The Poetry Society Celebrating our centenary

Do we live in small murderous towns

Where history has ended up?

Under their grubby insignia,

Summed up by mottoes

In greengrocer Latin? Do we reside

In the abolished Thridding? Have we always?

 

Were our towns constructed

From coal or manure, as kaufmanndorf

Or jakes, at a trivial confluence,

By deadly caprice (oh let it be he-ere)?

Divined in scripture? Destined

To defeat the understanding?

 

Are ours the homicidal sticks

In whose early spring evenings

Armies of policemen go down on their knees

In the scrub by the taken-up sidings?

Or do they peer from the edge of gravel pits

At frogmen who shake their slow heads,

 

Pointing like embarrassed Grendels

To a larder paved with torsos?

Do we answer these questions

Without taking legal instruction?

Can we not see how the trap is left

Open to claim us, the blatant device,

 

The traditional fit-up? Can we

Be what the atlas has in mind,

Twelve miles from a regional centre

With adequate links to the coast

And a history of gloving and needles

And animal products?

 

Is this the back of our station,

The clogging stink of the tannery yard,

And are these our gnats in suspension

Above the canal, and this our melancholy

Born of contiguity and quiet,

Whose poets are not very good?

 

Is this the poet? The immense

And anxious-making egg of his head?

His vast squirearchical torso?

His air of always being somewhere

Else in spirit as he turns

To hold your gaze a moment

 

And discard it? Is the poet

Here tending his irony, making a phrase

With the same offhand stylishness

Seen when he's chalking his cue

Or admiring the sheen of his waistcoat

In the smoke-filled mirror

 

In the afternoon hall, unfussily

Clearing the colours? And are those

His friends the police, who salute

With their pints, and not for the first time

Declare he's too clever by half?

Is this the poet? Well, is it?