Paper One

oh yes, and I am stepping ashore

ashore

ashore

(so many steppings ashore)

back in Blighty

Christmas Eve’s only foot passenger

and my father the welcoming party’s

only guest

ashore

ashore

for I have suffered the sea to get home

(Dean, 2008)

ashore,

and one minute

on Remembrance Hill

it is a century ago

and Walter (1897 – 1916), youngest sibling

(and unluckiest),

great uncle I never knew,

is marching to his death

on the killing fields of France,

the next

Julie London is crying a river over me

(despite my hair, those flares)

but all I want, must have,

is a ticket for T Rex

to see Marc Bolan before he dies

and question 2 asks me

to define myself in relation to

this place at no fewer than three

and no more than five points

in my life

so here’s the Dickens theme pub

two bars as two cities/two cities in two bars

where Jonno’s granddad lost the family fortune

in a game of poker

in the London bar (perfidious Albion)

while in the Paris

Fabienne made my every wish

come true

draped her stockings round my neck

long before Julie cried that river

and her shoe

with its impossibly high heel

cast in bronze

became the star of this year’s summer exhibition

(and how that takes me back…)

here is a numbered stone

for every man who marched

down Remembrance Hill to his death

on the Somme

(Walter number 1,958)

and this is where

Sam Beckett stayed

when the time had come to wed,

to experience the suffering of being

in a whole new way

and the fairground lights

take years to reach me

as I look down on them,

and see myself on dodgems

half a life ago

and Walter never did return

any more than I can slip back

forty years to that fairground,

those dodgems,

those brightly burning lights

​

Paper Two

but we reassemble on the clifftop

a random dozen now

to remember Jonno,

with all the baggage we’ve acquired

(while he took with him no more

than he’d brought, when he went)

and I have less than some

and more than others

nothing that compares to that huge trunk

but encumbered nonetheless

and we do remember –

Jonno, all of us, the fairground lights,

the paths that led

from there to here

from then to now

our yesterdays, and all of our tomorrows.

Clearing out another drawer, 
I come across the postcard 
quite by chance – sepia, faded,
the city’s name in Cyrillic script,
and before I know what I am doing 
I am composing your name 
in characters that are as unfamiliar
to me now as you are, 
forty odd years on from the picnic
on the Potemkin steps, the glasses 
raised to toast our futures
in the cheapest Soviet vodka;
and all the innocence you coaxed
from me, so tenderly.