Daintiness suggests it was crafted
for a Victorian woman’s life and person.
Gift from a husband or father no doubt.
Its tiny key meant for delicate hands, kept soft
by glove etiquette that swiftly dipped
pen nibs into the neat ink jars without
a dribble, to write in elegant copper plate.
Passed down by a series of ‘careful owners’,
the walnut box now placed into my hands,
big as a man’s and garden weathered,
handwriting, a primary school scrawl.
I imagine a 150 years’ worth of letters
that emails and texts have now killed off.
Instead, my poems are shaped over weeks,
on the slope that is better company than a laptop,
poems personal as letters, posted out
to whom it may concern.
Circus
Months sequestered like light house keepers,
we now have box set, books, and baking fatigue.
A jaunty flyer trumpets the promise of ‘Santus Circus’.
Both of us crave entertainment with a pulse.
Queuing up, we find courtesy is back in fashion,
with smiles and sorry and leaving spaces.
Childless, our first visit since childhood,
we find clowns are suave now in waistcoat and jeans,
raffish face paint unlikely to engender night terrors,
throwing only buckets of charm at the audience.
And the girls, no simpering in sequins and feathers,
but thrilling on the trapeze, strutting on the high wire.
Parents have brought stir crazed kids,
who look up open mouthed at acrobats performing
superhuman stunts created not by CGI
but hours of pain and practice.
Of course, they will desert when the multiplexes,
with plush seats and popcorn, reopen.
Increasingly, in the housing gold rush,
new builds lay claim to fallow fields,
circuses struggle for sites, find themselves
marginalised, prevented from flaunting
their footloose life in our 9 to 5 faces, tempting kids
to escape exams rut and run away to join.
Strange, circuses never adopted by the retro crowd,
perhaps regarded as a little too groundling.
Inevitably these contortionists are fated to work
call centres, jugglers flip burgers and jaunty big tops
become permanently tethered in vintage photos,
served up as nostalgia on bijou coffee shop walls.
Toy Run
The youngster in lime leathers
on champing Kawasaki
boasts immortality as bike and
biker become a roadblock, holding back
two snarling lanes of traffic.
So we, on this motorcycle run for charity,
may pass like a fast-flowing river.
First time perhaps as an out-rider,
he busily buzzes by the main procession
of some 300 experienced bikers.
Gets a thumbs up from me in
tribute to his fearlessness.
I know at 69 you ache to slew
our big old tourer across a double lane,
in a ‘You shall not pass’ attitude,
wearing an expression grim as death.
But my clenched muscles scream
don’t you dare as, at 62,
I feel the hot breath of mortality
on the back of my neck.
Dinning amongst the dead
As the trickle of worshipers dried,
the chapel was sold off to developers
who converted sympathetically.
However, no garden, since old bones
cannot be evicted like squatters.
Family plots bare old village names,
still extant amid the influx of newcomers.
Graves maintaining social segregation,
landowners with handsome memorials
in prime positions, whilst labourers consigned
to dark corners. Separation, too, between
certain families who bear a feud into the afterlife.
The old car park becomes a makeshift patio,
tables and chairs suggesting al fresco dining,
beside the remains of death’s great feasting.
Graveyard grass is kept under, but ecumenical law
also precludes removing moss clad tombstones,
so stacked against walls like a grim garden feature.
Baronet peers over baker, Hogben elbows Wanstall,
an eternity now to settle their differences.