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“We could hear the oncoming doodle-bug behind us chugging like a motor bike, in front of us on a rise to the left we saw two semi-detached houses. A man was digging in a garden alongside, a little boy was running up the garden path towards the house... at the doorway was a woman beckoning him to hurry indoors... there was a loud explosion, a mushroom cloud of dust. Everything went up; no houses, no man, no mother and no boy. We picked up three dustbins full of pieces out of the rubble. The only way to identify where they were was the dampening dust and the cloud of flies.”
Stanley Rothwell: Lambeth at War, 1981. (Quoted by Jane Stevenson in Edward Burra: A Twentieth Century Eye.)

(i)

How busy, busy, busy these ghosts are,
who pack away their bones and wrinkles,
roll ashen sleeves up for the duration.

She ties time back to its apron strings,
puts up her hair in a nest of curlers.
They cling tight for a safe rough-ride

when she pummels and scrubs life stupid,
sets the Vactric moaning like a siren,
pegs out her tempers to the washing-line.

He buffs up his blue, chalk-striped trousers,
snaps the jaws of his briefcase shut
on dull certificates of proficiency,

sets out in khaki on a croaking push-bike
for sticky-bombs, clay-grenades, firecrackers,
the Captain’s chalk-and-talk in the Village Hall.

Their children’s job is just to shrink a little,
cut rinds of mud from square-toed shoes,
trundle dolly about in a deadbeat pram

while the wireless wraps house and garden
in creamy sheets of taratantara.
Housewives without choice, workers without playtime

flog themselves back again to skim and bone.
The dustmen make Schrage musik with the bins,
swinging us all to the grave on stooped shoulders.

(ii)

Big flowers lean to the sun,
blonde village simpletons,
dirt faces picked to moons

like the one I watch climb,
pause, out on a limb
of a tree I can’t name

in a place I called home.
Each dissolving room
rubs to the same

patch of distempered wall
made gestural
by Van Gogh’s chorale:

sunflowers with tousled heads,
a Zoave’s brilliant red,
a blue cart in a field -

their licks of paint all
primary, primal,
the world before this fall

into unlit green and brown
where the big flowers lean
and bombers groan.

(iii)

In a flat-faced semi on the road out
shaky taps have left their misery running.
Garden-skins souse in slurps of cess
or loll and sunburn to a sour frizz.
Is it Charlie Holmes, digging in his patch,
in battledress, in summer, in silence?
At the window I watch our neighbour’s child
go riding down the gravel in his coffin,

watch Charlie, Father, patched and taciturn
as guys or scarecrows, whose hands
cradle potatoes like misshapen eggs,
wring necks, drown kittens in cold pails.
Houses brim with slow, hoarded anger,
spill to outbursts of wild sobbing.
Men’s work is burial, exhumation;
the clay weeps at their slicing spades.

(iv)

War, cat-like, hoards nine lives
in dust-scribbles, boxes of dull silence.
Here the boy cupboards his ruinous loves
bomb-fins, tracer shells and shrapnel -
hunkers them down with the cold pond-life
of eggs in isinglass, window-panes
furred white with webbing, trunks of trunks
stretched out headless on a cage of rafters,

My rod propped against the garage door,
I turn, paw the shelf to reach my gentles:
glistening maggots packed like shelter-sleepers.
Fingers tingle on a fizzing tin
of flesh-flies greedy for the hidden light.
Wings and legs tangled into vortex
unscrew away from their dispersal point,
sing a dark song back into its ghost.

(v)

Pain is so far away it has become lyrical,
its edge keening in a dramatic present
where the world dances to sweet, high music:
plucked wire, hen squawks, a child screaming,
the grasshopper tick of a bike wheel spinning free
between its tuning forks. Down the school road
small village sirens and their bully boys
sing their piss into buckets of warm straw.

Bass-notes: the labouring gear-change of a truck,
slap of wet sheets in a drying wind,
silver bombers wrapped in quiet thunder
floating east over westering buzz-bombs -
feral waifs combing the low highways.
She stands alert, carved out of stony time
in a cold kitchen, in a cold house,
a silence neither of us has the heart to break.

(vi)

Criss-cross, cat-like,
he follows the ditch lines,
notches pithed elder
to whistle up a wind

to blow them all away:
con-trails, cobwebs,
sobbing, anger,
the blue smoke-tang

hovering a penny
perched on the line -
a King’s face blurred
by the hammering wheels.

Down wind, wires thrum.
A pole’s china insulator
falls to his catapult’s
four-square elastic.

Never such innocence
on his round cat-face,
purring up the drive,
a bomb in his basket,

like other boys
who go out, early,
come back, late,
do nothing, much,

but race down paths
where mothers beckon
and men in braces
turn things over.

(vii)

Beggar my neighbour and take the rap.
From Mondscheinsonate to Thunderclap,
Coventry, Dresden, sear the map.

Do the little dogs laugh to see such fun?
How can the dish run away with the spoon
when moon refuses to rhyme with June

and anything, everything, anything goes,
the umbrellas to mend, the holes in their clothes,
the rings on their fingers, the bells on their toes,

the jug with no handle, the half-burnt candle,
Monday’s washing done up in a bundle,
the Bible, Shakespeare, Brahms and Handel.

“Lie in the dark and listen.” I do.
I hear the shake of them passing through
as each earnest, chaffering, murderous crew

of the Sorcerers’ clever apprentices
blows by sky-high to turn is to was,
and only a pen to turn was to is.

No Odes to Nightingales, or Joy,
but built from the plainest light of day,
houses, a man, a mother, a boy.

They dance in the dark with clapped-out eyes
through blood and treasure; is, will be, was,
through dampening dust and a cloud of flies.