Motor Cycles
When I was sixteen, my father
advised me never to read poetry,
he said people would think me
effeminate, reading such things.
He could only see with the logic
of a military man, so he tried
to teach me about motorcycles,
showing me how to decoke
his old Francis Barnet.
I watched his cropped head
bending over it, explaining which
bits did this, which did that,
about chokes and pistons,
but I never listened,
my head was with Yeats in a bee
loud glade on Innisfree,
or with Burns on Lammas night,
with Annie, “when corn rigs are bonnie”.
Page(s) 171
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