Concert Party

There was to be a magician, two dancing girls

and a singer, and ‘A’ Company had eagerly awaited

the day to brighten up the sober Belfast November.

As duty Subaltern, it was my job to collect them

from the airfield in an armoured car, and feeling

important as we entered our world, up the Falls Road

and into a fortress of corrugated iron, the cookhouse

for a dressing room, and an improvised stage in the

dining area with plastic chairs arranged in rows

and we piled in, still operational, restless and armed

to the teeth and ready for anything. Except the girls,

who weren’t up to much, and didn’t get up to much,

and the boys didn’t hide their disappointment as I sunk

deeper into my seat on the front row as the magician

sawed one of them in half, to a tremendous cheer

(for the wrong reasons) and I realised that this wasn’t

exactly going to plan. And then the singer walked on,

guitar in hand, and the room fell silent: ‘Alright lads?’

he said in a friendly scouser accent, and the ice was broken

by one or two intermittent baboon impersonations and

for a moment my faith in the English Tommy, for whom

I would have taken a bullet without a thought,

and they for me, was shattered into a thousand shameless

shards. But the singer wasn’t phased, almost as if he

anticipated this welcome, welcomed the anticipation,

and began to strum with a knowing smile, as if playing

to an empty room and proceeded to deliver his killer punch:

‘I am sailing, I am sailing, home again, cross the sea…’

And one hundred of Her Majesty’s pumped and primed

testosterone fuelled military machines fell into a reverie,

one hundred pairs of eyes, wells of stormy waters,

bold hearts trapped in a snare of sentimentality, that seemed

to capture the pity of the place, the role and the reason

and the final chords were lost in the thunderous cheer and

thumping of rifle buts against the linoleum floor and the

helicopter was late returning to the mainland that night.

John H Davies

5th February 2011 

Fractured Limb

It struck the bough half way along its length

at the moment I chanced to be looking out

across the field towards the old oak.

Rather a forlorn tree, not the majestic

symmetrical shape you see in books

and standing alone at the head of a ragged hedge.

And yet it framed the window perfectly,

and it seemed unfair that it should be singled out

for such a ferocious, random attack. The lightening 

felled the branch with a fizzing crack, and it

maintained a horizontal attitude as it fell

to the ground in slow motion, as the rain

hammered against the glass pane, the whole event

seeming oddly detached from reality,

and I searched for some divine meaning

but found none; a random act of nature;

and returned to my work, looking up some

half hour later to see the tree slowly burning

from its base, the flames eventually dying

to a pyre of smoke, doused by the still

teeming rain, and realizing I had witnessed

a random act of nature defying nature.

The tree lives on, still rather forlorn,

but every inch a king.

John H Davies

4th February 2011 

Alternative Advent

I’m just letting you know

they appeared today,

a little late this year,

but no less welcome.

Because someone special

used to ring you and share

their advent wherever

you happened to be.

And although he’s not around,

you both made sure

the notion of him

would remain,

and proliferate

and recur in us -

like the snowdrops

that appeared today.

John H Davies

3rd February 2011 

Further Distillation

Is it better to accept

who we are,

rather than

who we would

want to be…

how we are,

rather than

how we would

yearn to be…

…where we are,

rather than

where we would

hope to be…

…what we are,

rather than

what we would

aspire to be…

…when we are,

rather than

when we would

wish to have been?

John H Davies

2nd February 2011

Don Arturo Alpizar Vargas

It’s hard to imagine

a chest large enough to

carry it. But he carried

it with ease, on his sleeve.

He knew no boundaries

except those for crossing,

and he bore me over

frontiers on his bravado.

I may never learn how

or why I qualified for

his attention; there were

no flags or medals

for playing our game, and

he played it with such an

intensity it was as though

the lives of his family

depended on it, and all for

the chance perhaps one day

to clasp my shoulders again,

and call me brother.

John H Davies

1st February 2011 

Murray versus Djokovic (Melbourne)

You say he gets too angry.

I call it killer instinct.

Potatoes and tomatoes aside,

the other guy was just better.

John H Davies

31st January 2011 

Brown to Green

I like the brown soil,

the smell and the spoil,

even when it sticks heavy

on my boots. The clay

flecked with flint

and dark like the season,

moulded into the landscape

by an unseen sculptor

who knows his materials,

and holding the germ

that even in winter’s teeth

squeezes out the faintest 

touch of green, as the eye

plays from foreground

to horizon gaining in

pixelated intensity like a

thin gauze, that will fill

and ripen with the year.

And while I sit and wait

and ponder and wonder

when the phone will ring,

and where the next order

is coming from, and how

we’ll cover the next quarter’s

VAT bill, I think

of that brown soil

sticking heavy on my boots.

John H Davies

30th January 2011