My Racing Heart

for Andrew and Lizzie

 

The quick and dead share this in common –
their ends define astride the instant
when the one becomes the other.

Put it another way, it’s the second when
the body doesn’t know it’s had its day,
it’s bliss has rocketed you to space,

but awesome, awful emptiness stretches velvet
smooth oh so far into the distance,
and light has gone, and nothing wins.

These are only words that like to play with
danger, indulging cliff edge stunts that fall
for jokes about your  finite store of heartbeats,

but feel that flutter of an atrial excitement
and take again the middle path that leads to hills
where sunlight beckons and breath takes in

the air with ease. And here I have a
momentary release that unexpected weakness
brings. The puzzle is no laughing matter.

I lie upon the waiting earth and pray
for strength to walk again, to rise
to this or any other time to come.

Larks shatter the air with derision
and their distant, soaring panic. Slowly, suddenly,
the instant ends and paths lead once

again above the Roman forts, the valley
roads, the racing hares, the stone-
built farms and fields, the water

lying sleek in pools with smug
smart trout. It’s only just in view
this glimpse of things more special

than they are, but as the weeks
go on, and resentment at the treason
my own self has perpetrated

on its host subsides to an accepted
daily pill, the things that really
count shine more vivid in the grass.

the bride in the bookshop

I’m just passing through crime and warfare
thinking that nothing could surprise me
in the world of second hand books. On my
phone are the images of various collections
that might rub together in a poem or two.
That’s fine then. Lunch ahoy. And suddenly
she’s there. Totally bridal, her white dress
sacrificing the everyday. Sweeping aside
the book hungry and the image seeker alike,
down the shelves she passes. Follows: a husband
[in greys and blacks], the bookseller [charmed,
smooth-haired, pleasantly obsequious], a photographer
[ready to freeze the day she takes her steps
to virginal mortality]. Billowing onto a Victorian sofa
she becomes the moment. An inconsequential
with an iPhone, I retreat down the gallery of books
towards cookery and the domestic life. Somewhere here
are shelves on family planning, relationships,
health and wellbeing, coping with illness,
the future. Now she preens and settles to the lens.
What world there is defocuses, becomes a blur
Of fiction, beauty, travel, science and romance.

It’s not uncommon – there’s a cutting by the door
pins up another. A pair of star booked lovers
share their bartered passion for personal posterity,
second hand. That bride, I bet she’s there,
forever, arranging silk and smiles, keeping that
appointment with a date that never comes.

Fired

It is then. One of them sits at the back of class
and learns how to format a spreadsheet or two.
A teenager apprentice, he grins on demand,
and knows how to screen his idleness whenever
I come near.  And here is the other, standing
to attention at the local Cenotaph, his proud
cadet clothes reminding all of loyalty,
safety, courage. He faints – the heat of ceremony,
the pressure of remembrance – and is led away.

It is now. His friend and he are gone.  Too old
to be at home, they’re in their private world.
We’re out too. A friend is 50, an age they think
they’ll never be. The stack they’re playing in becomes
a beacon in the night. Must be a Viking raid, we say.
Holy Island, hide your valuable daughters.
Curiosity fades, and they’re unseen for miles.
Later, still a fearful blaze of sheer
obliterating light, we drive past, home.
The iron roof, trapped in rage, collapses.
Engines, men in uniform, stand helpless
in wonder at the flames. The innocent
darkness holds itself aloof. And as we
take ourselves away to beds and sleep,
their bodies are reducing, starved of
air; of everything they hope; their families’ love.

It is days. They are not missed, then are, then are not found.
And in the only place left for them to be –
fragments of bone, of priceless, matchless DNA.
No real answers but a mystery solved.

It is years. Nothing grows or is harvested there.
No shed or barn stands waiting for another
crop. Only shards of air that pierce the
everyday, that beg the head to turn and look.
No last post for them. Nor proud parents
holding letters of success from Boards or Colleges
for sleepy sons who nothing ever wakes.

~

[background]

Tourists

Souviens-Toi

Oradour-sur-Glane is cut off from the rest
of France. Iron gates divert the N route
from Limoges that once took through a tram,
the telegraph, the casual commerce of a nation.

Nothing lives in its dry ruins now
but weeds. The grass is cut around the car
left by the doctor on the day he died and burned.
Rust has sculptured it, and before that fire.

On that June day in 1944,
4 days beyond the beginning of the end
in Normandy [not much before the RAF
were bombing Caen] the SS came to Oradour.

Their rank precision arranged the town much as
we see it now – the women in the church burned
with the kids, the men in barns, shot low
to bring them down, then sacrificed in flames.

The dead are known and numbered, their sufferings untold
have come to the same end – a common graveyard
and a mausoleum where their last possessions
and their ashes can be sampled under glass.

And still we tourists come. French, Dutch and
English number plates park outside the gates
[the Germans on their way to Spain no longer
stop in France] to share our European heritage.

It lives again this town – as if the polished
insulators and the wires still sang with local
orders, news of cousins in the rest of Limousin.
A people walk its streets. In shorts and tee shirts,

we pause to look at images of flame red bricks
behind the crumbled plaster; pots, pans and
Singers; a bicycle marooned upon a wall.
Wordless, I let my camera take it all.

Before us came the men in black, anonymous,
known only as “the nazis” on each plaque.
We take their steps, and leave no names behind,
like them. Their map too was Michelin, they had

their places they must do. Each fresh reprisal
marked a cross upon the way. Their own
journey to a death in France. About the suffering
they caused – I can neither take it in, nor write.

Words light on what those tourists left behind,
and what the French have kept alive – a sense,
the senselessness of mind, of what they did.
It happened here. It happens everywhere the same –

they’re lynching, burning, shooting, raping –
pinning on their grubby uniforms our human shame.
It does not matter in whose name. A chasm
opens up and all our hopes fall in.

Ecology

Another dry summer
The garden hose lies out
all day. Each night I water
flowers whose anonymity, colour,
character and short, short life I respect.

Another dry summer in Africa
Sad children die of cholera,
a name we have exported with the
automatic rifle and the tank.
Their remote lives, unwatered, wither.
Ammunition blooms on the ground at their feet.

Ellingham
28.7.93