Wilderspool Causeway

i.m. Ken Mok

I felt the warm earth of England
on scraggly grass between paths on a council estate.
You felt it too –

but now it’s too late. Last April,
in the undulations of Forest Rec
how would we find you in Nottingham,
a turn of the century grey brick ziggurat
or in early morning winter sun behind the UEA lake
you were the only one up to photograph?

I felt the warm earth of England;
you knew our welcome room to room
on Waveney corridor, but not so much in pubs
where you felt they saw ‘just another immigrant’.

I felt the warm earth of England
barefoot by the river, but now
what is this fast-flowing current
no-one signed up for,
an ever-rolling stream become rapid
to stop the heart on a football pitch.

I felt the warm earth,
but you were a man who bore burdens,
sole breadwinner six thousand miles from home
with bright and lively lads alone in loss.

Who were the teams and why did the heart stop?
A football pitch in Birmingham,
too many questions…

What happens to the dead in Wolverhampton,
those diamonds –
will there be a heavenly midlands

in the upper reaches, not Asphodel Fields,
where people of substance rest in glory
or does the body simply shift its energy
to multifarious particles’ resting places
in the earth? In other words,
we’re out of ideas at the end of the road
and what’s left to say doesn’t bear mentioning
or dissolves into cliché.

I felt the warm earth:
you heard it in the sounds
of Neil Hannon’s Summerhouse,
Passage over Piedmont, Eye of a Needle.
Now no autumn tour to hear
‘Why did you have to die, Achilles?’
and we wonder the same
when the words of a text from New Cross Hospital –
‘he passed away’ – confirms an end
in English euphemism
but we’re told to be strong against the clichés,
praise ‘muscular’, unsentimental
stoic footsteps for no apparent reason,
but what can we do
but take the clichés and the footsteps on?

I felt the warm earth of England
in your membership of English Heritage
and the hope of your 10 year-old’s questions:
are conservatives really libertarian?

Is a social democracy the ideal form of government?
And what are your interests?
‘The two world wars and the history of colonialism.’

I felt the warm earth of England
and hope you felt it too in more than fragments.
You make it warmer by your presence.