Whitby, August 2018

You know how, in a rough sea,
breakers in long lines, ramping up the beach,
crashing around you, spray in your face,
your feet slipping in the undertow,
and the sand liquid beneath you,
its underwater troughs wavering and changing;
you’re off balance, no certainty underfoot,
and you’re woozy with sun and sand and salt and sea
so your head spins, legs jellify, heart stutters ?
 
It’s like living on this island, now,
adrift, at the mercy of rip tides,
caught in a storm, beyond control,
all holds lost, our anchor dragging
through shifting sand on a lee shore.
 

John Gilham

in collection Where the Hares Are, 2019, Stairwell Books,
ISBN 978-1-939269-96-6

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Bicycling towards Ieper.

     (i.m. Käthe Kollwitz, sculptor)
 
Bicycling towards Ieper
across the small, significant, ridges of Flanders,
I found the quiet cemetery at Vladslo.
 
Here was a grove of trees
which in late November carried still
the memory of summer;
leaves fell on the incised names –
Johannes, Martin, Hans
– yellow on the grey slabs.
 
A grove where no birds sang
and Kollwitz’ silent parents,
wracked with grief, mourned for us all.
 
To Tyne Cot and Passchendaele I carried them with me.
 
And years later, in the gallery, in Berlin,
I realised her cruel fate,
whose imagination was tortured,
years before the war, with images of mourning,
of mothers whose hearts were torn from their bodies
as their sons’ entrails, and her son’s, were torn from theirs.
 
Her soul, her hands knew
long before that last wave
at the corner of the street
that it would come to this unbearable quiet
this bitter hush.
 
How could she let him go ?
 

John Gilham

in collection, Learning to Breathe, 2015, Stairwell Books,
ISBN 978-1-939269-37-9

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A Tune from Everywhere

All over Europe you’ll find it:
different instruments, different voices,
but the same tune, everywhere.
 
And tales also: often a king,
and many a shepherd boy,
brothers three, often a witch,
and everywhere a step-mother.
 
Characters, plots
that cross forests and mountain ranges,
that leap the great rivers:
Elbe, Rhine, Danube, Dneiper.
 
And words too, that migrate with peoples
and merge into English,
(that mongrel tongue),
to re-emerge as Franglais, Pidgin…
 
Words, tunes, that ignore frontiers,
stories that pass the guards unseen.
No tariffs to geld our dreams,
no barbed wire to shred their truth.
 

John Gilham

in collection, Footprints in the Mud, 2025, self-published,
ISBN 979-8-31-754573-4

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Country Roads, Michigan, USA.

The dirt roads are still roads, but not dirt;
the family farm’s still a farm, but not family;
and off this once-dirt road the white-sided church
doesn’t any more christen, confirm, marry us,
though, round the back, they still bury us,
our name among others: Schairer, Schaibele, Jedele, Frey,
lined up against the fields and rows of corn we farmed,
the long stripes of the plough, the pockets of scrub we never cleared.
 
We are still here, but not farmers;
we sit behind a screen in Jackson, or Toledo,
weld the cars in Flint, in Dearborn,
drive the Interstate from client to prospect
chasing the sale – we the invisible.
 
But take your lunch at Metzger’s, Hoffman’s, Dieterle’s – you’ll find us,
our German faces, our German stockiness,
our not quite lost German accents, as we greet each other
– retired farmers and farmer’s sons,
shooting the breeze, touching hands;
and we are the harvest of all those generations,
watching Fox News in the subdivisions our farms have, or will, become.
 

John Gilham

in collection, Learning to Breathe, 2015, Stairwell Books,
ISBN 978-1-939269-37-9

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