NIGHT BOAT

The night we spent on the hired boat
moored on the Thames, you had a fever.
I placed a flannel on your burning head
and tried not to worry about your health,
our unborn baby, two sleeping children,
as endless night seeped into the boat.
Since then there have been other times,
when darkness appears to be desolate—
despite the ink-black sky filled with worlds
as many as grains of sand on the shore—
those days when light seems gone forever.
Yet before morning your fever broke,
I found a phone box, the holiday was done.
We are always turning towards the sun

FOR THE WOMAN IN ST PETERSBERG

Who has invented our enmity, Wendell Berry

I never met you when I visited
that city beloved by the tzars,
and have no idea if you were once
one of the elegant fur-wrapped women
I passed on the freezing pavements.

Now I imagine you in your kitchen.
Through the doorway your grandson
struggles to play the balalaika you
gave him. He looks up and smiles.
He would probably prefer a guitar.

You battled through the market
for the meat and vegetables that you
now chop, add to the pan. You wonder
how your country has arrived here
at a point in time you don’t recognise.

Your son joined the army at the moment
when you believed it was a just war
that would be over in two weeks.
But he didn’t come back and his wife
now sits silently, rocking with grief.

You write long hours into the night
trying to find words to describe
this strange world that is almost
like the one you used to know,
trying not to hate people like me.

Despite this, I would like to sit with you
in the night that binds us together, share
a coffee. I’ll bring biscuits, shop bought,
flowers from the garden, maybe we’ll
tell our stories of family in happier times.

I’ll describe the convolvulus hawk-moth
I saw yesterday. Wings folded, motionless
on a silvered beam of wood, it was perfectly
camouflaged, waiting for darkness. It won’t
survive the winter but, just then, it was safe.

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yVONNE… blurb