home>
poets>
Joan McGavin poems
With the Armistice declared,
school was closed
and the children all
ran hilty-skilty
down the brae.
Mum burst into the house –
her brother’s photo
already three years
on the mantelpiece.
Newly
promoted corporal,
he holds
the swagger stick
self-consciously,
glances to the side.
And now she’s gone,
and those questions
one could ask about him
– dead on the Somme –
will need books,
the internet, research,
for any hope of answers –
and between me and my uncle
only the red hair
and my mother
forever saying
how much I reminded her of him.
I’m sitting in a corridor empty
apart from tables pushed against walls
between lecture room doors and I’m surprised
how comfy it is to be here, my back
to the wall, waiting for a meeting
to close. Although the building
seems old, its paintwork unhappy, some new
green diktat means the lights go out
every three minutes or so – as I stay still
in my pocket of space. All I have to do
to cure the darkness is wave the paper
I’m writing these words on; I can play
God by raising in an arc
my folded A4, wondering if all I actually
have to do is think Let there be
Darkness and dirt-clog are cataracting the windows
of an abandoned van in Jacob’s Gutter Lane
where the police find it.
Tapes like bunting are hoisted, as if to hint it’s in
the village summer fayre, half a mile to the north –
uncobwebbed, scrubbed hard, with chintz in evidence,
its cosy interior might invite strollers to peep
at boxloads of paperbacks with broken spines,
the cake whose weight is to be guessed.
Such a godsend – how it appeared just when
we needed it – the old one quite worn out, beyond repair.
The local constable, who knows a thing or two,
tweaks his shorts and teeshirt, sticks his head and hands
in the dusted-down stocks, in the throw-a-wet-sponge tent.
at Rubha nan Oirean, Mull
This has become the wrens’ house:
twenty of them converse in it,
hop among its still strong stones,
remains of walls that were hewn to last.
They cross its bracken-filled floor space
to explore new clefts. There’s sunshine,
a breeze, the sound of the sea nearby.
Nearby, too, the remains of a pier
where people left for good.
Consider the words of a woman named Mary:
It was necessary to depart.
The hiss of the fire
on the flag of the hearth,
as they were drowning it,
reached my heart…
How tiny a wren’s heart must be –
not much bigger than a berry,
and the human heart might shrink
round a great pain. In a world
of small survivors, injustice
large as oceans, rank as exile,
wrens keep house for the scattered dead.
They exist in the gaps that are left,
their voices undiminished –
troglodytes troglodytes troglodytes.