Patch
When I was playing,
the decrepit neighbour approached
the gloss of laurel
and pointed at the unruly flowers
squatting on our path.
My grandfather called forget-me-nots
‘remember-me-forevers’-
his own grandmother taught him that!
Getting up close,
talking like this
she would no longer see me,
her azure mac bobbing so near
as to briefly patch
and mend
the coarse weave of leaves dividing us.
She would often repeat that
stub of a tale
planting the shrunken smudges of prairie-blue
renamed and unwanted
in my head.
These flimsy strands
of ancient inconsequence,
orphaned words
she had lovingly long shepherded.
The last time I saw her
was from my window,
before college
(she died during that first term)
her pulled door coughing into a final slam,
the same coat enveloping her
like a piece of misplaced sky,
though now tellingly
freshly stained.
Piss-me-not, I whisper:
the remembering of her
already twisting in my cruel hands.
Park
I am by the arbour,
under the small square plaque
screwed deep
into bare wood,
a school friend’s name,
and two
far away dates.
Sometimes
these arches course with rose-blood,
but today
they protrude painfully,
like ribs.
I tell my almost attentive son
a little about you
and realise:
I am all you ever were
and now can ever be.
My pruned sentences
are dishonest and incomplete;
you remain ungrasped.
The living can propagate the dead
but thick-gloved
and clumsy,
only as a stunted
bloomless lie.
Before we depart, I notice
the empty benches surrounding us.
Each bears nothing more
than the rigid certainty
that someone,
not here,
always loved this place.
Julian lives in Cardiff with his wife and son.
The bulk of his professional life has been spent working with the terminally ill.
His poetry can reflect this but is equally often inspired by the minutiae of relationships.
Published in Envoi, Pulp Poets Press, Nine Muses, The Dawn Treader and Black Bough Poetry.
Bindweed Magazine 