The Poetry Society

Arrowsmith, Bettshanger, Condon, Devine,

Evinrude, Fimister, Golightly, Heathcote,

Isbister, Jupp, Kingsogmore, Lobb-Leppard,

Motherwell, Nethercott, Orpington, Poad,

Quinnsworth, Ranfurly, Spaven, Terhune,

Urfe, Vandervelde, Woosnam, Younghusband

And Zimmer, who says he was framed.

 

*

 

They are not what they seem, my old cocker,

These names in a book, in a file

Or incised in old gold

 

On the greeny-grooved obelisk

Marking the dead of two wars

Where on market days madmen foregather

 

To issue their joint declarations,

Passionately letting us know

We should shove it right back where the sun don't shine.

 

Beside them the market goes on selling buckets

And James Hadley Chases and Jansons and Cheyneys

And knicker elastic and tripe.

 

They are not what they seem -

Lives of the lant-makers, lens-grinders, bailiffs

Arrested mid-gesture, their heads shot away

 

In a series of Flanders from Zutphen to Haig,

The wind blowing through them

Like cats to be put out at night.

 

These are the people who stretch on the landing and groan

And go on with the business of living,

The murdering-murderee classes of England

 

Found rubbing the sleep from their eyes

Or indifferently turning a page of the Argus,

For what with one thing and another

 

They must have five minutes

To think about nothing or sex

Or an ivy-grown gateway they never did

 

Get through as children, yon side

Of the churchyard whose slim barrel-tombs

Are not mentioned in Pevsner. No,

 

Not what they seem, not at all, old cocker my lad.

 

*

 

Alison Arrowsmith, dead in a ditch,

Walked out with a soldier, came back in a box.

- It's the men says her mother, the men,

Obeying imperatives straight from their cocks.

 

- It's the times, says her father, half cut at noon,

And somebody's just got to do something soon.

He was last noticed resting his brow in the Gents

While the town got a handle on recent events.

 

Up at the paper, hot-metal sweat,

There isn't a clue or a suspect yet

And the Friday edition is short of a page

And the editor's deep in an alky-red rage.