Two poems

Two poems published in nthposition

Neighbourhood watched

Warm rain rises from the high street.
Buggy wheels plough through cabbage shells
that once were green. Above
the sky hurries away on business of its own.

We’re safe here for the moment.
We’re free to evade each other,
darting into shops, eating sandwiches…
a humming sound permeates the vapour,

drawing us together, keeping us apart.
No still life captures this delicacy –
blurred edges, polite agitations, yet
so few umbrellas! Windows mist

exotically over the call centre. Our speech

is compromised by scare-quotes;
we’re furtive, hedging every bet,
shoulder muscles twisted by shopping bags.

Even your bones couldn’t rest here

Even your bones couldn’t rest here.

I remember ghost-houses in primary colours,
bodies sheathed in uniforms, morning
and evening alternating monotonously.

To begin with, your voice was only static,
an interfering crackle…
later I felt it as concentrated heat,
welding synapses.

Your phantom residue makes itself known
as gaunt intelligence,
impatient with superstition, eager for colloquy,
the new-old spirit come to liberate us from the old-new ways.

Stalking amid ruined friendships,
frowning at compromise,
unappeasable.

Sometimes that chill nipped you in old age:

What ‘lessons of history’? You may as well
never have taken action, bold or cautious,
never have risen from bed with a purpose for the day.

But your demon survived: stout,
sound – like your analysis
of the causes of war and the burdens
of precedent and regressive taxation.