LAST VISIT

 

A sadness ghosts

The room;

Silence drags down

To paralysis.

Somewhere two corridors

Distant, a hoover

Nags away at dust,

Troubling our sanctified

Calm.

Worse still,

Another cleaner emerges

With feather-duster,

Attempting to purge

Recusant cobwebs.

The magpie on the lawn

Turns Gatling-cackle

Into dada shoot-out.

We return to silence,

Our only counter to guilt.

Shrive and housel,

And the semi-excuses

We use as reversal.

Not touching. Never touching.

But she has shrunk,

Turned her bed into cot,

Turned her face away,

And back to a

Frightened childhood.

Copyright Michael Newman

ZODIAC

Across the valley,

The woodland script is illuminated

By gold leaves;

Autumn at its most compelling.

But now twilight intervenes,

Chases goblins from the bushes,

And holy fools from the oaks.

Now it stealths along hedgerows,

Surfaces with the boundary ditch,

And enters my garden shed.

Still not content, this

Twilight coaxes Wagner out of radios,

And summons the shadows

From the hinterlands of lawn.

Now the page is closed,

The script forgotten.

Only stars are left,

Wide-eyed as children,

Corrupted by the Zodiac.

Copyright Michael Newman

LINES FOR MY MOTHER

Your breath was my first passion,

Your tom-tom pulse

The first rhythm I danced to.

I clung, longer than I knew,

To your umbilical love.

No fairy tale proved too grim

For your guardian-angel comfort.

And when the bedclothes

Failed to stave off nightmare,

You were always close at cuddle.

School would gong,

And clamour rough-and-playground tumble;

Spitfires would nose-dive out of sky,

Flatten towards airstrip zero.

You were always there for me.

Then later, when a tambourine

Ushered-in girls

And strange talk,

The dance began again,

Disquieting, desirable.

I chewed each nail in turn.

And now the insistent tom-tom

Of my own pulse

Draws me back to you,

As I seek approval

On this, my wedding day.

Copyright Michael Newman