I come from a chalk-white, sun-streaked street where skinny children stick-rattle and hopscotch away careless summer days. I come from the domain of bus drivers and bricklayers, where ferret-keeping, earth-salty sorts artfully tend their vegetables and their kneeling house wives with scrubbing brush and Vim nag at the linoleum within. I come from…
Scene in the sky
a lonely cloud wandering a red balloon bobbing a jumbo bound for Brooklyn vapour trail exhaling a paper kite parading a flight of young geese gosling a solitary starling a kestrel that’s amazing a swarm of bees just being a bubble tempting fate a yellow biplane towing a banner proclaiming L U L U L…
Show me the earth
Show me the earth, I said he smiled and cupped his hands like a maltster might or a coffee merchant to show me the soil which richly crumbled between his fingers. I could tell by the ingrained dirt that here was a man hewn of the earth a son of toil, and so twenty sacks,…
We are made of memories
we are made of memories we met somewhere before first day at school seems like yesterday I wore a new blazer like a tortoise would its shell a coal shed, a first kiss fumblings in the dark that coal dust smell I can conjure it at will walking along the sand somewhere…
The order of things
On my haunches on the garage floor, aged eight My father’s oil-grained hand reaches out from under the car I place a bright chrome wrench in his outstretched palm No, not that one, not yet! He can tell by the feel - No, I need the three-eighth Whitworth! Its heavy maw hints at gas pipes…
The things people do
Alan West finds himself in a parallel universe It was the day after the day after Christmas, one of those nowhere in particular days when you feel you ought to be doing something but can’t. So we decided to walk to our nearby shops to stock up on eggs, indigestion remedies and other essentials. On the…
Back from the war
Back from the war, why didn’t you say, No telegram. I would have expected that. That’s what anybody would expect Of their husband of twenty two years. Back from the war effort, more like. Our boy, gagging in a muddy trench In some corner of a foreign field And me, doing the…
Sun flower
When I first heard it, Girasole Sunflower, the Italian word I formed an instant picture Girare to turn, sole in the sun. How aptly named The flower that turns heads And in turn, turns itself In the lazy heat of the day. How could you not notice? Field after field of…