One Nation

1

The place hasn’t changed. Things are in their place.
Things remain exactly what they were: just things.
Home comforts are what we expect of home.

Sunlight hovers on walls, remaining sunlight
even when spread on pavements. Our keel is more or less even.
Our clothes are comfortable simply because they’re our clothes.

Back to front, front to back we go, until we’re back
at the front. We try to preserve a united front.
Here is where we are: our place is always here.

2

The softness of the place, the pressing into grass.
The warmth when it arrives as a kind of grace.

The soft bricks, the earth that crumbles. Rain
that gentles and does not precipitate ruin.

Temperate climes. Our fingers on the pulse
of dinner and bed, the night fumbling for pills.

3

The poor will get poorer, the rich richer. The wind
of fortune…

The Bus Riders’ Creed

We believe that passengers, like motorists, are people, who need to move from one place to another;
that if their destination is too far for them to walk, they should have provided safe, efficient means to get them there;
that these means are more efficient shared, and that sharing, as every toddler knows, is good;
that therefore it is no imposition to take yourself to a public stop, and wait with other passengers;
nor is it an infringement of your rights to have to wait for transport while it pauses at other people’s stops;
that everyone who can pay pays the same price for the same distance, and those who can’t pay should be helped to pay;
that those who need help to get on should be helped to get on, and if other passengers can help them, then they should;
that if someone needs your…

Mare Nostrum

Shoe laces tie the dead tighter than life.
We raft on their skin, how can flesh float
when boats shatter, wood, ribs and bone.
Hamid, swollen brother, hollow gourd,
the salted body of you drifts, whitens tears.
My hands are cups of waves and piss
and all the sky hangs grey as glass.
I never knew the baby’s name. Gaza, Syria.
Her eyes are closed, turtle, fish.

I

Winter Encounters

House and hollow; village and valley-side:
The ceaseless pairings, the interchange
In which the properties are constant
Resumes its winter starkness. The hedges’ barbs
Are bared. Lengthened shadows
Intersecting, the fields seem parcelled smaller
As if by hedgerow within hedgerow. Meshed
Into neighbourhood by such shifting ties,
The house reposes, squarely upon its acre
Yet with softened angles, the responsive stone
Changeful beneath the changing light:
There is a riding-forth, a voyage impending
In this ruffled air, where all moves
Towards encounter. Inanimate or human,
The distinction fails in these brisk exchanges—
Say, merely, that the roof greets the cloud,
Or by the wall, sheltering its knot of talkers,
Encounter enacts itself in the conversation
On customary subjects, where the mind
May lean at ease, weighing the prospect
Of another’s presence. Rain
And the probability of rain, tares
And their progress through a field of wheat—
These…