LOCKDOWN
I
The midges are out in force tonight, strangers to social isolation,
keen to get into my clothes, my hair
I shrink from their touch
the closest I’ve been to a crowd for weeks,
close-pressed clouds of them, their buzzing in my ear is almost
conversation.
II
The streets are full of brigands, masked or scarfed
bottled sanitiser holstered in low slung handbags
itchy hands are trigger happy here in these clean streets
where tumbleweed should blow down Sheen Lane
every man’s a stranger in this wild, South West London town
eye-ball the gap between us: who’s the fastest to withdraw?
III
I can’t recall where I slipped through or when,
portals to other worlds aren’t billed.
This one’s a close relation of my own,
fewer cars, planes, vistas of trees unfold,
novel statues, soaring spires, but Austen’s
‘Reason and Rationality’s, unknown.
MIGRATION PERIOD
Across the whale-road on a broad, wave-rider,
packed together like boxed fish
with the water rearing higher than a wild horse.
Below, a mountain’s span of water, a monstrous well,
Swell of teeming waters storm this tide-wolf’s keel,
Cymen and Eawynn, Sweterun and Aesc
cowering in the cold bowels of a dead-tree hull.
At the ragged coast, rock-castled, masked by fog
they clambered knee-deep in silt and surf.
The land is no more welcoming than the sea,
borrowed ground is brutally guarded
but the earth itself, deep as the ocean,
buries bones impartially.
The sea is a multi-mouthed fiend,
to fall is to be consumed
to be stripped of breath.
They are raked by the claws of the waves,
the crush of bold bodies crammed too close
squeezes out hope.
Aamena, Ahmad, Leila and Karim.
At the ragged coast, rock-castled, masked by fog
they clamber knee-deep in silt and surf.
The land is no more welcoming than the sea,
borrowed ground is bureaucratically guarded
but the earth itself, deep as the ocean,
buries bones impartially.
EASTER 2020
I
Good Friday is our mourning day, we dwell on loss,
asphyxiated on a crucifix because
back then we shouted for Barabbas for the craic.
Now Raab and Boris, busy taking Britain back,
allow our best to die without the means to fight:
we wash our hands for hours as if to put that right.
II
Herds of deer cwtch together in the dappled April light
overshadowed by the sprawling pack of people
exercising their rights, on foot, bike or skateboard
distanced though present: the army of the absent,
the not yet ghosts are grieving in shadowed isolation
every death infecting a hidden throng with grief.
III
No church bells this morning only the exultant song of birds,
treble- voiced children hunting for eggs next door.
In the stove, lamb’s roasting only our festival table lacks
place for family shielded from us at home.
Too warm, too still for Spring only the budding copper-beech speaks,
on this strange Easter day, of Resurrection
THE BLACK PATH (BRIDGEND)
My grandfather walked the black, cinder path
between housing estates and farmland.
No countryman, as such,
he knew coal, criminals then factory floor,
walking in his steady, easy way
the usual walk with a stick to slice
the heads off nettles.
He’d tilt his head and say a name: ‘skylark,’ ‘linnet’
‘chaffinch,’ ‘thrush.’ It was the kind of thing a
grown man knew, like lines of Shakespeare
Keats and Shelley, where to go to miss the traffic
on the A48, and all the ‘B’ roads to the sea.
I thought one day I’d know their songs as I walked
the usual walk.
My father always keen to be outdoors
bought books and leather-cased binoculars
observed and noted with his draughtsman’s eye
the plumage, beak shape, line of wing,
tilting his head to listen to the song
he’d learned to know, walking on with
slow attentiveness.
I had a ring tone once of some bird singing.
I only guessed it was a nightingale.
Tilting my head to answer it, I’d think again
of the black path, Dad and Bampa knowing things
about a world that isn’t here, the birds, their names,
and beauty, the way to the sea. All walked the usual walk.
All gone before me.
Nick Browne is an established novelist and aspiring poet and poetry critic. She is the author of nine YA titles published by Bloomsbury and her poetry has appeared in Acumen and Ink, Sweat, and Tears. Website http://nmbrowne.com/ Blog https://www.nmbrowne.com/blog