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Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

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Cherry Smyth

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Behindhand

On the 60th anniversary

The dog’s bark is all the fear we don’t shout
at the dark, stones thrown to the waning moon.
Each morning, you take the train under,
without heart, plugged into other people’s music,
lunch wrapped in your bag, too good-girl to need
the word for arrears we learned from the crossword.

Yesterday, before we got up, fingers tapping the beat
on my bum, you sang a new melody, the Shabbat song
for a used-up dream, turning hate’s echo to a round
dark cadenza. ‘This is your true work’, I should’ve said,
but sorrow caught in my throat, like something too big
to swallow, swallowed down those tracks lit by a mile of fire.

All night in that top floor flat in Amsterdam, I’d listened
for a stifled cough, a page turned in the attic, held you closer,
kept seeing you unsteady on a big black bicycle, your face
monochrome, until you pedalled, not knowing
how to stop, your smile breaking
and breaking the street into colour

Errata
In issue number 65, two poems appeared with some misprints, and we reprint both below in their correct versions. Ruth Valentine’s biographical note should also have read that her collection, The Tide Table, appeared in 1998, and not 2006, as stated: our apologies to both for the errors.

Page(s) 151

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