Author Archives for J. A. Huddart

Newcastle Central Station

Neat, double curves of iron
Enclose a sense of opportunity.
Waiting is anticipation of elsewhere going and
Coming. The air booms with
Adenoidal announcements.
Sleek carriages grumble over
Tracks that disappear into half moons of light.
Laid when steam was
Everything – an age of

Certainty, when top-hated
Engineers were only
Next to God. Their roaring
Trains kept people in their places,
Ran classes in and to their separate stations.
And now electric locomotives haul
Less formal times behind them. They

Sidle modestly between the platforms.
The barriers have gone where uncles waited
And wartime lovers kissed each other one last
Time. The clock has seen out arrivals and departures,
In with the old,
Out with the
New.

Reservations

“THESE WOODLANDS ARE A CONSERVATION AREA. NO DOGS UNLESS ON LEAD. KEEP TO MARKED FOOTPATH ONLY”
SIGN ON THE SANDSTONE TRAIL, RAWHEAD, CHESHIRE
for Pete Morgan

One step beyond the stile we trespass
down a margin of the world. A bluff escarpment,
thinly wooded, edges us to sanctuary
between machine cropped fields. Unplanned things,
like thoughts, may be allowed to flourish here
within the confines of electric fences.
Here is something other than we have
in terraced yards or lawn edged gardens:
here grow the undeveloped grasses,
or gather, in the hollows, cars that sculpt
themselves to rust. All that our living
has no need for made into a reservation.
Roads thread the grey horizons.
Beyond the trees and casual walkers
a careless energy consumes the world.

Tattenhall, March 1990

Congregational

It is Epiphany – a day of meetings and surprises.
Narrow winter sun pierces lancets,
projecting miracles on whitewash – the walls
just begging for some risen light. The magi moving,

fluid over plaster, bringing gifts to lands
where winter nips unfeeling fingers.
The 4 gas heaters make a brave quartet
But the air is coffin cold, uncaring –

breath clouds, lightens and is quickly gone.
Rejoice. You’re here for what can really bring us
to our knees – the need for death, the hope for life,
the cause of love – and to share a silence that reflects

on wishes, that can condense in actions all our days.
True, Church is more than gravity and graves,
so now we’re older, becomes the everything
we were, gives back the people we’ve become.

But keep away those O.T. resurrected texts
where ministries of learning are grained
like wood into our cells. This stuff goes back
into its own mistakes and never can be changed.

And no amount of transubstantial talk
can match the truth of Christ’s own forsaken cry
up on his cross – “Why have You gone?”
he asks. “Thank God,” it’s tempting to reply,

for it’s that sudden, brilliant lack of faith
that keeps me curious, and here. That pain, torture
and despair that makes a suicide like his a crime
of love to solve as urgent as any on TV.

So souls or cells? How close they sound.
We move eternal into light – science burns
forever, triumphant genome of the stars –
so keep the faith. As Larkin said, it’s going on.

Death of a Naturalist

The obits fill the papers for a week. Heaney
is Dead. Disinherited – we dumbly stare,
as if a shaded bulb had failed at the far end of a passage.
It’s Dover Beach and  anarchy is briefly born –
to mix it with the metaphors and references.
We all share touches from the man we never knew
but may have met – a moment on the damascene
when his Irish voice speaks calmly from the fire.

So here is mine. With Digging firmly in our thoughts,
it came as a surprise  he crossed the Irish Sea
to Birkenhead with no pen in his bag.
His reading done, we faithfully produced our copies
to be signed. Deficient of a book, I had
the pen the time required. Now dry, it nestles
in its drawer. It’s 40 years since it was called
to rescue a poet with no pen – a man
with confidence that nothing on that day be needed
to be writ down. So, Parker Vector Rollerball,
you took the place of spade, and left his mark
upon two dozen pages. I would have happily
allowed him pocket it and disappear.
An honest Ulsterman, he gave it back again.

Nobodies

The murder of a mistress excites an editor or two
But this defendant is the first to face his fate
on camera, so lawyers have their say,
then leave it to the judge to read the verdict
on The News. It’s Guilty and before you know,
he’s gone to spend his years reflecting
or resisting all the ends that sentences entail.

A determined innocent he declined to answer
any particle that made the cloud of evidence
that brought him down. And it’s a house of
horror tale no jury could resist.
Each circumstance weighed heavy with the next –
the luring, lonely basement, filled
with suffocated wishes; the kitchen scoured
with bleach in an over spotless house;
the hair caught in a carpet; the freshener
that lingered in the boot; the tape which could
have bound a quartered body, butchered
into meat. And then the search for rocky
tracks that must have caused the damage
to the car as it defiled the empty wilderness
that slinks now round an unmarked grave.
You could not write it for TV.

Poor girl, she’s not found to add her
body’s outrage to the day. Instead
the empty land they think she’s in
yields five more bodies in her stead.
Four buried and one abandoned
on a beach. What their sacrifice was
only can be guessed. Their resurrection
brings no judgement day on anyone.
But she escaped, and love is free
to keep its council in his cell. Out there
concealed in urban post codes five more
killers guard their secret liberty
to see what hidden death may call.

In 2012, a friend told how a colleague of her husband’s was being tried for murder in Edinburgh. It was a crime of passion, with no body, and entirely circumstantial evidence. The verdict was to be televised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Pilley