sitting at peace. Sit at peace, sit at peace, all summer.

When Muriel Purdy, embryonic cop, thwacked the back

of your knees with a bamboo-cane, mouth open, soundless

in a cave of pain, you ran to your house,

a greeting wain, to be kept in and told once again.

Nip was a dog. Fluff was a cat. They sat at peace

on a coloured-in mat, so why couldn’t you? Sometimes

your questions were stray snipes over no-man’s-land,

bringing sharp hands and the order you had to obey. Sit –

At – Peace! Jigsaws you couldn’t do or dull stamps

you didn’t want to collect arrived with the frost.

You would rather stand with your nose to the window, clouding

the strange blue view with your restless breath.

But the day you fell from the Parachute Tree, they came

from nowhere running, carried you in to a quiet room

you were glad of. A long still afternoon, dreamlike.

A voice saying peace, sit at peace, sit at peace.

Hometown

In that town there was a different time,

a handful of years like old-fashioned sweets

you can’t find anymore. I lived there.

What am I wearing as I pine for the future,

alone, down by the river by the Brine Baths

longing to get out? But I only threw a stone

at the face in the water and went home,

while behind me my features vanished,

trembled, reappeared, though I could not see.

Those streets, the gloomy shortcut by the church,

the triangle from school to home to the high field –

below which all roads sped away and led away –

and back again. Wherever I went then, I was

still there; fretting for something else, someone else,

somewhere else. Or else, I thought, I shall die.

And so I shall. Decades ahead of this, both of me,

then and now, pass each other like ghosts

in the empty market-place, where I imagine myself

to be older and away, or remember myself

younger, not loving this tuneless, flat bell

marking the time. Or moved to tears by its same sound.

Translating the English, 1989

‘. . . and much of the poetry, alas, is lost in translation . . .’

Welcome to my country! We have here Edwina Currie

and The Sun newspaper. Much excitement.

Also the weather has been most improving

even in February. Daffodils. (Wordsworth. Up North.) If you like

Shakespeare or even Opera we have too the Black Market.

For two hundred quids we are talking Les Miserables,

nods being as good as winks. Don’t eat the eggs.

Wheel-clamp. Dogs. Vagrants. A tour of our wonderful

capital city is not to be missed. The Fergie,

The Princess Di and the football hooligan, truly you will

like it here, Squire. Also we can be talking crack, smack

and Carling Black Label if we are so inclined. Don’t

drink the H2O. All very proud we now have

a green Prime Minister. What colour yours? Binbags.