by Fanny Howe
I was walking over Primrose Hill
one damp summer night.
Bundles of white chestnut flared
under the street lights.
London’s unsteady skyline
was not a reassuring one
but like a graph that measures
limits: hesitation.
It lurches, drops, drains and twirls
in imitation of the pickle and the snail
still trying not to fail
but to survive on little.
When my brain was weary my heart was not.
It all came down to oxygen
or a walk with God.
When my heart was tired my brain kicked in
as if they were holding hands.
The brain can be shucked
when all the air is gone but the heart
is slippery and needs a word of
kindness to encourage it.
How am I still here,
Without another.
The heart has its needs
and feelings sewn like threads
into branches and seasons
that we pencil as trees.
The Irish women with brass-capped hair
and tight mouths
and a Muslim woman with five girls and one boy
are all sadly clad at Victoria.
In poverty some screaming brats
are fat, and some are starved
into silence on their father’s laps.
No father is worse (than that).
What is created by humans
Is always alien.
The hissing buses and trains
in Kentishtown, boys hunched
in bunches on the Lock
drugged and dirty and crushed
their eyes like lizards veiled
and blind in retreat while
a man with a machete
cut a fellow down, blood
all over his hands. Proud
of being a killing kind of man.
Machete or his father’s hand: which one
caused this crime?
The naughts were unlucky years for boys
and brothers in their teens.
Clouds of lard covered
Kent’s fields as the Eurostar
raced away from London
and William Blake’s spiritual sun.
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