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Roger Caldwell

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Bad Weather: For Isaac Rosenberg

God’s castaway, the clumsy clown,
all but a derelict from Cable Street,
he’d known bad weather from the first.

No one could deny he had a gift
- though not for living: as for that
his card already had been marked.

An absent-minded very raw recruit,
he fought the drizzle and the lice
as much as Germans for his patch of sun,

for summer and the sweeter times
who’d lived in Nomansland already
when walking the Whitechapel streets,

when it was always far, so very far
from here, wherever here would be,
to the British Museum.

Unwritten epics lay beyond the ridge.
They rose before him like the Cambrai spires
glimpsed indistinctly through the mist

- a mist as thick as the tobacco-smoke
that climbed so high above the marble tables
to the painted ceiling of the Café Royal.

There is no hope of writing poems now.
Lost in the fog, all his defences smashed
he falls into a churned-up sea of mud

that welcomes yet another hapless guest,
its April fool, although the weather
shows - too late - some signs of clearing.

Roger Caldwell writes as literary critic and philosopher for numerous journals. He has published two collections of poetry, This Being Eden (Peterloo Press) and Walking on the Moon (Ninth Arrondissement Press).

Page(s) 48

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