The Art of Smiling

As I recited poems
for the YouTube channel
my sister suggested I smile
as I deliver the words.

It would come through
in my voice.
As an accomplished actress
she knows a thing or two.

She knows what I
try to hide. For instance
when I am glum —
in Welsh ‘digalon’.

So I am remembering
to smile again
and not be too
caught up in it.


John H Davies
20th X 2026

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