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Jean Watkins poems
It is a night over the Baltic. My cruise ship
purrs across its quiet pond. Programmed
for darkness, I stare at luminous sky.
It is a bedsheet, clean and starched,
stretched on a mattress, waiting to be creased
or torn or stained with piss, blood, semen.
It is the blindness of a blizzard in New York
which hurries all to shelter, fetters taxis, cars;
pinions synapses, deep-freezes my thoughts.
It is that moment when you’ve had the sedative,
been wheeled along a corridor, through rubber doors
to men in masks who prick your hand, ask you to count
and now I’m counting minutes since I first
stared at this white desert. Do I dare become
a tribe of ants to set out tracks just visible from space?
As with ton-up boys
the first thing was
a hostile hum
the faintest trace
then louder louder
as the tiger-insect neared,
a black and yellow
menace. At tea
under the apple tree
it would hover, land
on the lip of your cup
circle a head; freeze
the cool ones, panic
the hot, who’d flap
spill tea or run.
Gangs raided jampots
at that tea garden
by the river, jewelled
your scone with threat.
Where have they gone?
No more bicarb
on stings, dead bodies
on the window-sills,
no drunkards on windfall apples,
pot-holes in the plums,
no flight path
under the soffit
papery nests in the loft.
Stanley Spencer 1937
Lips are the things you notice first –
the humans’ full and sensual like his,
dolls’ in the rigor of a rosebud smirk.
Next necks – Unity’s frail as a mushroom’s,
dolls’ drainpipe hard. Hilda’s rope-like tendons
groan with the stress that’s echoed in the set
of her mouth, her inward-looking eyes.
One eye is severed by her spectacles’ steel rim,
edge of the picture has trepanned her heavy hair
as though he knew, not knowing, that her apathy
came not from cussedness but illness.
The child whose name had now a bitter taste
stares out, touch of defiance in her lifted chin,
her eyes clear windows. Boredom looks out,
perhaps suppressed dislike, a sense of wrong.
As for the dolls, their masks with black-hole eyes
are sinister, grotesque. Only my fancy, surely,
that their names might be Dorothy and Patricia.
When I have seen how we have poisoned seas
with micro-plastic never to decay;
scarred landscapes, nuclear waste, the death of trees,
how hives collapse, song thrushes fall away.
When I have seen tall ice-cliffs fracture, fall,
watched people wading down a flooded street;
when maize crops shrivelled by the drought appal,
raise ribs, leave infants suckling a dry teat;
Then, Shakespeare, does your balance overturn
for Nature cannot heal the spoils of men.
The wise set targets, try to halt the harm
but tides of appetite grow strong again.
Though you beyond your mistress had no fears
We tremble for our children down the years.