The Grievance

Arriving from elsewhere, a merchant grew wealthy
in the market at Izmir. Not without rivals, he soon
became known as The Democrat for the breadth of his produce:
mollusc and crab, clawed creatures from far-off salt water.
Though stories abounded as to his wives, their beauty and number
 
few claimed to have seen them, none could verify details.
Every night after closing his stall, people told, he’d vanish
down the maze of high alleys where no sun or moonlight
could penetrate, pass through a heavy locked door and into
a courtyard of fig trees and roses before entering the house.
 
Reports spread that on Mondays he’d call out ‘Asifa?’
(who lived on her nerves), another day ‘Fatima?’ (whose eyes
were a lynx’s on fire), on others to ‘Mina?’, ‘Melika?’,
‘Cherifa?’ – and how only silence replied. But when,
at the urging of mullahs, the police at last knocked
 
at his gate, none could explain how they found
not a trace, not their scent nor the qualities and faults
only he had ascribed to them; and never, deep as they dug,
the fine loam of ash and crushed bone that in tales
such as this always nurture such bountiful gardens.
 

André Mangeot

Runner-up, Wigtown/Scottish National Poetry Competition, 2006 (Judge Don Paterson)

 
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The Odds

Stall to stall, a child in Delhi runs
his barefoot errands: tea-trays, lemons, bolts of cloth.
In northern Chad, a mud-walled mosque
is shelter from the scarring wind as boyhood friends
bow down in prayer. Somewhere in London an alarm-clock fails
to bring the student-medic to her ward-round
while a teacher rides the A-train back downtown
from Harlem, his book-filled rucksack lined with Semtex, nails.
 
It’s said we’ve more in common than divides us.
Can something be both false and true? The younger ones will come
to what they know by imitation or disdain, not reason,
and there are secrets stored in any heart or house.
Clutching his rupees, the Indian child runs
back across the street, light as air, his only god the sun.
 

André Mangeot

Longlisted in National Poetry Competition, 2015;
in collection Blood Rain, 2020, Seren Books

 
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Icehouse

     (Ralph Allen 1693-1764)
 
In the open-air café our glasses are fizzing with lemonade,
our heads with history. Just imagine, you say, marking
your guide-book, and we squint into glare till lake-dazzle
whitens to ice and Postmaster Allen’s first gardeners
and woodsmen, their calls faint and cloudy, emerge
in the snowscape, laden with grapple-hooks, axes,
hauling sledges and carts. Below the Palladian bridge
they saw and heave their cold harvest inshore, up to
its dark winter sepulchre. Slab upon glistening slab
lowered and packed into sackcloth, layers of straw.
Behold wealth. Clear and chill as his hilltop statement
in stone: built to see all of Bath, for all Bath to see.
Downing our drinks we climb back toward it, out into
sun-melt, tongue and lips numb from slivers of ice.
 

André Mangeot

First published in The Spectator;
in collection Blood Rain, 2020, Seren Books

 
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Natural Causes

Rodriguez Petrón: stabbed.
Eva Waters: scarlet fever.
Van Houten: beaten with a stone.
Chas Helm: shot.
Holo Lucéro: killed by Indians.
Peter Smith: struck with a poker.
Frank Bowles: thrown from his horse.
Freddie Fuss: stagnant water.
John Heath: lynched by a mob.
Thom Cowan: diphtheria.
John Gibson: crushed by a wagon.
Mrs Stump: died in childbirth.
Geo Johnson: hanged by mistake.
Billy Kinsman: crime of passion.
Delia William: arsenic poison.
Willam Carpenter: kidney infection.
Charley Storms: cardgame shooting.
Lester Moore: “four slugs from a .44”.
Kansas Kid: killed in stampede.
Malvina Lopez: charcoal fumes.
Archie McBride: consumption.
James McMartin: “over consumption”.
Mrs Pring: suicide, hydrate chloral.
Brady Boys: drowned while swimming.
Foo Kee: ptomaine poisoning.
Johnnie Blair: smallpox.
Unknown man: mining fall.
Mrs Brown: natural causes.
 

André Mangeot

previously published in TLS, No. 5008, 1999;
in collection Natural Causes, 2003, Shoestring Press,
ISBN 978-1-8995498-6-3

 
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