Poem 36

More from the lives of the great writers … reading Prick Up Your Ears I was struck by the comic farcical and monumental passivity of Joe’s dad – an Ortonesque character if ever there was one …

The Death Of Joe Orton’s Father

The sun shone green through the greenhouses
and buttered England with low summer
    as Joe Orton's father lay dying

Nurse he whispered (he wasn't one
to shout)
           Nurse my old blind rattling
confession final thoughts of a gardener
before I go like an old bad bulb
    into the earth to rot
I a quiet man who woke in the middle
of the night every morning
                               to pedal away twelve miles
   to the gardens of my employment
to spend my days among stems
    whose wife openly dreamed of murdering me
with her bare fists
    whose children would have disappointed
                                                   had I had
any expectations
England you made me
a man only comfortable with a wheelbarrow
or a paper in his hands
                          Nurse I did nothing
but garden all my life and saw my eyes blacken
into blindness before retirement
                                     Nurse when my daughter
tells the press her mother was a heartless bitch
I can only nod my head and say it's true
                                             Nurse
all I ever wanted out of life was a greenhouse of my own
  and lo and behold
I never got that
                 Nurse if you weren't somewhere
down the corridor tossing off young doctors
you could know what I know now without
the early mornings
                      that I never was
much of a gardener
it was always the others
seemed better able
                      to make things grow