Divided Attention

He could fly a helicopter so competently that the Chief

Flying Instructor complimented him after his final sortie,

having executed a faultless autorotation engine-off landing,

bringing the machine to the ground with artful grace.

He could communicate simultaneously on three different

radio channels with the refined poise of an airline pilot.

He could navigate to within a solitary blade of grass

at a given eight figure grid reference in the dead of night.

He could direct an unseen battery of field artillery

onto an enemy target within three single adjustments.

He could trim the finely balanced dynamics of the

sophisticated machine purely by the seat of his pants.

But ask him to do it all together, at the same time,

in the same instant, without a second thought,

and each element crowded in upon his narrowing

vision, and before too long he was well and truly lost.

John H Davies

14th May 2011

Mail

We promised to write

every day

and you did.

In your neat hand

with a whiff 

of Miss Dior

on each page.

So that in the slumbering 

barrack room

after the clamour

and mud and pain

and cold and boot polish

and disinfectant

I could pull the starched sheet

over my head

and feel you

beside me. 

John H Davies

13th May 2011

The Enlightenment

When it arrives

it is as if

it had been here

all the time,

and we had become

so familiar

with the

imaginary space

which it occupied

that its realisation

was both a shock

and a comfort

in one

swift movement

of the

executioner’s blade.

John H Davies

12th May 2011

Laundry

He attributed the mud and grass stains,

worked into the knees of his new school trousers,

to his ‘signature move’ sliding tackle

at break time, and it was difficult to decide

whether to discourage such bravado

or suggest more subtle ball skills

which in another day would have been

substituted by a pair of shorts, clenched teeth,

and the smell of Dettol in Matron’s room.

John H Davies

11th May 2011 

Aceldama

It still broods when I drive by slowly,

as I am drawn to do whenever my travels

take me near the house where he grew up,

and even as I write I feel it watching me.

The sun never shone there in my memory

but despite the tragedies of his childhood,

they dug in deeper to defy the malevolence,

and grew potatoes and made cheesecake,

and all of a sudden we had grown up,

and he took me to one of the upper rooms

and explained how something so awful

had haunted him there he couldn’t

or wouldn’t tell me in any detail, and I

could only imagine his pain as I lay in the

guest room that night and struggled for breath

as something pressed heavy against my chest.

John H Davies

10th May 2011 

Chinese Whispers

Lieutenant Commander Henry Mirehouse RN

taught us Latin for a term, but his health

was unreliable and he didn’t stay for long.

He had old fashioned whiskers and flinched

when we banged our desk lids because he’d

been wounded by Chinese shellfire as his

ship ran the gauntlet of the Yangtze river.

We banged our lids more often and his face

grew red and angry when we laughed so that

I felt guilty, and became his friend. And one day

he gave me an old fan that had belonged

to his mother. I treasured it until it crumbled

into dust like the awkward correspondence

I wished I’d taken the trouble to maintain.

Years later I heard he’d died alone at his home

on the Lizard, aged 58. The Coroner’s verdict:

‘Death by enemy action.’

John H Davies

May 9th 2011

People you meet in pubs - V

I think I might have warmed to him

because other warmers seemed to be

thin on the ground and perhaps

amongst the others I knew at that time,

I recognised a fragility

beneath the bold pronouncements

that some despised,

but I could see through all that.

And now he sits before me,

and points to where the growth

is slowly spreading from

his oesophagus, and smiles

in a rather awkward way as if to say:

‘Funny how life turns out,’

and explains how a burglar

hit him over the head

with a fire extinguisher

because he’d probably

said too much in the pub.

John H Davies

8th April 2011