Saint Judas' Day

How to suspend a raindrop in mid-air

New Scientist, 29 February 2012

We can all be Samoans

a year from today

if the race only ends

on Saint Judas’ Day

I’d promise to visit

the dentist and pray

that he hits a raw nerve

on Saint Judas’ Day

And I’d learn how to sail

in the Bay of Biscay

without compass or Qualms

on Saint Judas’ Day

And I’d overeat

and then underpay

and I’d drink in the morning

on Saint Judas’ Day

In a bar room brawl

I’d be lost in the fray

one on one with the big guy

on Saint Judas’ Day

And let’s hope if we must

be laid low by a plague

that what goes about comes about

on Saint Judas’ Day

And you dearest father

if you cannot stay

should save your goodbyes

for Saint Judas’ Day

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Beyond Damascus

Court upholds St Paul’s eviction

Financial Times, 22 February 2012

Beyond Damascus

an ideological fissure sprang

from the Vatican to Karachi

over swaying Afghan

opium pastures, whose legacy

became a looking-glass prophecy;

there were two opposing

versions of the same litany:

they might just have been inept

translations of the divine;

and young Americans

arrived at Bagram fresh

meat from Fort Worth, Texas,

their minds on homecoming

queens until time alone

fortified them with wisdom

to distinguish dates from figs;

but there are no trees outside

the gates of Bagram, Saul,

so think again before you turn.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

New Year's resolution

Fasting once a week could help you live longer

The Telegraph, 19 February 2012

Peter didn’t plan to go so long

without eating. He wasn’t aiming

for a mention in the Guinness

book of fools, freaks and unfortunates.

But he had over-indulged,

and so resolved

as his tyre chains bit into the forest

road home to lose the surplus,

shed the spare, kick

the snacking habit, maybe

next year.

When New Year came

he had already been fourteen days

in the belly of a Volvo stalled

at the side of a glacial road.

Stalactites of his breath tinselled

the rear view mirror, a yellow pond

had frozen where Peter’s feet would be. 

The winding windows in the back opened

onto his larder, where

the richness of Swedish vocabulary

lent variety to his diet

of snow.

Peter didn’t know a month had flown

by. He’d seen through the snow

that the sun had risen and not

set again, and now his white

cocoon sparkled like iced champagne.

Since his body quit

shivering nothing moved, and without movement

what is time? His breathing was shallow and silent.

The silence convinced Peter

he was deaf

or dead. When the world

broke through

Peter’s Volvo-centred igloo,

and green and blue

gushed in

with a scorching

pine-laced gale to the rasping

of blades, the breaking

of seals, he had nothing

to offer his guests.

‘Eat,’ he told Officer Nyberg,

‘snow.’

Peter Skyliberg was found awake and able to speak after spending over two months trapped in his snow-buried car on a Swedish forest road. Scientists think he may have gone into a hibernation state in which his body conserved energy by lowering its temperature.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

What is white and spotted

Snow leopards disappearing?

Kuensel, the newspaper of Bhutan, 16 February 2012

All colours are white

but can you not see

a shady outline

in this frame, or that?

Could that dark polished

stone not be an eye,

that crease of pink rock

a bared tongue or bloodied

fang? Yak herders tell

of leopards forming

out of falling snow,

the border shepherds

of snow drifts thinning

out their blue sheep herds

and leaving behind

only red shadows.

At this altitude

so close to Tibet

we are watchful of

our northern neighbours.

Look more closely, tell

me you see leopards.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Signs of Your Love

Bookshop bickering over Valentine roses

Evening Standard, 14 February 2012

for Louise

How your love light dazzles if I dare only look it in the face
yet I have looked for a sign of your love in all the wrong places:

how you sigh as you pile another load into the washing machine
and not how you’ve never asked me to wash my own clothes,

how you iron my shirts as though mopping spilt blood
and not how you fasten them on a hanger so they stay free of creases,

how my wet shoes on your spotless kitchen floor make you mad
and not how its cleanliness is your way of saying welcome home,

how you fight a futile battle all winter to keep the cars clean
and not how their polished shine reflects your pride in us,

how you always want to talk about who’s done what at work
and not how lucky I am that you choose to unburden your cares on me,

how our children’s incessant demands exhaust you so
and not how you chose me above all others to be their father,

how you devote so much time to keeping fit at the gym
and not how much you still care that you please me after all these years,

how a speck of dust on the floor makes you reach for the vacuum
and not how it breaks your heart when your home-making goes unsaid,

how we have to live near your family and two hundred miles from mine
and not how your heart is set on retiring to a city we can both make our own,

how for years you straightened your hair and now you fuss about your curls
and not how a simple and honest compliment makes you smile,

how you won’t leave the house without your makeup applied
and not how you wash it off at night and still look wonderful to me,

how you won’t kiss me if I’ve the slightest stubble on my chin
and not how you only care if I shave when you want us to kiss,

how you leave all the post in a pile for me to open at the weekend
and not how you trust that the mail contains nothing we’d rather not share,

how my raging poems and stories leave you stone cold
and not how you honour that part of me by patient acceptance.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Sparkle

Grammy Awards recast as tribute to singing legend

The Independent, 13 February 2012

Did you ask at the front desk for a suite

on the top floor

to experience once more the rush

of the express elevator?

Could you recall for whom you were saving

your greatest love

when you stood before the bathroom mirror

framed in bright lights?

Now if you peered through a telescope

at any part of the sky

you'd see stars coming out just for you,

and Bobby shedding a tear.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Homs

A veto against the Syrian people

Al-Arabiya News, 8 February 2012

Do not blame

China and Russia

for the carnage their veto

commands:

the spinning bottle

knows no magnetic north.

When the rain in Spain

was bombs

and Britain stared down

the bottle’s throat

we too chose to sit around

on our hands.

Do not honour the fallen

or their sacrifice;

it’s happening over again

in Homs.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The Year of Wringing Hands

Navy fires 21-gun Jubilee salute

Littlehampton Gazette, 6 February 2012

Nicholas Witchell’s on TV

telling a story I already knew

mattered less than an ant’s fart to me.

Cut to Pathé newsreel, cue

the fawning bishop of Durham, then trail

any one of the relentless slew

of documentaries planned, a gale

blown out of the butts of also rans —

Lord Archer, if he’s not in jail,

the James Whitakers, the Jennie Bonds,

and of course, old Nick himself — and so

begins a year of wringing hands

and concerts headlined by Status Quo.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Orange Sunshine (Ode to a watermelon)

Fresh blow to fruit & veg growers after watermelons linked with salmonella outbreak

The Grocer,  3 February 2012

Tender as freshly fallen snow,

   dripping like a honeycomb,

no seed to spike your throaty slurp,

   no need for a spittoon

to catch that arcing pesky nut.

   This ultimate vainglorious shoot

from an ancient vine, brought to the west

   from the heart of Africa,

first by the Moors and later slaves,

a horticultural chimeric fix

   brought to ripe perfection.

This sweetest fruit is a coddled child,

   nursery raised in its own cot-bed

of peat, no rival sibling claim

   to fear or elbow aside.

Shallow-bedded on a gentle mound

   of sandy loam first blanket warmed,

surrounded by a wide dry moat

   to occupy and own,

greedily it suckles on sunshine, hoarding

from earth and sun a sweet estate

   no heir shall ever succeed.

Bloated in its tangled cot

   it hides its ripeness, rather to rot

where it lies than yield to the anxious grower

   the nectar in its vault,

its perfected flesh, bought at the price

   of sterile ground, so easily lost;

yet be wary of reaping too soon, this fruit

   will not ripen off the vine.

Watch out for greying tendrils, for a yellowing

soil-scrubbed rump, for dulling and leathery

   skin too long in the sun.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Bitter Cold

Big freeze continues as snow hits British coast

The Telegraph, 2 February 2012

I

And yesterday, my lost one's birthday,

far to the north though not far enough

and more a ghost than a child these days,

discovering, at last, her own rearing pain.

II

From farther still the roll of rain,

cold rain, on a Perspex drum-skin roof,

and over the din a happy crackle,

leaping flames of laughter casting

long, flighty shadows you would

take for real, but for the absence

of human warmth. I am in a depression.

There is air rushing in from the Atlantic;

its warmth, its wetness invites its ruin,

and sure it's met as it rollicks down

the chalky, grassy lees of the Chilterns

by a killer's embrace blown in from the east.

Its tears spiral down as snowflakes

as any fool could have told you they would.

Now wiser voices speak and fools

stay silent, or they trade indulgences

for petty change, eternity in Heaven

for another priceless night right here.

III

But I'm not here at all, see me

on Hastings beach two children and

one wife ago. My parents, both

of them, are here on the beach, in the snow,

eager to reassemble their son,

or at least to tuck my guts back in.

Feel the smooth rounded stones

under the soles of our thin shoes,

feel the burn chill the balls

of our feet. We stand on icy coals.

Marvel at the frozen shore.

The sky, vast and frosted, reflects

the phosphorescent snow-capped peaks

of distant black-moated waves.

Angels have yet to fall from that sky.

But perhaps the chill is here and now,

the entropy of my memories the cause

of this unforgivable loss of fidelity.

IV

In Prague, the tenderest sight: a mother,

a frozen thread of milk strung

from suckling infant to weeping breast.

Her story, otherwise commonplace,

just one meagre clipping in this winter's

album. This cold is set to last.

My father is safe on a hospital cancer ward

waiting patiently for a lost and familiar face.

He tries in vain to recall its features plainly.

And there's a beggar outside Barclays Bank

sitting cross-legged under the cash dispenser;

pass him in the snow, he'll always be right there.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet