of style). I stop, push off from my right knee
willing the flick of my wrist to yield the sort
of gorgeous arc that’s talked about for weeks.
The rim gives back the sound of falling short.
I pass the ball to the top of the key.
Tata throws up a fade-away and scores.
I can’t match him, and collect the letter ‘e’.
Alternate Take
When they laid our father out, mwaice wandi,
I want to say – I’m meant to say – soft light
played the skin of his spent face and the sobs
were, of course, a jangling kind of song.
If I could take you where the sandy earth
meets his final stone, tiled and off-white,
we might have learned to worship better gods.
He was known, in the shebeens, as long John.
At the wake relatives tried variations
on the words of the day: I am sorry
for your grieving/your trouble/your loss.
I’ve been weighing these apologies for years
that pass and retreat like disused stations.
I think of his walk becoming your quarry,
his knack for beguiling women, your cross.
It’s enough to bring me here, past tears
to where his face simplifies to a picture:
the shrine in Nagoya, him stood, sequoia
among lesser trees, looking good in denim;
every inch the charismatic spectre.
In his memory my voice bears his tincture –
saxophone played low / boy raised on soya
porridge, chloroquine, a promise of heaven.
There are days I think I’m only a vector
carrying him slowly to my own graveyard,
and standing at the lectern, rather than my son,
will be another copy: the same sharp
edge to the chin, that basso profundo hum.
Kid brother, we breathers have made an art
of negation, see how a buckled drum
is made from a man’s beating heart
and a fixed gaze is a loaded weapon.
A Proud Blemish
The year I graduate from size eights,
learn to walk in the grown man’s shoes
contradicting the diminutive frame
I parade across the Arndale estate:
2step is an airborne sickness, infecting
every discerning cassette deck,
after-hours wine bar, joy rider’s car.
Most weekends I try to fool a woman
accustomed to the lies of men, sneak home
an hour shy of her footfall in the hallway,
to rehearse my lines: I was home … I just
… didn’t hear the phone, the beep
of the answering machine, her repeating
my name till it’s a prayer, voice two parts
ire, one despair, that her days are riven
between shift patterns and her only son.
By the time I graduate size nines, understand
Caesarean when she answers my question:
did it hurt? Shows me the dark groove hidden
under her work shirt, a proud blemish in skin
rippled with ridges from weight loss. She knows
it’s not stress. We sit, lumps in throats,
wait on tests. They don’t know what’s wrong
she says, next day she’s back to underground
tunnels, thousands riding the same choppy waves.
Soon she’s too weak to walk or wash herself.
The bones of her skull vitiate a face that once
stunned grown men into mumbling stupors.
On a grey ward, two months in to size elevens,
she speaks in my mother tongue, begs me trace
the steps of its music, but the discord of two
languages keeps me from the truth I won’t hear.
She’s dying but I won’t call her dead, can’t let mum
become a body, a stone, an empty hospital bed.
Orphan Song
I think of the songs they’ll play
at my funeral. For all I know death
is like watching a landscape dissolve
through the window of an overheating
coach, bound for the nearest airport.
And if passing out of this life
is like passing through check-in
to be felt up by surly officials,
being carried aloft in a wooden box
must be like pushing back on a runway;
entering the next life like landing.
Who will greet me when I alight?
Will my parents be standing there,
reconciled, glancing at their watches,
with Kenta, rid of his jaundiced glow,
and the twins, grown to their full height?
Grief
What became of the boy
who called himself Grief?
The boy who, the story ran,
harboured a gun
through the back-roads
and alleyways of his teens,
the boy who turned up
as a footnote the night
we played my ends are rougher than your ends
in a flat overlooking London Road –
frontline of a post-code war
so far removed
we chuckled when someone said
kebabs from the shop that wore
a fresh batch of memorial flowers
were to die for.
Grief was grit
to lend the fable texture.
We never knew the name
his mum called him,
or what reduced him to plying
the night trade so white kids
could say they bun high grade.
He is a boy caught between commas
in a news report about youth crime,
an image fixed in place
by someone else’s language.
The Nod
When we’re strangers that pass each other
in the street, it will come down to this tilt
of the head – acknowledging another
version of events set in a new-build
years from now, a mess of a place filled
with books and records, our kids thick as thieves
redefining all notions of mischief.
Perhaps our paths will cross in a city
of seven hills as the light draws your face
out from the bliss of anonymity.
Maybe you’ll be stroking the goose-down nape
of a small child with eyes the exact shade
of those I met across a room at the start
of this pain-in-the-heart, this febrile dance.
In Defence of Darkness
Drum-brush of fabric. The clink of a zip
on laminate floor. You step from a skirt
to the sound of the street outside swelling
with traffic, the sound of our breathing.
We’ve time to touch like we used to –
the harshness of the journey written
into the depth of a clinch. Chest to chest,
your head in the cleft of my breastbone.
Coconut oil, laundry detergent, sweat,
dry shampoo, Burberry Weekend.
Garam masala tang in the troublesome
hair inherited by our possible daughter.
I kneel, the better to drown in your scent.
Since I’m remembering this, or making it up,
there is only darkness; our bodies speaking.
Eat, you ask. I eat – savouring
your aftertaste: tart but sweet, the inside
of a cheek, cured meat, a local delicacy.
Andrews Corner
I.
Where an old man comes, to practise
standing still, tutting
that the street he fought to keep is gone
and, sixty years on, he doesn’t belong
to this world of bass, blasting out of
passing cars, and earshot, at the speed
of an age when pubs close down
overnight; are mounds of rubble in a week.
II.
Where flowers moulder in memory of Tash,
fifteen, her twenty-something boyfriend
too drunk to swerve and miss the tree,
girls own their grown woman outfits,
smile at boys who smell of weed and too much
CK One. Pel, who can get served, stands in line.
Outside his friends play the transatlantic
dozens; the correct answer is always your mum.
III.
Where alleys wake to condom wrappers,
kebab meat, a ballet pump, last week
a van pulled up and it was blood. Today:
joggers dodge a dead pigeon, offer wordless
greeting to the night bus’s army of sanguine-
eyed ravers, nursing bad skin and tinnitus.
Goaded by the light, past the same house on repeat,
they think of taking off their shoes; inviolable sleep.
Martins Corner
Meat wagons sing an ode in sardonics
passing a bus held briefly to regulate
the service. Jesus loves you, if you
believe in signage. High heels clack,
are slung off, taken in hand. A shawl
flicked around our lady’s shoulders
flutters. She speeds up by Londis
past friends pressed against shutters
huddled, from the cold, round a zoot
two-sed then snuffed by a scuffed shoe.
This is the hour when a silver glimpse,
likely a phone, is a blade and a patch
of shade must be an assailant. A couple
on their second date claim a requisite
slow-dance in the space where restraint
cuts its eye at recklessness, their arms
charm necklaces warding off the thought
of these limbs round some other necks;
the night, years hence, when they’ll forget
how to want and need in the same breath.
Kung’anda
The English newsreader told me
home was a broken man, holding
a dying child, with flies round its mouth:
a story that didn’t tally with my mother’s,
of childhood smiles on granddad’s farm
or the laughing dance across hot soil
to the ice-cream stand. No tagline
could capture the air, swelling
with moisture after dry season
or the glistening brown torsos
of children bathed in the promise
of rainclouds, kept at last.
’Round Midnight
Hour of bones singing a blues of cold
setting in, camp beds, vouchsafed mattresses
in overcrowded rooms. The lost growing old
in post-industrial towns, words in their heads
from the tongues of long-defunct countries
and only these words in case they forget
where they were born, street names, all those sundries
that, in retrospect, amount to a life.
Who stops to take note of the smell of trees
this leave-taking hour, turning like Edith
to commit a burning place to memory,
knowing, even in this harshest of lights,
what’s unrecorded is a reverie
faded in a year, gone in a century?
Baltic Mill
Though you maintain the elements
have conspired against us we still
inch the cobbled street past Castle
Keep down to the Quayside’s rain-
slick paving slabs all for the thrill
of standing across from Baltic Mill
in a turbid mist lifted from the Tyne.
We planned to catch a talk at the Laing
or the Biscuit but, pushed for time,
plumped for a backstreet pizzeria, throw-
back to another world, a haberdasher’s
maybe or greasy spoon for blackface
minstrels from Gateshead mines and
iron works. The North Sea wind-chill
bids us leave behind this city of faces
cast in stories passed down, vestige
of years when hundreds of miles stood
between us. The exact course that brought
us here is unimportant. It is that we met
like this river, drawn from two sources,
offered up our flaws, our sedimental selves.
This poem contains gull song
not song, as such, so much
as guttural injunction; a music
we forgot how to understand, since
it lacks that carefully planned sweetness
sounding instead of black-shod
clockers-on, the splash and clack
of shop fronts, cabbies sparking
tabs in the cold of a windswept rank
flanked by one of Monkchester’s
lesser monuments; a sentry stopped
in his bronze tracks, steps echoing
the strains of an old tune hidden
in the genes of a new one – a left-behind
accent fizzing at the back of my tongue.
For those orphaned late in life
What if the wind blowing through
the french doors of your childhood
is the house’s way of saying goodbye
and when you call out, answering
yourself, greeting the gone out of habit,
you hear, for the first time, the timbre
of your voice how someone else might?
Author’s Note
Meaning ‘initiation’, kumukanda is a ritual that marks the passage into adulthood of Luvale, Chokwe, Luchazi and Mbunda boys, from North Western Zambia and its surrounding regions. As part of these rites, young boys live separately from their community in a bush camp, where they are taught skills that will aid them in a productive life. Makishi, a festival of dance, song and theatrical performance, marks the return of the initiated as men. Throughout kumukanda and makishi, masks represent communion with the spirits and teach important lessons about the history of the tribe. This book approximates such rites of passage in the absence of my original culture.
Notes
‘Self-Portrait as a Garage Emcee’: the poem contains brief quotations from garage songs and freestyles: Nikki S and Nyke (‘Boom like TNT …’), Craig David (‘sum a dem a ay sum a dem a luv dis …’), and Godsgift (‘in the venue we send you our menu …’). ‘Enter with the Eastender …’ is a folk lyric of unknown provenance (the names mentioned are characters from a popular UK TV programme), ‘[I’m] k to the a to the y to the o …’ is the author’s riff on a rhyme that was common in UK garage circa 2000.
‘Broomhall’: kapenta are a kind of small fish.
‘Some Bright Elegance’: the poem’s title is taken from a passage in Amiri Baraka’s poem, ‘The Dance’: ‘and all his words ran out of it: that there / was some bright elegance the sad meat / of the body made’.
‘Casting’: contains a line from Clare Pollard’s poem, ‘The Panther’.
‘Legerdemain’: the poem contains material from George Washington Williams’s open letter to King Leopold II, as quoted in King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild.
‘H-O-R-S-E’: A basketball training exercise. The object of the game is to score a basket so skilful that your opponent cannot replicate it. Each time an opponent fails to replicate their counterpart’s successful shot they receive a letter from the word ‘horse’.
‘Alternate Take’: ‘mwaice wandi’ is a Bemba endearment equivalent to the phrase kid brother or sister.
‘K
ung’anda’: is a Bemba word meaning home.
‘’Round Midnight’: Edith is thought to have been the name of Lot’s Wife.
‘This poem contains gull song’: Monkchester is one of the old names of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Ambit, Magma, Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe, 2011), Ploughshares, Poetry International Web, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2012), The Best British Poetry (Salt, 2011, 2013, 2015), The World Record (Bloodaxe, 2012) and Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014).
Several of these poems were also published in two pamphlets, Some Bright Elegance (Salt, 2012) and The Colour of James Brown’s Scream (Akashic, 2016).
‘Self-Portrait as a Garage Emcee’ was commissioned by Apples and Snakes for The Word’s A Stage and performed at The Soho Theatre.
An extract from ‘calling a spade a spade’ was awarded the 2012 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (judged by Jane Draycott).
‘Loch Long by Ardgartan, Argyll’ was commissioned by Apples and Snakes and RIBA in response to a photographic exhibition featuring the work of Edwin Smith. ‘This poem contains gull song’ was written as part of the Bloodaxe Archive project, a collaboration between Bloodaxe, Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts, and The Poetry School.
‘Winter Song’ was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and broadcast on Front Row, 21 December 2016.
This collection was begun in earnest as part of a residency at Cove Park in 2013.
Thanks also to: Parisa Ebrahimi, Jolyon Roberts, Joelle Taylor, Monika Neall, Dorothea Smartt, Skorpio Da Nemesis (R.I.P), BREIS, Charlie Dark, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Roger Robinson, Zena Edwards, Niall O’Sullivan, Poetry Society, Apples and Snakes, Spread The Word, all my Sheffield people (especially the 225 Crookesmoor Road, 423 Glossop Road, and Tuesday Club extended family), Les Robinson, Roddy Lumsden, Bernardine Evaristo, Nathalie Teitler, Anthony Joseph, Sean Graham, all Complete Works fellows, Anna Kirk, Rachel Piercey, James Trevelyan, Jay Bernard, Inua Ellams, Yemisi Turner-Blake, Warsan Shire, Jasmine Cooray, Miriam Nash, Sarah Perry, Monika Navarro, Rowena Knight, Mum and Dad (R.I.P), The Kaulu, Chingonyi, Siameja and Yonga families, Auntie Florence, Uncle Kenneth, Kaimba, Sempela, Chilufya, Katai, Yande, Louise, Adina, and Malaika.