Parting

I used to part my hair to the left,
I’m not sure why, it didn’t naturally fall
in one direction or the other;
it was simply one of those decisions
you had to make as a boy, and I think
mine was based on a straw pole
which revealed that most people’s
partings were on the other side.

And I never gave it a second thought,
and hardly ever looked in the mirror
until the winds of change blew about us
and you suggested I parted my hair
the other way, and said you preferred it.
And for once I checked my reflection,
still familiar but now inverted,
and saw how I must appear to you.


John H Davies
31st May 2011

Sketch by John Wheatley 1916

I’ll leave your picture up
until the very last moment,
because it helps me to think
of you struggling to make
sense of the changing world,
and the pursuit of that elusive
other self. For sharing your
hardship brings us closer,
even though I have added
almost ten years to the moment
you made your lucky escape.

John H Davies
30th May 2011

Tony Boyle

I felt you there today,
Your reassuring presence at my shoulder.
I followed the path that you had trod
A year before, and now a little older
I’m still wandering in the aftermath
Of your departure.

You left us unprepared.
No timely warning that you planned to go.
And yet in truth
Those years that you bestowed
In wisdom kind
Will bear us safely down our onward road.

I felt you there today,
On a breath of warm Italian wind,
And I knew that all was well.


John H Davies
29th V 2011

Choice

Why fall we pray so often
To the victim of our passionate response
To some small thing
Whose harmony does not accord with ours?
Do matters thus exert some hidden power on us
To form a righteous verdict
And disturb our peace of mind?
Are we so fragile as to feel compelled
To form opinions and so dispel
The hopes and fears of others likewise trapped?

The choice is ours. Aurelius says:
Escape from man’s true sin
Is so to exercise the knowledge
That our souls cannot be marked
By any outward thing,
Unless we let it in.


John H Davies
28th V 2011

Silver Screen

She took me out to watch a movie

for some light entertainment

and instead we saw a film

about the Australian underworld

in which practically everyone

met a miserable end, but despite

the content we emerged from the

theatre feeling strangely uplifted.

John H Davies

27th May 2011 

Flor Y Sol

The flowers are in bloom

but the sun isn’t shining.

I had thought the two

went hand in hand;

that one was a prerequisite

of the other, or that

the other heralded the

splendour of the one.

But sometimes the two

don’t go hand in hand,

and they are poorer for it.

John H Davies

26th May 2011 

Dawn Chorus

There wasn’t much for a child to do
in the small bungalow and all you could see
from the bedroom window as we lay together
in the grey of the morning, were five
telegraph wires like a stave of music,
and as the birds perched upon them in
a seemingly arbitrary fashion, Nana hummed
the melody they described from pole
to pole in her soft Welsh contralto.


John H Davies
25th V 2011

Path of Least Resistance

The path of least resistance

can also be the path best lit;

the path along which the traveller

needs no map or compass,

and with a little wind behind,

the gentle gradient will carry him

to his yet undisclosed destination.

John H Davies

24th May 2011 

Parallel Universe

There is a quiet place

on the outskirts of the village

from which you can spy

all the landmarks of your life.

The school you didn’t attend;

the fields of buttercups

through which we wouldn’t roam;

Old Windmill Hill, up which

I don’t see you running with a kite;

and over the brow, our home

where you never grew up.

The church where you weren’t

Christened, but instead a short

service brought you here to rest

locked in your six weeks

of what might have been,

where I return from time to time

to find out how you’re doing.

John H Davies

23rd May 2011

Books

If I had to save anything

from the burning house,

it would be the books.

I could live pretty well

with nothing but a book;

to feel, to smell, to feed

my mind and fan the flames.

And when the lights go out

I will light a candle

and read my books.

John H Davies

22nd May 2011 

Judgement Day

Today’s the day,

and I guess if you’re

reading this it didn’t

quite happen the way

some predicted:

with earthquakes

and tidal waves

and graves thrown open

and survivors existing

in a world of horror and

chaos beyond

description.

And then again

perhaps it has

already happened.

Quietly, when

no-one was

looking. In fact

it has the sober

ring of familiarity

about it, although

frankly I don’t think

He would have

bothered.

John H Davies

21st May 2011

Agenda

He had an agenda,

and so did he,

and also him.

She had an agenda,

and they had agendas,

as well as several others.

His agenda conflicted

with her agenda,

and also theirs,

whereas it was

in complete accord

with the others’.

And although there were

no hidden agendas,

there seemed to be

no single agenda

that satisfied all

parties and as a result

there was no meeting.

John H Davies

20th May 2011 

Song of the Songs – Part 2

Here’s a song that I’ve created

Here in the sweet afterglow

Softly as the falling snow

Oh how they sigh.

You left me fond recollections

When a pale September moon

was shining,

Nobody knows the hour

They were there together

Constant forever.

Pray tell me whence you come

Oh heavenly rest

Somewhere I know where lovers go

Into my heart one December day

For me there seemed no morrow.

Raise your voices, raise your hearts

There’s a wonderful light in the sky

A poet loves the springtime.

That is all I have to say.

John H Davies

19th May 2011 

Friendship

Someone suggested

that friendship

is easier to give

than to receive;

rather like a wound,

or a salute,

and as a consequence

the only way

to receive friendship

is with the grace

of a warrior

or a general.

John H Davies

18th May 2011 

People you meet in pubs VI

I loved to hear how during the war his squadron
had been stationed for a while in South Africa
and he was billeted with a family at an address
that had become imprinted on his memory,
and after only a few repetitions, on mine too:
77 St. Albans Road, Mayfair West, Jo’Burg.

He reminded me again the night before I left
for the airport, as he steadied the shimmer
in his glass-hand by gripping his wrist
with the other, and with a glint in his eye
and despite the forty years, he could still picture
the daughter of the house, and I practiced her name
as he repeated it in his quiet but clipped voice:
Suzanne Labuschagne, Suzanne Labuschagne…
and the side of his mouth rose ever so slightly,
accentuated by his neatly trimmed moustache.

I kept my promise to look her up once I’d settled in,
and found the house quite easily, and my knock
was answered by a girl who only rented the place
and didn’t recognise the name, or know the owner.

A year later I returned to the pub to let him down
gently, anticipating his repressed excitement,
but fixed to the wall by the bar where he
liked to stand, was a propeller and a small plaque
that read: ‘In Memory of Freddie Lane,’
and despite my sadness, I was pleased that both
those memories were now conjoined and
strengthened and recycled like that repeated address:
77 St. Albans Road, Mayfair West, Jo’Burg.

John H Davies

17th V 2011

Herd Instinct

The giraffe in the garage gave a wide berth to

the alligator in the bath, as it ignored

the fly in the soup that avoided

the kudu in the corridor running from

the leopard on the landing slipping quietly past

the hippo in the hall, but none of them noticed

the elephant in the room.

John H Davies

16th May 2011

Lover’s Complaint

The hardest part about walking

up a concave hill, is not the gradient,

but the inconvenient fact

that as your journey progresses,

the summit remains hidden from view,

and what you imagine is a brow

relentlessly opens up each time

you think you are getting close,

so that your only option is to

concentrate on the journey

and not the destination.

John H Davies

15 May 2011

Divided Attention

He could fly a helicopter so competently that the Chief

Flying Instructor complimented him after his final sortie,

having executed a faultless auto-rotation 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,

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
12th V 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

Background

I had always thought
British garden birds
rather ordinary,
boring and brown
and all looking the same
more or less.

But suddenly this year
they seem to have taken on
a splash of colour,
as if they have
dipped and swooped
in and out
of an artist’s pallet.

Even the red chin
of the swallow
seems brighter;
the green wagtails
greener; and the
goldfinches scramble to
monopolise the view
from every window.

I had always allowed
the birds to occupy
the background,
and perhaps only now
that I yearn
some colour,
do I notice
the rainbow in them.


John H Davies

7th May 2011

Touché

Have you ever been touched?
An unseen foot under the table -
the touch of the untouchable.
Or an innocent touch, a soft touch
conveying more than words
or a glance. Do you touch
upon a subject without concern
that you might be out-of-touch?
Would you have touched the border
of the garment, a touch of virtue
and desperation, in the same
touching moment? Is it only
the tangible that we trust, or repel -
the touch of the leper? Are you
the type to stay in touch, or wait
for the touch on the shoulder?
Do you still favour touch-typing
or one-touch technology; prefer
being in touch with your emotions
or touching the void? And
whether you’re touched up
or touched in the head -
take a leaf out of an old book
and don’t forget to ask yourself:
‘Who touched me?’


John H Davies

May 6th 2011

Rescue

You can never find a policeman
when you need one –

I considered the irony of these words
as I relayed instructions from a man
in the office of the crane hire company
to the Bobby below, who in turn fiddled
with the buttons on the machine
which eventually lowered us safely
to the ground, and seemed bemused
and rather diffident when I shook his hand.


John H Davies

5th V 2011

Stranded

We're 40 feet up in the cage
of a hydraulic lift that has just
stopped working and we've no idea
how we're going to get down or
more importantly how I'll get
today's poem on the blog
hang on, here comes a policeman...


John H Davies

4th V 2011

Osama

I know I shouldn’t be glad that
someone’s dead, but I am glad
they got him at last. I’m glad
for the families of his countless victims
and I’m glad, because when I was a boy
he accused me of something I didn’t do
to cover up his own shortcomings,
and he pushed me down a stairwell
and trampled on me mercilessly
because I was smaller than him.
So I joined the army and learnt
how to take care of myself, rather hoping
that one day I might bump into him
and even up the score, but I guess
I won’t have to bother now.


John H Davies

3rd V 2011

Fresh Start

She took her clothes and shoes
and potted plants,
the sofa bed
and the ashes of her dead dog,
some kitchen utensils
and a large smile.

And replacing his tape measure
on the desk
in the office,
she locked the front door
for the last time
and stepped out
into the sunshine.


John H Davies

2nd V 2011

Cure

When I’m down
she dumps our puppy
in my lap knowing
I won’t be able to resist.

What simpler therapy
in all the world,
than the craving
of the innocents?


John H Davies

1st V 2011