Originally Posted by
Stevie
Excellent choice, Alf. I do like "Daddy".
I have been trying to find a certain Tim Turnbull poem on the web and failing, I will have to type it out some time. In the meantime I have in my drawer at work this morning a book by Paul Farley (The Boy From the Chemist is Here to See You). Here is "My Italics"
On waking disappointed from a deep sleep,
he'll boot up his machine, sit down and type
Even though I know that I will never
live the rural life, God knows I've tried
to imagine rising at five in bad weather
carrying a paraffin lamp, peering inside
a fecund dark, up to my elbows in lather
helping pull a shiny calf from its mother.
But five o'clock comes round just once most days.
Deep in quilt, I'm stuck for raw material.
The lamp slips from my hands. After each blaze
I'll stumble from its ashes to my cereal.
His inkjet ploughs the page for all it's worth:
it drops head-first, the easieest of births.
And on lamps, here is one from the same book. The poem is based on a simple idea, but it somehow works
"A Thousand Hours"
There were false starts, but life, for me, really
began the night he unplugged the telly
and snuffed out the pilot light. As last-man-out
he worked right through to dawn, between the street
and this bedroom, until he's stripped it bare,
but he left me in his rush to check the meter,
to turn the stopcock on a copper tank,
count stairs and memorize that manhole's clunk,
the first hawked phlegm, the way a window pane
was answering the early Line Street train;
and posted back his keys to nobody.
I've hung here naked since, by day barely
able to force a shadow to be thrown.
It's nights I come into my own:
a halo for the ceiling, corners for mice,
and through the glass a phantom of all this,
a twin star that is shedding kilowatts
in translation. Beyond these dark outskirts
my creator sleeps. I recall how his eyes
woudl whirr just like this night-time visitor
that might outlive me. Of all his ideas
I burn on, having been conceived in error.
Paul Farley