Selected Poems (24 page)

I’ve seen it, like our love, survive

from when you were only 35.

That’s almost the length of time it took

to pick this first ripe fig to suck.

My heart too has felt the South,

that puts this fig into my mouth,

warm my heart’s North at a time

life’s forecast as a colder clime,

and, in the heart’s depths, it renewed

love in life’s last latitude.

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.

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.

‘No, not to school,’ I counter-snort,

‘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.

They 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.

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.