Teatime

September 9, 2017 / The Editor
(Published in a Cinnamon Press anthology, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, August 2008)

Cake darling? Mummy asked.
Daddy smoked with shaking hand.
She drank from her smudged whisky glass
As the cherry winked on the iced cake.
Daddy topped up his milk with Grants.
I knocked the tumbler from her hand.
She ran from the house
Cherry blossom fell in the wind.

Morning Lane, Hackney: revisited

July 9, 2017 (Published in Links, Spring 2002)

Morning Lane is falling down
and its dereliction is
like the end of time.
at 3am in the eternal night of
here, I stopped in this road
of compressed grief beneath
the sign ‘Morning Lane’
my lips mumbled ‘Morning Lane’
‘Morning Lane’ and I touched
the icon of its former self
the beginnings of its name
when milkmen’s carts clopped
over cobbles and vegetables
fruit and meat were swept in at dawn
to load the great city for its day.

Meditation on a photo of the Romanovs, 1913

May 9, 2013 (Published in Understanding, November 2000)

The Tsars of Holy Russia!
How well you looked four years before your death
The girls smiling, on the boy’s head a sailor’s hat.
Standing in furs, snow hard upon the ground
And behind, a black wood tipped with ice.
Your open smiles defied the world
The private dreams, a family joke
While they waited in the woods.
How blind, to your names
dangling on Rasputin’s silver cross.
Serene you stand, arrogant no doubt, and yet
The elder sister’s hand upon Alexei’s head,
The mother’s touch upon the father’s arm.
And from the woods their burning eyes on you.

*****

Against the wall the family stood.
They fired so many bullets in your flesh
They left the shape of icons on the floor.
Stalin placed his spies in every private heart,
He made a nation of himself.
You waited as a family under earth
For over eighty years picked pure.
The icy winters gathered over you.
To St. Petersburg at last your poor and equal bones:
Do the bells across the steppes ring out
To call you home again?