Though they’ll know that’s where the camera often lingers

And along a length of comely thigh

While they tell us

Some of us have smaller heads because of this virus

And some of us have no limbs

Some of us have no homes, they say

And some of us have no cushions

Some of us have no pizzas

Some of us are dead in the sea

Some of us hear significance in its beating

And some of us don’t.

And some we’re told hold out

In camps, the street, the cell,

Holding decency’s last barricade

While unbearable populations cry:

What happened to that lottery ticket?

Yet here, in these braw kingdoms, their declamations

Despite the dross, seem almost sacred

The nightly interludes across our narrow histories

Consecrated utterances.

Freeing the prisoned words,

Loosing the languages tyrants long unspeakable

Though this is the FA Cup when anything could happen.

TITS UP

Coming home from the shops,

Barely through the backyard door,

She’d cry: Matty av just seen Sally Gilmore,

Thank Christ a arnly had the two

She’d such fine big titties

There’s nowt there noo.

What is the lass? Not thirty yet,

That’s what ye get tittie feedin' five.

Or observing life from the stair-head window:

Matty, young Atkinson’s got Rachael Black’s lass on his arm.

Them tits cannet be hers.

Her mother an’ her gran a both as flat as Seaburn sands;

She’s got one a them padded bras.

Or thoughtfully from the fireside:

Matty, what is it they shove in tits to sort them oot?

My father puts aside the Morning Star,

Removes his pipe, reaches for the Condor Sliced,

Fills his tobacco jar.

Sort them out, Mary?

Casting her the eye Yeats fancied from the horseman

That passed his gravestone by.

Aye, ye naar, stuffin’ them wi’ stuff

T’ mek them fuller, firmer, sit up better.

That would be silicone gel, Mary,

It’s an inert synthetic compound.

Breast implants are just one of its many uses.

He leans over and knocks out his pipe on the leg

Of the hard chair where his wife, my mother, sits,

Closing the ashes in his fist,

We use it for caulking down the pit.

EMILY DICKINSON GOES FOR A WALK

Don’t think I don’t think of travel.

To see the Don from the hills above

Embrace the sad lands.

Try a door in an ancient wall.

Africa.

The hope of strangeness.

Yet in their familiarity

These rooms and their objects

Remain as unknown

As the consummations

I cannot help imagine.

Nor do I need to step

Outside to know

Our blight will

Cease creatures upon the loneliest shore;

Our emptiness empty lands

Long before Earth's

Eventuality.

So I’ll stay here,

Where all that passes is,

Unlike the trivial distances of earth and sky,

Immeasurable.

FOR THE MAYOR OF CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA

She said: Tonight makes how many times exactly?

But sometimes all you can do is watch again

The Outlaw Josey Wales

And forget the next day.

Not that our hero did.

He tossed aside his blankets

And got up early to kill.

His only words were love and the gun

For his murdered wife and son

And, given the smiles as his befriended turn into the saloon,

And his easy mount into the saddle,

Despite the blood on his dusty boot,

His once comrade’s absolution

That they all can

Move on...

No, No.

I’m still drinking,

And the war’s still on.

ARCHAEOLOGY IN ICELAND

I found a young woman,

Nineteen or thereabouts.

She lived before the Christ Taking,

When the uncertain ground,

With its vitriolic shaking and spouting,

Was explanation enough.

I found her nestling against a boulder,

As if listening to the lives within its circuits.

I cast her up,

But never wondered if she ever cried, as I do,

To be let out of this cage of meaning.

WHAT WILL LOVE TALK ABOUT NOW?

You never tried to make me feel what you see,

Nor what you’re looking at.

Living doesn’t make things real,

You taught me that.

You ask:

Is that Al Pacino?

So young.

This film...

When?

But what will love talk about now,

Or feel, now he’s spent across the years

Watching nothing.

And listening

On the radio in North West India they’re

Ringing bells to celebrate some

Ritual of a monkey god,

And one of them says I don’t

Want war but this must stop,

These border raids –

While

He arranges lumps of stone in an empty kitchen,

Wanting to go somewhere where

He can watch skies like that

Make and unmake without this pain

Of seeing her hanging there again;

Just watch the sky

Read, walk, drink heavily and die

He remembers the three

Shoals of rangy cloud

Smoky, stray stuff, wispy,

Darker grey shot through the white.

Through the tree.

And saw she’d

Hanged herself from it,

Below the sky's pleasing archipelagos.

YESTERDAY AND TODAY

Yesterday

We met the usual day;

That is the day we usually meet.

The one where we reach for the keys

To unlock its fastened ceremonies,

The day’s loomings:

We meet

We rush through

Unregistered

Feelings

That should be of consequence

Through rooms

Radio

Our clever phones

That meeting

The kids to school

The blind commute

Headphones playing

Unlistened music

A paper or magazine

A book

Outside

Weather

A missed look

Even those sudden cries:

The accident

The unfamiliar pain

The approaching doctor’s face

This time her smile’s too tight

And doesn’t reach her eyes

Even those:

Cries that crack the day open like a fallen egg

(We’ll use or discard depending on what stuff we’re of)

Those too we know.

Even the tormented lives of others

Though afar, also embastion us here

In our here and now.

Every horror we see second hand

Amounts our specie of security.

So’s the round

Until today

When we do not know our hands,

Reaching for keys with nothing to unlock.

EXITS

While most of us will wait to

Take our turn, and hold the door

For those behind,

Some, the expected few, will

Either barge through

Or, the cheerful guardians of lost courtesies,

Step aside.

But these days I hear more often

Of those who’ll burn down the building

To get outside.

ENOUGH OF THIS

Enough of this he said

At last remembering her advice

To keep the living from the dead

Bonny lad

But , being his mother it was never going to be

Simply the human dead or even

The multitudes of forms now organic passed into something else

No, it was the burgeoning loss of everything she meant

That brings remorse and shame

The endless speculations

Self doubt, blame.

Whoever speaks, she said, but most yourself

Take care to see if there’s kindliness there

So now he sees by the dead she meant despair.

INHERITANCE IN PART

My handwriting’s now much like my father’s

And there are other resemblances too

But the ones that accompanied his life to death

In me work not at all or indifferently

Still there’s enough of him left in me

To make me think, near panic,

I’d better take hold of something of my own he’s left,

And heft.

AFTER THE MATCH

Walking home after the match,

Through a bit of park up the town’s arse end,

I saw two lads, in colours I’d been cheering on

For thirty years, beating a greyhound with a stick.

Vicious scum, and stupidly I told them so,

For, of course, they didn’t run, but turned the stick on me,

Breaking a forefinger and thumb as I tried to grab it;

And I needed eight stitches just above the knee,

But that was the whippet, not them,

I won’t be rescuing any fucking dogs again.

Oh yes, that raised welcome laughter in the

Royal Bolton’s A&E, and not begrudged,

No more than I’d apportion blame,

Telling the charge nurse, as he sewed me up,

I’d seen as bad in the modern game.

And so he I and other week-end wounded nearby, recalled

Vinnie’s fist on Gascoigne’s balls;

And Hoddle’s notion that the wheelchair bound

Are there because his god turns things round.

And O’Leary’s complaint,

That his lads can’t concentrate

With all this legal fucking around with

Bowyer, Woodgate and some asian cunt

Though none, I thought, as vile

As my boss, admiring admitting his amusement

When the Shed chant, Wenger’s a paedophile.

And if Keane didn’t finish Haaland’s career,

Chipped in a City fan,

It wasn’t for lack of trying;

What about Barton,

Yelled a scouser from a curtained bay,

What’ll he be up for next?

The first fucking murder in open play?

Watch the effin and jeffin we heard his

Ministering angel say,

And laughed as ones who needed laughter most

On every anointed Saturday.

As often after laughter shared

An easy quiet fell,

And out of its companionable stillness

My mind’s eye conjured

Diego Maradona’s gross form:

A body turned finally attuned to its soul’s

Sleight of hand;

Palming the game, his country,

And the ten year olds

I see on Sundays celebrate deceit,

Their fathers roaring on

Their own defeat.

POEM FOR TWO VOICES

It’s hard to believe but sometimes,

Worse than thoughts of all the vile decrepitudes

That greet old age

Is the sense I’ve seen it all…

I don’t think you’ve…

Surely you’ve noticed how I throw books aside,

Skim read the Sundays, and the Times,

Open more wine,

Then fall asleep to late runs of

Fearnley-Whittingstall,

Whose life seems so assured there in

His cottage by the river…

Friends, food, booze,

Sex, novels, news

They’re not working like they used to,

Used to…? How…?

Oh just the usual release.

Daddy, I know, since retirement you’ve

Been ill at ease…

It gets worse,

And this especially’s not clear –

Since we’re always

Accounted by what’s dear;

And I’m loved and love.

I’ve never doubted that-

Why lately I seem to hate so much.

Hate? Oh that’s nothing new.

I’ve always hated, daddy,

It’s not just you.

JOB DAVIES’ ADVICE

Here am I, forty odd and done fuck all,

Reading Lore and thinking

Live large, man, dream small

He’s got that right:

Every living thing but us

Lives out his advice as fact:

Dreams kill us:

Act.

QUICK CROSSWORD

Demonstrative adjective, definite article

The

A modest withdrawal perhaps

Retired

Vernacular pair: join

Couple

The sixth note in the diatonic scale of C major above with cruciform

Across

What they started with

The

Method of achieving something

Way

To hold in possession

Have

Purchase, past tense

Bought

Possessive pronoun: of themselves

Their

Not necessarily a home

House

Preposition: amongst

With

From this to Z

Prospect: archaic usage surely

View

Remove from this double the W

Once under cultivation, now fallow

Fields

Preposition: where it’s happening baby

Back to their beginning this last time

The

First of the last clue and they’re looking

Back

An unqualifying conjunction

And

What’s missing from and fro as once before

And we and they as they lay, in

Addie Bundren’s, Agamemnon’s tale and

Clytemnestra’s grieving for

All the world’s sons and daughters

Unclosed eyes and stilled laughter,

That must be?

Dying

TO MY IRISH GRANDMOTHER AFTER THE WARRINGTON BOMBINGS

Granny, don't send me anymore photographs of your Irish bars.

Drinking there are men who, when the fiddler jerks his arm,

Or hear songs of loves and sorrows of other lives,

Shut there gobs, think nowt of murdering wives and kids.

Derry or Londonderry, rags, bones, drums; your tales of

Auntie Dumphna and Uncle Mick.

No more, for just now your whole fucking country makes me sick.

Don't take on now Granny, it'll pass, but until it does

Make that postcard of Lafferty's your last