Category: taster

Swifts (for Sankaram Kumar*)

Seasonal migrants of our global economy,
they don’t need papers to come here to work,
dashing all over like underpaid waiters,
they screech as they whirl about and never stop.

Harvesting much of our surplus winged insects
with no time to relax, they eat on the wing,
ducking and diving so long the sun shines,
‘cos any bad weather will bring down the crop.

When the picking is over they queue up to fly
back over continents, mountains and seas
but, if they only go south for the winter,
the question arises as to where they belong.

In a world without frontiers, as it is for the birds,
the question is meaningless, pointless to ask –
life is a struggle, as it’s always been,
if they claim a homeland, they do it with song.

rs 8.6.07*

* [‘voluntarily’ repatriated this day]

Close Encounter

Closing at around 50k,
that pole’s got an extension.
Owl?
Cowled head
hawkturns.

Buzzardstare.
My heart leaps!
And we’re past.

I grope camerawise
and she slopes
slowly, easily away.

rs 17.4.91, Ardèche

Holy Fool (Leonard from Pennard)

One sunny afternoon
in yellow sports shirt, pink hotpants
and night-time driving glasses,
transistor radio to his ear,
he trucked on down the street –
not gay but rather queer.

He was a one-off
who made us freaks look staid,
who spoke with candour
both refreshing and bizarre.
You’d assume that he was touched
but then most people are.

In an age when it had counted more,
he’d grown up on the edge of things
in that strait lace-curtained world
of tight-lipped prayers and bibles,
so he found a ready audience
amongst the rebel tribals.

I don’t know what diagnosis
a psychologist would give
to explain his odd behaviour,
but he seemed very comfortable
with how he was
and not at all unstable.

He could appear quite innocent,
or knowing, sly or wise.
His babbled incongruities –
more dormouse than Mad Hatter –
while sounding free of malice,
would often still the chatter.

The mynah, chicken-wired alone
into a corner of the park,
who ignored attempts to teach him
obscenities vulgar, coarse and choice,
echoed happy aphorisms
in our hero’s well-known voice.

And, one night after closing time,
we followed two loud drunks in suits
singing the usual beery hymns
as they staggered on their way.
“It’s not the drink, they’re willing it”
was all he deigned to say.

Voodoo Angel (Angélique Kidjo at WOMAD, Reading, 2006)

The last act on the last night and we’re there,
it’s colder now the rain at last has gone,
everyone is standing, tense with hope,
we want a big finale to finish the weekend –
we’ve heard some of the finest in the world,
we’re glutted but we still want something more.

Pink glitter trouser suit, crop-haired, compact –
even on the stage she isn’t tall –
the women in the crowd go mad with joy,
especially the three in front of us –
one of them could even be her sister
and she is only four foot six, if that.

And yet she has complete control,
the ambassadress from Africa
with the dignity that this conferred,
her voice is like a banner and a sword –
why are small women often very loud? –
she overwhelms the whole of this huge crowd.

Benin’s not-so-secret weapon flies,
taking Jimi’s anthem for her own,
not just because her singing has such power,
nor the fact that she’s become a star –
for now her soul is in her throat for sure
and like a lioness she roars it out.

She sings of love, of struggle and resistance
and everyone there understands it all
though few of us can recognise a word.
We stamp and dance and cheer and sing along
in that dark and dusty summer field
to celebrate her night of victory.

Compared to men with armour, bombs and guns
she looks so slight, when she comes down to join us,
a warrior armed, but only with a song,
a queen crowned with conviction, strength and passion
so deep and wide and raw and real and whole,
she shows us how we also might be strong.

ii. Secondary i.

Then I passed 11+ and it was back to all boys:
seven years of being bored right out of my wits,
not forgetting the five being tortured and squashed –
I was so easy to wind up they couldn’t resist.
My chances of meeting with girls were so limited
‘cos I didn’t have sisters to fight and to argue with
it was well-nigh impossible to learn how to play,
let alone how to talk and even make friends with.

Our headmaster was a moderniser, he thought,
and thus, in first year, sex education was taught.
The teacher was ancient and useless as well,
he used to fill blackboards with acres of script
that we had to copy in exercise books.
I always wrote slowly and couldn’t keep up
and he would rub out work before I got there –
I gave up on Biology in plain despair.

We studied the glands of a rabbit in chalk
and thus came to the gonads at the end of the year
and then, as we slavered in anticipation,
at last he arrived at human procreation.
He projected a photo of a woman unclothed –
some innocent Papuan at 25 yards
with a fuzzy vague patch of dark pubic hair
and, with his school pointer, simply said, “There!”

He talked about semen and ova at speed
and said that a man passed a women his seed
when they slept together, but didn’t say how.
I sat there and puzzled how they came together
and imagined the sperm seeping out of a dick,
crawling over the sheets between a couple in bed
and into her hole while both of them slept.
With instruction like this it’s amazing we bred.

Fitting

Comfortingly familiar
this lump of cold metal
with its double steely grip –
the gates closed with bolt, nut and washer,
defying gravity with friction –
our lives hung by a spiral thread –
drop-forged or hot pressed,
now dressed with
oil and rust in equal measure,
heavy and hard on the hands,
but light enough to throw and catch
if you’re good enough
(aim for the nose!),
a lesson in mechanics,
a sound, a shape, a pain
never to be forgotten
when you’ve stood over the abyss
and prayed it didn’t fail.

Standstill (Friern Barnet 1969)

The frosts get sharp, the regulars appear –
clever dossers come in from the cold,
sectioned for a bed and three square meals,
a glass of beer on Christmas Day – not bad.

I’ve seen the other wards by now
and romantic thoughts of madness are dispelled:
there’s no-one to release,
even those who should be – nowhere else to go.

Alcoholics, depressives, those who just can’t cope –
“Which nerve broke down?” the nurses smugly ask –
straightjackets come in pills and draughts,
while lobotomies are rare since ECT.

I’ve carried Xmas cards around two weeks,
too low to send my greetings anywhere,
I skive off with a phone call Boxing Day,
to say my wife is sick.

The new Chief Nursing Officer is unimpressed –
he’s gay and I’m supposed to be unmarried …
“legally” I say and disregard his threats,
I’m leaving in a fortnight anyway.

I’m his predecessor’s parting gift –
so nice to be a pawn in someone else’s game –
but all this will be over soon
and I’ll return to my normality.

Breakfast in Cayenne (1974)

Seeing that name on a map of France’s oyster coast,
I had to find out what was there
and if it might have been the spot explorers left
who built a pepper city on the farther shore.

For two days I’d been desperately in search
of work to earn the cash we’d need
to get us through a winter in the Pyrenees,
minding someone else’s farm.

I’d traipsed round every ostréiculteur’s cabin
in Marennes and La Tremblade –
from tin shacks to solid warehouses
they cordoned off the waterfront.

The third night found me outside with no place to stay,
frost was in the air and sharpened stars to needles;
walking on a causeway built of oyster shells, it seemed,
I found the cabin of a boat marooned upon the levee.

With nowhere else to go, I crawled inside this plywood hut,
made a mattress out of mares tails –
all that grew on such a wasteland –
got into my dossbag and gave into fatigue.

I woke up, shivering, well before the dawn,
and carried on my hunt for somewhere warm.
according to the chart, there wasn’t much to find –
a dozen houses at the most – the end of the Atlantic line.

The café was just open – a sort of bungalow
where fishermen would eat and drink –
the woman at the iron stove,
bent over, making up the fire.

She didn’t seem surprised to see
a stranger in her establishment
so early, even one like me,
while, outside, night still hid the sea.

I ordered un petit café – the funds were low –
said I’d been looking for a job;
she asked if there was unemployment back at home
I said there was – in my case, true enough.

She was a while out in the kitchen
but returned with coffee finally,
plus bread and hot milk in a bowl,
and told me that these came for free.

I felt as grateful as it’s possible to be.
She’d clearly known hard times
and what it means to give and to receive.
My shipwreck then began to look like victory.

Language lessons (1982)

Heading north by auto-stop

out of Basel down the Rhine,

I’m picked up by a trucker Freiburg-bound.

My German isn’t bad but to me his accent’s strange

and shouting cross the engine makes it hard.

We chat a while quite amiably

about what I did and where,

then he passes me a beer and one for him.

I struggle for an age with the pliers he employs

till he shows me, single-handed, how it’s done.

Then he starts in on his story,

with the bottle in one hand,

how he should be on vacation with the wife

but, instead, he’d had to buy a headstone for their son.

I sympathise with caution, as one does.

It’s a touchy point of etiquette

how to make sure I heard right –

should I ask him how and when the young man died?

There’s a stage in language fluency when the major errors come

and all kinds of mixed-up wrangles are begun.

As I sat there questioning

how well I’d understood his speech,

it occurred to me that he was really drunk

and wondered just how reckless grief can make a man,

flying, tanked up, down the autobahn.

Walk like an Egyptian!

Now, that’s what I call ‘the Big Society’