And now today you’re 46
and far from the first of our sweet figs.
I’ve watched it ripen from where I sit
at the kitchen table candle-lit.
I’ve watched it ripen at each meal.
Facing the autumn now I feel,
as reflected candle on the wall ’s
flickering, licking the fig, like you my balls,
so lost without you, that I’ve plucked
the sweetest fig I’ve ever sucked.
Such flavour, sweetness! Half ’s a feast
though ripened in the chill North-East
ripened through gales and CFCs
warming the globe a few degrees,
and by the shredded ozone layer
and, I confess, my loving care.
(Because my fig tree ’s far from Greece
I protect it now with garden fleece.)
I ate my half and then thought yours,
like kids leave cake for Santa Claus,
should be left out on a plate all night
with the half-burnt candle left alight,
so tomorrow, when I woke, I’d know
you’d come to me from Tokyo,
where, as I picked, you’d been performing
among typhoons born of global warming
Goneril in Shakespeare’s Lear.
But I know you won’t be here,
to share the fig picked from my wall
with a ripeness that we know is all.
But so it wouldn’t go to waste,
and longing for my favourite taste,
just as Kent said his Alack
(Act V, scene iii) I ate the black/
deep ruby bit I’d left for you
just as your corpse came into view.
May the both halves that I’ve eaten,
like ‘an ounce of civet’, sweeten
my imagination when I brood
alone on this bleak latitude,
trying to make my simple rhyme
obey the weight of this sad time,
but honour, too, rare days of joy
that death or distance can’t destroy.
In Japan your curtain falls
and all the corpses take their calls.
Happy Birthday! I’d raise a glass,
if those prophecies had come to pass,
of Bradford bubbly or Leeds Mumm,
though unhappy that you couldn’t come,
being borne with Regan on a bier
as the deaths piled up in Lear,
to the sweetest woman that I’ve known
most welcome to the figs I’ve grown.
Next September if you’re freer,
and raised from the corpse-pile of King Lear
we’ll celebrate your birthday here
with storm-ripened fruit. 46
leaves life enough for future figs,
and I still hope to suck a few
though this year I turned 62!
May whatever ’s left in yours and mine
bring figs like my first fig on the Tyne.
The Krieg Anthology
I. The Hearts and Minds Operation
‘Decapitation’ to win minds and hearts,
a bombing bruited surgical, humane, ’s
only partially successful when its start ’s
a small child’s shrapnelled scalp scooped of its brains.
II. Mirror Image
Forced indoors with shining sun outside,
a child of seven who should have peace to play
on a swing, a roundabout, a slide
slid out on a chilled morgue metal tray.
III. Comforter
Maybe she was teething up to her last day!
The dummy with smeared honey on its tip ’s
to soothe the fretful babe till USA
grab life and plastic nipple from her lips.
IV. Rice Paddy
‘US Airborne ’s not there to escort
kids to school,’ snorts Condoleeza.
‘but to the mortuary freezer.’
V. The Body Re-count
Dead Iraqis vote BUSH after all!
Florida’s Bushibboleth ’s become Baghdad’s.
He’s re-elected by them as they fall
with flayed-off human flesh like hanging chads.
VI. Rose Parade
Sorry they’re shrivelled, your liberators’ petals!
There’s no water here to keep the flowers fresh
though your laser-guided shower of shattering metal ’s
sown these damp red roses in our flesh.
VII. Shake, Pardner!
Bush, who dragged him into this mad folly
though shown flag and painted V and warning flare,
will, like the A10 ‘cowboy on a jolly’,
with friendly fire, finish Tony Blair.
VIII. Favours
The friendly fire from George Bush and his pards
rains on Tony Blair who shrieks et tu!,
like so many open wounds from bomblet shards
spattered party rosettes, blue on blue.
IX. Baghdad Lullaby
Sshhh! Ssshhh! though now shrapnel makes you shriek
and deformities in future may brand you as a freak,
you’ll see, one day, disablement ’s a blessing and a boon
sent in baby-seeking bomblets by benefactor Hoon.
X. Illinois Elegy
My son’s remains come back for me to grieve.
They’d’ve brought me more to bury if they could.
They went to so much trouble to retrieve
the DNA smear on this cotton bud.
XI. Holy Tony’s Prayer
Why is it, Lord, although I’m right
I find it hard to sleep at night?
Sometimes I wake up in a sweat
they’ve not found WMDs yet!
The thought that preys most on my mind,
is the only arms they’ll ever find
(unless somehow I get MI6
to plant them to be found by Blix,
that’s if the UN sneaks back in)
are Ali’s in the surgeon’s bin.
Ali Ismail Abbas who
is a sick Iraqi PR coup.
Lord, Thou must divinely care
for Thy servant Tony Blair
since Thou decreed I was created
morally more elevated
and by Thy grace created blessed
with clearer conscience than the rest.
When little children squeal in pain
my conscience, Lord, ’s without a stain.
Thou knowest that my conscience, Lord,
for all the bloodflow stays unflawed.
I unleash terror without taint
a sort of (dare one say it?) saint!
Miraculous! No moral mire
soils my immaculate attire.
None of the blood and shit of war
ever clogs a single pore.
What a good boy am I, Jack Horner
self-cleansing in his moral sauna.
At Camp David dinner I say grace
with my most holy parson’s face.
Though brother George requires no prod
to bring your name up often, God,
fact is I competed with my host
to see who can mention Thee the most.
Lord, buff now my halo’s sheen
dimmed now that the nation ’s seen
Ali Ismail Abbas who
is a sick Iraqi PR coup,
the bandaged forehead to enhance
the pathos of his helpless glance.
Poor Cherie’s throat gets a small lump
when Ali waves his bandaged stump.
It made me think, Lord, that they’d win
if we can’t contrive some counterspin
against this winsome amputee
specially created for TV.
Th
ey held a country-wide audition
to undermine the coalition.
Let ’s hint that vile Iraqi guile
chooses a boy with eyes and smile
that melt the heart, then (how I hate
such callous brutes!) amputate
both his arms with blunt axe hack.
The British ’ll buy that from Iraq!
I need a spokesman, Hoon for choice,
he ’s got the gall and boring voice,
someone like Geoff Hoon to say
how Ali’s mother will one day
(oops, can’t, sorry I forgot
our bomb, apart from Ali, killed the lot)
mothers ’ll draw comfort from
the coalition cluster bomb.
Then once hostilities soon stop
there’ll be a brilliant photo op
outside with me at number 10
(yes, I’ll still be PM then!)
outside number 10 with me,
once every Saddam statue ’s downed,
Ali with prosthetic V!
(Twist his wrist the right way round.)
XII. Epilogue to The Recruiting Officer of Mr Farquhar
spoken by MR REDGRAVE from the stage of the Garrick
Theatre, Lichfield, September 2003
You might consider me more brazen if I doff
my feathered hat, and bluff persona off,
and as my brazen self stand up and say
what else our Farquhar might put in his play.
I tell you that our playwright Mr Farquhar
could have made your evening a lot darker
and made our play uncomfortably black
by showing you recruiting for Iraq,
and war management in Tony Blair’s UK,
the doctored facts, the dodgy dossier,
that sent deluded soldiers overseas
on the strength of spurious WMDs.
Suckers fell for our recruiters’ tricks
and took the shilling in 1706,
now they are conned, the suckers of our times,
when Brazen Blair doles out George Bush’s dimes.
Seek recruiters in our cast you won’t find any,
not Neve, Harry, Brendan, Harley, Petra, Penny,
and the recruiter’s job is absolutely foreign
to Owen and to James, and to me, Corin.
As Kite and Plume and Brazen we’d dragoon
the deluded and the duped for Mr Hoon,
but as ourselves we’d damn Hoon, Blair and Straw
and drum up people to condemn their war.
We’re resisters not recruiters, anti- not pro-wars.
Pray show which you prefer by your applause.
Hats on, recruiters!
Off, resisters!
Pro-?
Or anti-wars?
Pray show which you prefer by your applause!
XIII. Off the Scent
Thank God (the PM’s pal) he’s not resigned
and still here to lead his party from behind.
Though not actually voting he was there
in spirit to spare the fox, our caring Blair
whose far far shriller view halloos
set off packs of Tomahawks and Cruise,
Blair in his Iraq-hued hunting coat,
whose cheeks with Bush-brush daubings bloat
when he blows hard on Herod’s hunting horn
to cluster-bomb the cradle-culled newborn,
whose taste for dismemberment ’s more amputees
hunted by helicopters and Humvees.
Shrapnel
A summer day with all the windows wide
when suddenly a storm-presaging breeze
makes the scribbled papers that I’m sorting slide
onto the floor. They’re these you’re reading, these.
I rummage through my many paperweights,
grandad’s knuckleduster, this one from Corfu –
a rosette from the Kaiser’s palace gates,
and shrapnel from an air-raid I lived through.
Down in our cellar, listening to that raid,
those whistles, those great shudders, death seemed near,
my mother, me, my sister, all afraid
though my mother showed us kids no sign of fear.
Maybe the blackout made the ground too dark
for the aimer to see the target for his load
but all the bombs fell onto Cross Flatts Park
and not onto our house in Tempest Road.
And not onto our school, Cross Flatts CP.
A hit would mean no school and I’d be spared
old ‘Corky’ Cawthorne persecuting me.
If he’d’ve copped a bomb would I have cared?
‘Don’t talk like that!’ I heard my mother chide
though she didn’t know that Corky used to tell
her frightened little son that when he died,
because not christened, he would go to hell.
On the rare occasions that I chose to speak
in Corky’s RI class I’d make him mad,
trying out bits of calculated cheek
and end up being called ‘a wicked lad’.
Sir, if you’ve had your legs off, sir, like say
poor Mr Lovelock down Maude Avenue
will you get ’em back on Judgement Day?
Does God go round and stick ’em back wi’ glue?
Corky Cawthorne’s cruel and crude RI
put me off God for life. I swore I’d go
neither to Hell below nor Heaven on high,
and Beeston was all of both I’d ever know.
He also taught music which he made me hate,
not quite as much as God, into my teens.
I’d never ’ve come to music even late
if that raid had blown me into smithereens.
I went to see the craters the bombs made
first thing in the morning and us lads
collected lumps of shrapnel from the raid
to prove we’d seen some war to absent dads.
There was a bobby there who didn’t mind
craters being used by kids so soon for play
or hunting for shrapnel that he helped us find.
Clutching my twisted lump I heard him say:
’appen Gerry must ’ve been ’umane
or there’d ’ve been a bloodbath ’ere last neet.
They’d be flattened now would t’ ouses in Lodge Lane,
Tempest Road, all t’ ’arlechs, Stratford Street.
He dumped his bombs in t’park and damaged nowt
missing t’rows of ’ouses either side.
’umane! ’umane! And ’im a bloody Kraut!
And but for him, I thought, I could have died.
So now I celebrate my narrow squeak,
the unseen foe who spared our street in Leeds,
and I survived to go on to learn Greek
and find more truth in tragedy than creeds.
I stroke my shrapnel and I celebrate,
surviving without God until today,
where on my desk my shrapnel paperweight
stops this flapping poem being blown away.
A flicker of faith in man grew from that raid
where this shrapnel that I’m stroking now comes from,
when a German had strict orders but obeyed
some better, deeper instinct not to bomb
the houses down below and be humane.
Our house, thanks to that humane bombardier,
still stands; and those of Hasib mir Husain,
Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the following publishers and periodicals for permission to reprint poems in this book:
London Magazine Editions – for ‘Thomas Campey and the Copernican System’, ‘Ginger’s Friday’, ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, ‘Allotments’, ‘The White Queen’, ‘The Heart of Darkness’, ‘Th
e Songs of the PWD Man’, ‘The Death of the PWD Man’, ‘Schwiegermutterlieder’, ‘The Curtain Catullus’, ‘The Bedbug’, ‘The Nuptial Torches’, ‘Newcastle is Peru’ and ‘Ghosts: Some Words Before Breakfast’ from The Loiners, 1970
Anvil Press Poetry – for ‘The Morning After I, II’, ‘Bye-Byes’, ‘Testing the Reality’, ‘The Effort’, ‘Jumper’ and ‘Changing at York’ from Ten Sonnets from the School of Eloquence, 1987
Rex Collings Ltd – for ‘Doodlebugs’, ‘Curtain Sonnets’, ‘Durham’, ‘Sentences’, ‘Voortrekker’, ‘The Bonebard Ballads’, ‘Social Mobility’ and ‘History Classes’ from The School of Eloquence, 1978; and for ‘On Not Being Milton’, ‘The Rhubarbarians I, II’, ‘Study’, ‘Me Tarzan’, ‘Wordlists I, II, III’, ‘Classics Society’, ‘National Trust’, ‘Them & [uz] I, II’, ‘Working’, ‘Cremation’, ‘Book Ends I, II’, ‘Next Door I, II, III, IV’, ‘Long Distance I, II’, ‘Continuous’, ‘Clearing I, II’, ‘Illuminations I, II, III’, Turns’, ‘Punchline’, ‘Marked With D.’, ‘A Close One’, ‘Blocks’, ‘Bringing Up’, ‘Timer’, ‘Fireeater’, ‘Background Material’, ‘Self Justification’, ‘Divisions I, II’. ‘Lines to my Grandfathers I, II’, ‘The Earthen Lot’, ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’, ‘The Birds of America: (i) John James Audubon (1785–1851), (iii) Standards’, ‘Loving Memory’, ‘Looking Up’, ‘Killing Time’ and ‘t’Ark’ from Continuous, 1981
Bloodaxe Books Ltd – for ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ which was published as a pamphlet in 1981; for ‘Oh, Moon of Mahagonny!’ from U.S. Martial, 1981; ‘The Fire-Gap’, 1985 and ‘v.’, 1985
Encounter – for ‘Confessional Poetry’, ‘Flood’, ‘The Queen’s English’, ‘Aqua Mortis’ and ‘Remains’
The Times Literary Supplement – for ‘Grey Matter’, ‘An Old Score’, ‘Still’, ‘A Good Read’, ‘Facing North’, ‘Giving Thanks’, ‘The Red Lights of Plenty’, ‘The Fire-Gap’, ‘The Heartless Art’ and ‘Cypress & Cedar’
Observer – for ‘Isolation’, ‘Pain-Killers I, II’, ‘Breaking the Chain’ and ‘Old Soldiers’
London Review of Books for ‘v.’
Poetry Book Society Supplement – for ‘Currants I, II’
Quarto – for ‘A Piece of Cake’
Stand – for ‘Stately Home’
Firebird 3 (Penguin Books, 1984) – for ‘Birds of America: (ii) Weeki Wachee’ and ‘The Lords of Life’
PN Review – for ‘Dark Times’ and ‘Skywriting’
New Statesman – for ‘The Call of Nature’
Collected Poems (Viking, 2007) – for ‘The Mother of the Muses’, ‘Initial Illumination’, ‘A Cold Coming’, ‘Three Poems from Bosnia’, ‘Fruitility’, ‘Fig on the Tyne’, ‘The Krieg Anthology’ and ‘Shrapnel’
He just wanted a decent book to read ...