by Ward, Mark
THUNDER ALLEY
Sonnets and Other Poems
Mark Ward
I’ll be out of here
before the first blank ice, well before rotten
gutters grow healthy fangs.
Geoffrey Hill
Contents
Mark Ward
Regret
Time Zones
Specimens
Junction 31
Haiku to the Fairground Goldfish
Mr Brown goes to Colwyn
Mrs Eccles walks on Air
Roaches
Thunder Alley
ii
Home-grown.
iii
The Last Supper
Spinning Jenny
The Polish Barber
Umbilical Cord
Spanish Lament
Landfill
Michael Dixon
Legends
Regret vi
Killers
Days like These
The Mansion of Aching Hearts
First impressions
Shadows
Itchy Coo…
Amusements
Regret viii
Self-Awareness
Church Candle
November
i.m. M. D. Ward
The Smoke that Thunders; rising as vapour,
Prosthetics
Sappho
Blakewater
An Eventful Night
The Ratchet:
For Neil Rollinson.
T
Kingfisher:
For R.C.
Oh, and by the way…
Foreword
Acknowledgements and Copyright
Back Cover
Regret
A Question.
When the ice-shelf shifts.
What’s going to happen to
all the ornaments?
Time Zones
New Delhi: 5am – Dawn’s first light seeks
the homeless and dispossessed, and for
a moment at least the day belongs to them…
Driving from the city to the airport,
the hundreds of ragged bundles lining
the embankments were stirring to life,
as a warm sun gently announced itself.
Men lit kerosene stoves and made tea,
while women washed their babies in the drains.
The cold grey suds honeycomb and disperse,
dissolving into ditches alongside.
Blackburn: 8am – The morning sun backlights
the curtains, revealing Indian Cottons
tightly woven threads, of independence.
Specimens
Hobart: The colonial artists generally
depicted the Aboriginals, now extinct;
as a naked, ignorant sub-species,
lacking intelligence and common decency.
Propped in a box inside a specimen case,
a rare photograph of few survivors
of the ‘Black War,’ exiled to Flinders Isle
told a different story. Awkwardly
dressed in ill-fitting western clothes, they are
haunted and frightened; their lives fragmented,
their history about to be erased,
they stare out from the fading image like ghosts.
Joining them on display – a glass-eyed tiger; extinct:
and corset stays - made from albatross wings.
Junction 31
Airport Taxis
There may be a no smoking policy
but these Asian guys are usually ok?
All right if I smoke mate? Been a hell of a flight.
‘No problem: been anywhere interesting?’
Kashmir, I tell him. He ponders a moment.
‘Indian or Pakistan?’ Indian.
‘Aah…’ We both fall silent and return.
I to the campfires, the saffron pickers;
and the Floating Gardens of Srinagar,
he to the daily shelling, the terror,
confusion, loss and enforced separation.
On the road, always moving: even now,
each long mile, taking him further away.
It’s Junction 31 mate. Almost home.
Regret ii
Haiku to the Fairground Goldfish
Clear plastic to black,
in usually less than
a week – Assured.
Mr Mercer leaves his Wife.
The mealy-mouthed Mercer flies his kite,
when summer’s luscious sparkling rain abates.
And the tarmac and the red brick and the slates,
are swilled and spilled with gold and silver light,
which shines on Mrs Mercer’s polished face.
All buffed and waxed and plucked and pinched and preened.
She scowls and says, “The sun should know his place,
to shine so uninvited, on One he should esteem!”
Her husband, cowed, replied he couldn’t say.
His soaring kite, whorled, wheeled and dipped and spun.
As she loathed him with a look and turned away,
Mr Mercer and the kite became as One.
He sees the sunlight liquefy his spouse,
and altitude reduce her, ‘til at last:
she was a resin-coated insect - with his house
a lump of amber, set in a silver clasp.
Mr Brown goes to Colwyn
His pastime since the war left him disabled:
Splayed fingers, palms flat, sweeping the pieces
in two opposing arcs across the table,
he sorted sea from sky, and other features.
With a surgeon’s innate skill and application,
he attached a coast to Cymru’s brooding hills.
Finding deep in his imagination,
a cathartic joining of his shattered limbs.
White sky: white splintered shards of bone, he fused
together, his thumb pressing, smoothing every fracture.
Foregoing both his frame and fitted shoes,
to run on Colwyn’s sands, in all-consuming rapture.
For that one moment he was briefly man and boy,
until the tide redeemed his gladness and his sorrow,
the footprints formed of leaping boundless joy;
The Zimmer’s puncture holes - the trailed foot furrow.
Mrs Eccles walks on Air
‘Got you, you little rascal!’ she rasped; and,
removing the broom-handle from my back wheel,
prodded me as I lay tangled in the bike.
‘That’ll teach you not to ride around here!’
Later, the smell of Dettol; and dark thoughts
about the old crow, pervaded my dreams.
Once more she thrust the broom: Then the strangest thing,
as it somehow lodged underneath the seat.
With her bird-like hands gripping the shaft
and her petticoats a-swish, she was
dragged bouncing and shrieking along the road.
What joy and delight as the children sang…
Tra-la-la-lee - There goes Mrs Eccles.
Dragged down the street like a Witch to the gallows.
Lets hope it’s a good rope, strong and thick.
Put her in a noose and beat her with a stick.
Regret iii
Roaches
I’ve stayed in some shit-holes in my time,
but that bedsit in Munich takes some beating.
Coming home one night I saw the fridge move!
- Not as in physically moving across the floor:
More like, it was trembling where it stood,
over by the window.
I switched on the light to find every part
&nbs
p; of its surface, covered with small brown cockroaches,
of the North European variety.
A mass so dense it seemed to move as one.
You just wouldn’t expect it of the Germans.
Thunder Alley
i
Cycles.
Unprompted, he can casually dispense
a razor to the cheek of innocence,
carving his problems in his victim’s face:
a white-bone pelmet, a sagging crimson drape.
Whenever he gets troubled, bored or stressed,
a gasbag brings him temporary oblivion.
The girl he meets is suitably impressed,
and he fucks her in the park by the pavilion.
At fifteen, she’s pregnant with his child.
He gifts her a bracelet and some trainers,
ignores her when his hooded mates are round,
and kicks her for the slightest misdemeanour.
‘Things will improve when the baby arrives,’
She tells herself, tasting his boot in her mouth.
ii
Home-grown.
It is important when passing through this life
to leave some record of ones journey.
Thomas Gray
Fairly straightforward this martyrdom thing:
Blind faith: Semtex and a ticket one-way.
Where to? Well that’s entirely down to physics.
This elegy records his earthly stay.
He could have been a doctor or lawyer.
A teacher; someone held in high esteem.
He never realized his full potential.
Full many a flower was born to blush unseen.
His life was brief and unremarkable.
He died abroad with malice in his heart,
dispatched among the scorched and carbonised,
the guiltless amputees with shattered lives.
Formless; reduced to ounces, blood and fat
slather on the walls of a Tel-Aviv bar.
iii
The Last Supper
Remember the 70s; The Skinheads,
the Sex Pistols; Carlos the Jackal,
mayhem on the terraces: the three-day week.
Picketing gravediggers, blackouts and bombs.
The I.R.A was toasting its success
while some poor bastard was getting his head
kicked in, for his simply being Irish;
and not for anything he’d done or said!
And spare a thought for Jimmy McGuerter.
On his way home with a fish supper in
the aftermath of Mountbatten’s murder…
They punched and kicked him so hard that his head
burst open on the pavement like a ripe fruit.
His subsequent meals - ingested through tubes.
iv
Victimization
The fat kid with the jam-jars always copped
it. Or those too clever, beautiful or black,
or gay, or just plain different - their riposte;
to learn self-ridicule - or join the pack.
Those too shy or lacking self-esteem,
and often friends with whom they might confide,
could find each day a harrowing ordeal.
Tormented to the verge of suicide.
And racism itself is non-exclusive.
The fat kid with the jam-jars understands:
As one we are generous and inclusive.
As tribes we seem by nature, partisan.
When our streets form galleries of commonwealth.
Through every painted frame you see yourself.
Regret iv
The Editor
For Paul Farley.
42 poems: A modest collection,
I told myself,
handing them over.
24 poems - A pamphlet perhaps?
He suggests
handing them back!
Spinning Jenny
At the dance of ’63 for working folk,
where Carders, Weavers, Winders, Spinners all;
piss-stinking Fullers with raw ammonia sores;
were starched and groomed for the annual Summer Ball.
The dancers themselves were cumbersome and tired.
Their automatons mimicking their toils.
And leaden wooden clogs with horseshoe irons,
ground and crunched the flags in the Village Hall.
Everything they’d ever known then changed,
as barefoot from the shadows stepped a girl.
They stood in horror; wonderment, amazed;
transfixed: - as she began to slowly turn.
Then faster, faster still, as on a wheel
- Or spool, yet oh so graceful and succinct.
Through Time and generations she revealed…
A world engulfed in smoke and dust and lint.
The Polish Barber
A modest man by nature: stoic; dignified
For many years he’d lived in Blackburn town.
Haunted by an incident; so vivid, so profound
- one evening with my father he broke down …
His tears found tributaries in his face,
coursed through deltas clawed by gulags and the reek
of the airless cattle-trucks with the displaced,
to form a pool within the socket of his cheek.
He sees his harried village ringed by tanks,
as men with bayonets despoil the land.
And his brother swinging lifeless from a lamp-
post, his woollen trousers stained with shit and
semen, his battered body spat on and defiled,
the laughing Russian soldiers drinking beer.
And he a witness: Just a helpless child,
that day: Then every night for thirty years.
Umbilical Cord
They’ve never crushed the pillow at my side.
Nor pushed the air when entering my space.
And reassuring words I’ve been denied,
from those without a likeness or a face.
Breath so cold no mammal could survive
that icy fog: behind the unseen caul,
a powdered box with rags; and calcified,
the remains of those in me that came before.
A cord transparent, yet 10 times 10 thousand
chains, that man or men have ever made
in strength; draws me through the wakeful hours,
and distant lands, bringing me back again.
To Pleasington, where the dead converge,
in silent rows, repentant, unconcerned.
An oblong scar, a Remembrance Book page;
a dimple in the earth, above an urn.
Regret v
Spanish Lament
When I was a kid
they returned with sombreros.
Sangria and castanets;
lacquered lace fans.
Now it’s a villa.
A Timeshare apartment:
Skin melanomas.
Booze and cheap fags.
Landfill
Old Tom Barker down at the landfill
slept with a fireguard over his head
to prevent the rats from chewing his lobes.
Had his whiskers bleached white by their urine instead,
as they to’d and fro’d across the bridge, spanning his face.
Uncle Jack washed his hair in paraffin
to prevent lice. To which it could be regarded
a success – as it also prevented hair growth.
Aunty Molly thought we’d sent a boatload
of gherkins to the Falklands: She always misheard.
When Lord Ha Ha said the Palace was a target.
She thought he meant The Palace where she worked.
Bernard died, but kept walking by Alice’s window.
He wouldn’t leave until she joined him – so she did.
Michael Dixon
Scrawny lad with orange hair, (the type that
doesn’t like the sun:) a keen fisherman,
he preferred the river bends to street corners
and bus shelters, where his mates would hang out.
When all hell broke loose in the nightclub and
he was singled out for ‘a good kicking’
by the doormen – his skinny ribs couldn’t take it.
He got through the night, but the next day on
the river - he started drifting –
down –
down,
by the sloping banks of the long green water:
the hot blue lights and the black asphalt:
past the cool white sheets and hurried voices;
through the rising vapours at the distant bar;
and on – to the eternal sea beyond.
Legends
I keep seeing him: Captain Cook, that is.
He’s there now: mute bronze; at his Anchorage,
looking out over a stretch of water
he named in frustration, Turnagain Arm;
