Poem 147

An old man in his last hours realises he’s not going to make it all the way out of winter into proper spring – this time the seasons aren’t going to turn for him, he’s going to die on the borderline in no man’s land … another from the lounge of Hohiria Rd 1982 correlating evening and death, the hour I’ve thought most likely I will die at when it’s my turn … some say it’s always darkest before the dawn but for me there’s no dark like that between 6 and 8pm …

… there’s an element of Tennyson’s In Memoriam here, and T.S. Eliot’s April (spring) being the cruellest phase of the year …

( I like how I’ve used (breech) birth imagery for death, the subtle build up of rhyme, and that in a sense the poem has a happy ending as out of the darkness he’s revisited by a vibrant light-filled flashback of himself as a child … it’s not often you get to use the juicy word jubilant … )

No Man’s Land

Dirty unloved street
sinking back in the spring's cold slap
dark like gas coming over the lines
shingle holes broken bones
of stone snap through the ground

someone will die here now
in the sludgy dusk disappointed
not knowing how
to turn the miscarrying spring
caught forever beyond his reach
he lies wedged tight
in the strangling winter's breech
and against the purse of night within
like coins the memories come
years fingered off
                   shiny thin rims
all as one

there is the boy in the fountain
wading round and round
singing loud a song
new and jubilant on his tongue
each foot kicking up showers
like sparks high in the sun