HAPPY NEW YEAR

I thought it would be good to end the year with some poetry, CO2 will be back next week. I have just finished writing the preview issue, there were a number of changes needed and it was interesting to expand on what I had previously written.

Here is another of the Road Poems series. I think it is reasonably straightforward:

3.Trafalgar

We had trouble with the sun

That evening you drove to the cape,

The contoured coast transformed,

To light or darkness

As the car climbed and fell.

We stood and gawped

As the ground turned.

The regular illusion,

Of the sun seeming to set

On a spirit-level ocean.

Later, we ate in Vejer,

By the old town square.

The electric failed

And the fossilised light of far stars

Guided us home.

This one was inspired by a night out in Lisbon with some of my wife’s work colleagues.

7. 2 a.m. Trams, Lisbon 2009

They stand so empty

Half way down the hill

Stolid in the sodium light

Children’s toys preserved then abandoned

The Dutch Club in question in this next poem is the one in Singapore, my friends are members and I was lucky enough to visit again it is self explanatory:

9. Night Swimming at the Dutch Club

The placid mirror fragments,

Water triangles, shards of the sky

Pink with city overspill,

Jumbled lines of the bar,

Cracked blue neon,

Kaleidoscope by.

Now the universe is me

Moving, slowly through deep water

This last one I wrote for my Mother, sometime after she had died. It may require an explanation, in the days when people drank loose tea there was a superstition that the future could be divined from the shape of the tea leaves left in the cup once the tea had been drunk. Ok, you know this already, we used to drink Co-op Indian Prince which was a strong Assam-not sure if you can still get it. I still drink loose tea, I usually place some leaves in the cup and pour the hot water directly onto them-though I do not attempt to read my future. Most quality tea will take two or more re-infusions. Oh, a Woodbine is an old make of cigarette, all through my childhood both my parents smoked.

Poem For My Mother

It is autumn,

The fire is alight,

The world is fine.

Scan the tea leaves,

Darjeeling dust,

Coral in a white cup,

And I am small again,

My mother reads the future in

Co-Op Indian Prince Assam.

She smiles tells of omens,

Then lights a Woodbine.

She knows the worst this world can do,

In this terrace we huddle,

Behind the red bricks,

Behind this tealeaf dam.

It is autumn,

The fire alight,

The world is fine.

It’s no longer autumn -tomorrow is the calendar New Year- may it bring you happiness.