Reflection

Frouzins – November 2017

Days are shorter,

summer’s voice is softer.

Green chlorophylls return

to their brown towns of branch, cities of trunk,

leaving the pigments of red and gold

to occupy their now vacated

summer holiday accommodations.

I circumnavigate the lake

wishing for myself its calm acceptance –

unruffled surface waters –

in contrast to my many nightmares –

of destiny, of school examinations,

of conflicted family of origin,

of the distant cosmos.

Autumn: medium of quiet messages,

but the dark mantras of winter

overpower its liturgy.

True, pines keep their needles but our tragedy,

our shame – we of the genus deciduous –

is we shed our leaves, hibernate,

then one morning we do not wake.

NEVER

She never did come good,

no permanent move

from shadow into light,

no herb, medication or prayer

liberated her for long,

instead, chlorpromazine's spasms –

'twisties' we called them –

drove our family mad.

She’s dead

but the smoke of madness

drifts from her pyre,

slides under our door

obscures the window,

and hides the moon.

The White Room

My room has white walls.

Manacled with drips and catheters,

at night I conclude

I must be a prisoner

facing my last dawn,

the fatal shot up the cannula.

What have I done?

I’ve had the temerity to get sick

that’s what.

Something’s wrong

with my gut. 

I need ten days of antibiotics

through a vein.

I am captive in a single room.

Hour after hour the walls get to me,

screening silent episodes of my life.

I wait and wait for meals,

meds and obs.

Then there’s the TV –

it could be our family’s first.

“Hello childhood,”

it smiles, sparing me no pain,

“Remember me?” 

Tour de Parasol

Un parasol qui s'envole sur un coup de vent

Tawny brolly

slips the surly bonds of earth

cartwheel-dances

from the roadside

into the fray

of the peloton.

It’s alien: shocking.

Mechanical army of wheels

speeds past,

relentless, whirring,

rider-soldiers shouting

to avoid its lethal thrust.

What causes such rebellion?

Too many summers

shading families on  holiday

have turned its head.

Sunstroke with a gust of wind

releases it for freedom, folly.

The Account

Ninety unaccounted for In CNN’s 

latest pile of human waste

excreted by a liberating war.

  

Is it not spurious – the number

even in this digital age where everything

measured, conflated –

individual suffering, lost mothers,

children, separated heads and hearts

homogenised, weighed?

“Hmm, yes, looks like 90,”

the CNN man says to his crew.

“Get some footage; no details;

no legs or feet.  Definitely not.

Don’t want to upset Nike:

they sponsor this slot.”

Moving On

Shut the door: no point

in wasting heat – but if you wish

leave it ajar just in case.

He may return, of course.

We understand. 

The bed's made

window clean, blind drawn

lamp on desk,

asleep for months. Be a dear;

check that it works.

You can see he's been.

That’s his chair.

His clarinet in its small case

needs new reeds –

his books.

Unfashionable coats

in a dark cupboard

bow emptily like ghosts

to faded jeans.

On the wall, prints of bands

and heroes past,

spent calendars,

old shoes under the bed

where the cat

now sleeps.

The economy, failed relationships,

wanting to save, war’s end:

any of these may bring him back.

The battery in the clock is dead.

Closing the Circle

With age my mind loops

to link my present to my past.

At random and at strange times 

it asks me to retrieve details 

of holidays as a child, names

of essential amino acids, authors,

faces of school friends now old men or dead,

hymns and the litany of childhood church.

As the sun set on each day’s carnage

on the Western Front 

you could hear the moaning of young men,

shattered and unable to move

embedded in no-man’s-land,

calling for their mothers as they died.

When my dad died I found

a book of poetry by his bed,

cringe-making sentimental stuff,

open at a page that extolled

the virtues of a mother, for which read his –

his first, sweetest, secret water-home.

Is this the circle,  

the loop we try to close, 

not reincarnation but a return 

to our mother’s womb,

place of first and last love?