A factory at Christmas

Between Christmas and New Year
I would walk the factory alone.
After a year of noise,
silence.

The hundred-ton brake press stood idle,
the rollers still,
the guillotine harmless for once.
My footsteps, usually swallowed by machinery,
followed me across the floor.

But the aroma remained.
Oil and steel,
cutting fluid, grease,
that unmistakable smell of making things
which clung to the building
even when we’d gone home.

And in their absence,
I saw them more clearly.
Dennis would have been there.
He had come with my father,
a works engineer fashioned
out of the industrial Midlands.

He could fix anything.
A machine, certainly.
But other things too.

He taught me more than he ever knew,
about machinery, about men,
about the man behind the machine.

All year the place had beaten around us:
steel cut and folded,
rollers turning,
orders coming in and going out,
problems solved and others waiting,
men earning their living
among the noise and oil.

It wasn't beautiful.
It wasn't glamorous.
Some days there was little joy in it.

It was a place of work.
We made things.

And those machines, brutal as some of them were,
gave succour to families
mortgages paid,
children clothed,
Christmases provided for.

Some men stayed long enough
for me to stand before them
with a few words
and a gold watch. So small a thing
for so much time.

Perhaps that was what caught me off guard
in those few quiet days each year.

For once there was nothing to mend,
nothing late,
no machine demanding attention,
no customer waiting.

Everyone had gone home.

And I had the privilege
of walking slowly through the silence
of the thing we had made together.

I can walk through it still.

The press is silent.
The rollers do not turn.
My footsteps echo again
across that empty floor.

And there is Dennis,
where he ought to be.

Fixing everything.


John H Davies
5 X 2026

Learning Solitude

I looked out from the upstairs window
down into the small garden below
late autumn sunshine and my grandson
aged seven, sitting on a wooden hammock
swinging alone. His mother asleep

his grandmother attending to laundry
his grandfather, me, upstairs, working.
And he seemed content.
And I thought how good it was
that he should learn to be alone, not lonely
but alone.

There’s a difference. Though perhaps
it takes a lifetime to understand.
There will be times in his life
when he will be alone.
When the people he loves
won’t be there.

When decisions must be made
without reassurance, when disappointment
or grief
must simply be endured.
When there is no one at hand
to distract him from himself.

It may also occur to him
that solitude can be treasured.
Perhaps learning to be alone begins
in such an unremarkable way:
a seven-year-old boy on an old hammock
moving gently backwards and forwards
in the autumn sun

with no one entertaining him
no screen demanding his attention
no need for anything to happen
simply discovering that his own company
is sufficient.

It seemed to me, watching him
that this was preparation for life.
We spend so much effort
teaching children how to live with others.
How to make friends, how to belong
how to love and be loved.

All of which matters.
But perhaps we should also show them
how to inhabit their own lives
when nobody else is there.

Sooner or later solitude comes to us
and if we didn’t receive it
we knew only absence.

But solitude can also be a place
where thought settles
where we hear ourselves more clearly
where memory and imagination
have room to move.

Looking down at him contentedly swinging
I wondered whether he was beginning to learn this
without knowing it.
And perhaps that is how such things are best learned.

And that thought got me thinking.


John H Davies

3rd X 2026

Suburbia

I grew up in suburbia
and was ashamed when
I understood
what it signalled.

And from that moment
I sought the world
from Central America to Africa
and all points between.

Became saturated with
everything that wasn’t
suburbia.

But now
upturned
I’m back
remembering

benign pavements
low grey skies
with occasional promises
of sun.

A shallow hint of
excess
but only that.

Of a kindness and deference
I thought existed
only in adversity

and I’m surprised.
It’s like I’m on my bicycle again
weaving through
cul-de-sacs

without a thought
of the fight.


John H Davies
2nd X 2026

Wau

I was sitting in an old 4x4

In Wau, South Sudan
Waiting for my friend
Who was in the market
Looking for a toilet seat

There wasn't another white man
For miles
And I was happy with that

I watched you coming

Slowly, diligently

Old
Beautiful
Impossibly graceful
Dressed in rags

With a dirty rice sack
Picking through rubbish
On the roadside

Bottles and bottle tops I think
Perhaps there were a few shillings
In it

Enough for a handful of rice

You came alongside the car
And I scrabbled my pockets
For everything I had

It wasn't much

You took it
And looked me
Straight in the eye

At me and in me

And for that moment
There was nothing
Between us

And everything  

You continued
On your way

I have forgotten
Ten thousand faces since

But not your eyes

I think of them

Every day


John H Davies
17th IX 2026

David Gurr-Gearing

I saw you again just now

After some time
Although we met
Occasionally
Over the years

But not enough
My fault
And I remember your
Father and sister
And brothers

And my rather
Protracted speech at my
18th birthday party at Old Meadows

I was about to go to war

The important people were there
You
Rupert Barrington Harbage
You know the others
All significant, and

A gentleman farmer
John Heatley – who had been
Tasked (I’m sure) by my father
To tell me he watched
His fellows burn to death in
A tank – at Anzio

And of course as a young fuck
I thanked him and continued to war

John H Davies

17th IX 2026

Burden

Every day feels heavy

I don’t look forward to
the morning

I don’t look forward
to turning in

because I know I will be left
with my thoughts
until I drop off
which recently is not likely

Every day is heavy
because of what I’ve seen
and know

The expectations of those
I knew

Yes I grew, but

Every day grows heavier
because I’m bored now
if I’m honest

Isn’t anyone else
bored?


John H Davies

5th IX 2026

▶️Watch me recite this poem

Radio Silence

As he sailed past sixty-four
with each day passing faster,
it came as a shock
to acknowledge the rapidity
of his body’s deterioration.

An early spinal injury
had left him a leg
with little feeling,
which shook his confidence.

Sometimes, without his stick
he worried people
would think him drunk
when he stumbled.

His knees hurt whenever
he got up.
That had happened quickly.

And he often gave the impression
he was ignoring people,
when in reality
he’d never heard them.

Recently she asked if
he’d join her for church,
and he politely declined,
despite attempting commitment
to being more open
about such things.

It now felt hypocritical.
All he’d ever experienced
was radio silence,
despite his half-hearted search
for something spiritual.

She asked where he found solace,
and he shrugged.

She asked again in the morning.
They’d both thought about it,
and he offered:
Friends, family, people, poetry, music, you…?
‘But you hate people’ she smiled.
She’d meant it kindly.

Whatever the truth,
he missed his avuncular ghosts.
And when he thought about
solace he considered its meaning.
And realised the tempting
symmetry of
solace in solitude.

Or was that
solitude in solace?

John H Davies

9th VIII 2026

▶️Watch me recite this poem