Garibaldi Square
Old men lean to each other
gesticulating their opinions,
each like a frustrated lover
taunted by fretful minions.
The shaded seats are gone,
as if permanently selected,
a citizen assembly that’s won
the right to reward its elected.
We accept our lot and hunch,
back to the piercing sun,
pasta and espressos for lunch,
an hour on the clock to run.
The dry heat tires and saps
resolve as, held in its rays, we gaze
unseeing, books on our laps
unopened in the limpid haze.
The church tones for noon
as we lumber up the carved stone
steps beneath a painted moon
atop an oak-mounted throne.
An old robed priests chants aloud,
proclaiming hell for dissidents
and, reluctantly, as if from a shroud,
a glimmer of hope for repentants.
Then our choir, stacked in pews,
brings music to this concrete tomb,
offering fresh impetus to choose
new life in an alien womb.
Back then to the courtyard light,
all dark rituals of good versus evil
forgotten, dues paid to the trite
repositories of doctrinal drivel.
Once more the sun burnishes
the here and now, returns
us to our musings, refurbishes
life amidst the bone-dry ferns.
Death
‘I was born and I’m going to die’, he said,
‘so what’s the point?’
‘There’s always the bit in between’,
I replied, but it cut no ice.
He was a student of twenty
trapped between ‘ashes to ashes’.
He was right but he was wrong.
The trick, I think now,
is to abandon all absolutes,
to submit our poor brains
to the comfort of fallibility.
I told him one day his fatalism
would drift to the periphery
of his daily routines.
I was right, but not before
he’d twice rung me in the night –
I’d said he could –
in search of reassurance.
He bought me a bottle of whisky.
I hope he’s okay now.
What is a Women? Really?
My wife had trouble chest feeding
because her breasts got in the way;
no amount of ardent pleading
could hold an anxious NHS at bay!
Microscopic Eyes
Have you ever lain prone,
eyes like microscopes
scanning a singular patch
of turf, alive to hopes
of catching in that one
kaleidoscopic glimpse
a palimpsest of life,
a pod of unsung hymns?
Box 43
An array of box-like rooms
entered and exited by doors
once chocolate brown
but long since whitened
with paint from down the road.
It all comes back to me now,
the kitchen full to overflowing
with cupboards my dad built,
money being in short supply;
the dining room for Sunday roasts
and, later, the Telegraph crossword
after a breakfast of tea and toast.
In the sitting room ‘his’ and ‘her’
armchairs to look at the TV,
with an unused record player
lurking behind and in the corners
inherited Victorian china dishes
and glasses too valuable to use.
My bedroom faced the garden
and my parents had the bog room
at the front that overlooked the road;
my gran came to stay in her 90s,
settling in the little bedroom
adjacent to mine; she was happy
living in our house, though my mum
said she kept following her around.
I never minded the tatty loos,
nor did my dad; mum suffered them
because that’s what women did,
pick up the pieces in the background,
putting families together like jigsaws;
personally I think they still do.
But it didn’t belong to the council:
it was ‘their’ home, garden too,
and at the close of day my dad
would pause by the compost heap
and ruminate on property and life.