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.

From Slough Sewage Works
to a football field in Uxbridge;
Can you spot the Ring-billed Gull
among the others? Portland Bill,
in raptures: first a Desert Wheatear,
then a Ring Ouzel. And where
was the heath, that hot March
with the Crossbills? Whatever
is on the line, we follow the majesty
to places thought unvisitable.
Something’s blown in on tumbledown winds
so pack the flapjacks

and start the Passat. We’re off
to Vauxhall Sand Martins,
gravel pits and estuary flats,
seabirds slotted between tower blocks –
cormorants off the Isle of Dogs.
Can you sense the sea by St Edmund’s,
Millwall, reflected back
in shallows of the outer dock?
We’ll mark the species off,
more than a hundred in twelve hours,
from Slough Sewage Works
to a football field in Uxbridge,
from the post-dawn grey of Portland Bill
to an equivalent dusk on Bugsby’s marshes.

You used to celebrate voices on the wind,
but now yours is the one drifting through daydreams
diffuse as the notes in a thousand earphones.

Your face is in a cubist montage,
now in craft brew buildings, the depths of sleep
or a garden centre in Pontardulais.

Surveying snow against black beyond midnight
the earth contains in its six foot depths,
ashes are scattered among the Tuileries, out at sea

or in odd garden patches, air and rime.
So there are merits of the fixed and dispersed in time:
headstone and empty urn on the landing alike.

But nothing resolves so when you say they ‘live on’
I can only assume you mean that they died.

after Peter Robinson

Is it clear or hazy at Dinton Pastures
in a verdant May with dappled shade in patches
over ‘Enigmas of Departure’ at a café table?
Everywhere the trees are Larkin’s unresting castles.
A heron stands on stagnant water like a model,
then turns its head while a larger lake glimmers
around stranded panels facing up to a star.
They call it a ‘hard relate’ if you truly understand.
For me it’s the heat haze with everything silenced
by glass, passing inaccessible places, scrubland
below the horizon, glimpses of in-between fields
from a train’s confinement, a sense of lostness
in presences of space assuaged by new departures
and blessings of latitude to the sky returned.

n.b. This is part of a sequence called Tired Resort set at the coast towards the end of summer

Too Active

With everything strapped to your car:
boats and bikes, a tired passenger,
I wondered…with these holiday triathlons
to every snatched restorative drink –
are you not that bit too active?

You’ve got a dog to slow you down and radiate peace
but it sped you up a cliff on a short leash.
You could never be stationary, ever
fully here, and a coffee is for future plans
getting smaller by the year.

Photo by Harrison Haines via Pexels https://www.pexels.com/@harrisonhaines/

Opting Out

There’s a different kind of freedom
when you opt out in faded Berghaus,
not carrying much over the bridge
as a train rattles over the viaduct
between stubble fields, lighting its way
like the end of your roll up.
You descend into a quiet neighbourhood,
perhaps heading to the allotments
with a radio tuned to football results
that are just a stream of numbers
providing vague reassurance of life
existing under storm clouds unleashing
outcomes of low pressure weather systems
from grey ghost husks over Forfar and Kinlochleven.

Click to access The+Pan+Haiku+Review+Summer+Issue+3+%28August+2024%29.pdf

I am grateful that ‘The News from Schiphol Airport’ has been published in Alan Summers’ Pan Haiku Review, Issue 3 (p59). This is an open season issue, open to poems of up to ten lines in any form. However, none of the following words could be included: silence, silent, silently, still, stillness, reflection, reflected, old, young, alone, lonely, lone or any variations of those words. You can find out more about Alan Summers in this mini documentary which was featured on PHK (National Japanese Televison). This edition of the Pan Haiku Review includes submission guidelines for Babylon Sidedoor, the Autumn edition, as well as the review section Blōō Outpost, a wide range of poems of up to ten lines and editorial insights throughout on the nature of poetry & prose writing.

The News from Schiphol Airport

Now derisory
is the dividend from labour
as I see the red brick,
read the news from Schiphol Airport,
notice the leaves drift by the river
and mud trodden in the tension of the week,
the sky and stone wall,
the dog in the water

Alex Saynor