What is it with these people and death who can’t be told?
When the sky came down empty, we took almost-random roads,
Some we knew, or thought we did, enough to have a hold
Of what we were doing- somedays nothing, somedays loads-
–
A rectangle of light and leaf in the rear-view mirror
A milestone that told us we’re sixty miles from home;
Minor things, but we moved roughly north without error
From unbreakfasted dawn to a comforting evening gloam.
–
What was it with us and our life that kept us on the move?
The best I could, I wrote of this every night, a little
Poem to the stars perhaps, a log I kept to prove
At least where we stopped, our mileage, how much petrol…
–
These are some of the things that happened on this trip.
We saw a man dressed as a duck playing an accordion
(And, yes, we liked him, we applauded, tossed him a tip).
We ate by candlelight, your face half-lit, half-hidden
–
And asked each other Are you happy? Are you happy now?
A woman outside a café shouting into her ‘phone
“Of course, H- is literally having a nervous breakdown”
As if the whole world needed to have this known.
–
Our parlour game that evening was fleshing out that H-
Could it be Hildegard, Harriett, Hezekiah, Hank?
Hieronymus was our best guess (yours, I think).
We also tried reckoning the pebbles on Chesil Beach
–
How many more there are than all the people on the earth,
All the people who’ve ever lived. Happy diversions, these!
We wondered how far north we’d go before we ran out of north-
Hatfield, Hessel, Helmsley, The Hebrides.
–
It was too much and not enough- there are loads of things we missed-
Cathedrals, town halls, parish churches and resting-grounds,
Markets, museums, places where they keep things hid,
Old documents, coins, flags, the last trophies of their kind.
–
Finally we plummeted south, not stopping for roadkill
Thinking we might be lucky, end somewhere nice (Chesil Beach?).
Though you can’t crash through checkpoints the way they do in films
The sweet sea, halcyon, was almost within reach.
–
The travelling has ended, and the tons of weight
And the feathers of weight are crammed in the boot of the car
With the laundry and our souvenirs and the books of poems I wrote.
Are we happy now? Well, we are where we are.
These are my books. Available on Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles, Barnes&Noble, Booktopia and lots of other sites. Prices vary, but as a guide, Deathbed Poet is presently £9.99 on Amazon UK. “Highly recommended” (Amazon review)
freeversefolkestone 