Armada

Brian Patten

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780007333752
• eBook ISBN: 9780007440177
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Through the fads and fashions of the last thirty years Brian Patten has remained true to his own personal vision of poetry. Whether composing lamentations to the terrible beauty of human love, or writing his outstanding popular verse for children, he has continued to articulate and illuminate the joys and sorrows of the everyday world.

1
the armada

Cinders

You never went to a ball, ever.

In all your years sweeping kitchens

No fairy godmother appeared, never.

Poor, poor sweetheart,

This rough white cloth, fresh from the hospital laundry,

Is the only theatre-gown you’ve ever worn.

No make-up. Hair matted with sweat.

The drip beside your bed discontinued.

Life was never a fairy-tale.

Cinders soon.

The Armada

Long long ago

when everything I was told was believable
and the little I knew was less limited than now,
I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond
and to the far bank launched a child’s armada.

A broken fortress of twigs,
the paper-tissue sails of galleons,
the waterlogged branches of submarines –
all came to ruin and were on flame
in that dusk-red pond.
And you, mother, stood behind me,
impatient to be going,
old at twenty-three, alone,
thin overcoat flapping.

How closely the past shadows us.
In a hospital a mile or so from that pond
I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes,
reach out across forty years to touch once more
that pond’s cool surface,
and it is your cool skin I’m touching;
for as on a pond a child’s paper boat
was blown out of reach
by the smallest gust of wind,
so too have you been blown out of reach
by the smallest whisper of death,
and a childhood memory is sharpened,
and the heart bums as that armada burnt,
long, long ago.

The Betrayal

By the time I got to where I had no intention of going

Half a lifetime had passed.

I’d sleepwalked so long. While I dozed

Houses outside which gas-lamps had spluttered

Were pulled down and replaced,

And my background was wiped from the face of the earth.

There was so much I ought to have recorded.

So many lives that have vanished –

Families, neighbours; people whose pockets

Were worn thin by hope. They were

The loose change history spent without caring.

Now they have become the air I breathe,

Not to have marked their passing seems such a betrayal.

Other things caught my attention:

A caterpillar climbing a tree in a playground,

A butterfly resting on a doorknob.

And my grandmother’s hands!

Though I saw those poor, sleeping hands

Opening and closing like talons,

I did not see the grief they were grasping.

The seed of my long alienation from those I loved

Was wrapped in daydreams.

Something I’ve never been able to pinpoint

Led me away from the blood I ought to have recorded.

I search my history for reasons, for omens. But what use now

Zodiacs, or fabulous and complicated charts

Offered up by fly-brained astrologers?

What use now supplications?

In the clouds’ entrails I constantly failed

To read the true nature of my betrayal.

What those who shaped me could not articulate

Still howls for recognition as a century closes,

And their homes are pulled down and replaced,

And their backgrounds are wiped from the face of the earth.

The Eavesdropper

From my vantage point on the top stair

of a house that no longer exists...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 1: The Armada
• 2: Between Harbours
• 3: Inessential Things
• Keep Reading
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Other Works
• Copyright
• About the Publisher