Seeking Roots

An after-signing stroll among the crosses;
headstones of Victorian gentry
which lie, untended, along moss grown paths:
laments leap at me, testimony
to an epitaph of inadequacy.

By way of stale silence I reach the road,
and looking back on subjects loyal,
the past disappears; forgotten whispers
of smoke: our railways in sweated toil,
brogue built by ancestors from another soil.

Rear View

Breathe out. Breathe in.

Hang out the family washing;
a semaphore to the kind
observances of neighbours.
A frog leaps refugee cross the lawn
amusing playful cat:
Black games of pause-and-pounce.
Match pegs to the weight
and size of cloth.
That discarded Daily Mail
is re-cycled; wall-to-wall
lining for the guinea hutch.
Not really labour;
not Labour at all.
Winter whispers on the wind:
draw comfort round - a thin veil,
your curtains of self-regard.
I wait on a rising moon
to silver our skeletal birch;
over rooftops strides Orion,
every other fortnight.

And hold your breath.

^

Biography

I'm a Brummie by birth, but did much of my growing up on the Isle of Wight, where my family moved when I was nine. On leaving home, I returned to Birmingham to study Biochemistry. Among many diversions were punk and politics: although elected President of the Guild of Students, I never did get to see the Sex Pistols. Intermittent casual labour sustained a further 3 years as a "youth politician" - both in Britain and abroad. By 1983, when I left for Southampton to spend an abortive year not training to teach, I had become active in the peace movement. Several arrests and a speaking tour later of the U.S. later, I retreated to the island and worked on the buses for 4 years. Subsequently, I began again as a student radiographer; and have been gainfully employed in this capacity for the past 8 years. After a long hiatus, I resumed writing poems in the mid 1990's. , shortly before leaving the Labour Party. Any linkage being purely accidental! When I'm not at St. Thomas' Hospital, or commuting there and back, I'm mostly at home in Portsmouth with wife, son, daughter, four trees and two guinea pigs. The cat died.