Tag Archives: poem

ASHTON

ASHTON

the track
curves like a scimitar

I remember
being in a park in
Ashton on the red
steel roundabout

overreacher
    and fell

that roundabout went
on revolvng, spinning forever

that red roundabout
or maybe it was green

and talking of green
I waa distracted thereafter
by what
had happened to
the countryside

wondering where
it had gotten to
and so
forgot my poem
on the train

that train winding its way
forwards to the millennium
ot
  backwards in time

through toytown stations
where they loaded
real soldiers

some soon
       stacked to be buried
piled up in ossuaries

others, as is the nature
of war, simply evaporated,
officially disappeared

and my poem out there
with other poems lost
or forgotten
     poems out there too,
be it
recalled recounting
the horrors of war

but train
is at the terminus, no
more huff-puffing, or
smooth
      electric or
even diesel

the countryside chaning,
the poems
    No longer speaking the truth
they could not escape doing

this picture fading
all
   those lines
yet unwritten, all those tracks
going somewhere
          having nowhere left to br
   





JOHN

JOHN

Ah, John,
the smoke got you

did what German steel
and flame
could not do

I saw you with
my big little eyes
down in your cellar worship
a year or
so
before you died

those same little big eyes
fastened on a Vickers
belt-fed machine gun
fastened high up
to that tall wall

what tale of fear and bravery
life or death it might
have been
able to tell me

if it could speak
    but you did not tell
me anything at all

whilst you found
wheels and plank and
purple paint for my push cart

coughing worryingly
as you worked:
such a together, purposive,
engineering man
       given his
mission requirements by
his youngest
daughter’s eldest son

my single real
abidng memory

BEFORE

BEFORE

I read the poetry
of the dead

which I would not
recommend
to anyone

for what
business
do they have with us
who live?

what trade in, what purchase
of
    their defunct ideas

for
everything changes
moves so fast you
are no longer left
in any position
to recollect
    things
that were;
all that was

and so
     we are
      so much the better
for not
knowing about them

better
not to let their words
trouble us
let us contrive
                  to forget

erase
    
      take out of
the picture completely

I read the poetry
of the dead

their
dead poetry

disturbing the Hell
out of me