Recently in Poetry Category

This poem, written over ten years ago, contains some imagery (the plant growing in an old shoe) that has recently been echoed in the new Pixar film, Wall-E (see Hamgray's review below). I'm not saying that the idea was pinched from me - just that the Zeitgeist keeps manifesting itself!

Settling in was like saving the planet,
all that anxiety
over space, colour and temperature,
knowing when to destroy and when to nurture.
Our first flat a miniature Terra.

Once I came back to discover
that a bird had flown in through the window.
A foreign body,
unwanted as the outrageous cuckoo
in another's nest,
it perched on the angle-poise lamp.

Quick eyes appraised the living-space
as I myself had done
on a first visit,
nervous but intrepid like the bird
whose accidental presence in our flat
might yet make news:

'How a flying visitor became my lodger,
Woman tells of life with feathered friend'.
For although a parrot would be better,
I appreciate the timely symbolism
of this rare cohabitation,
a truce between man and nature.

But enough of millennium doom.
We could use the humour that recycles
shoes as flower-pots
on a neighbour's windowsill,
where daffodills sprout from worn soles
with spring in their step.

This poem was inspired by a visit Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute, which is a museum/library open to the general public as well as scholars. Recently a family day on the theme of polar bears was held.

Though the Cold War is over, paranoia
lives on, past the point of self-parody.
That polar bear, stuffed to within an inch
of its life, is a spy - its glacial stare
follows us everywhere. On the walls, photos
in frames show others of its kind - trophies
left to atrophy in cluttered stately homes,
yellowing like chain-smoking émigrés.

Though transport poses challenges,
we'll think laterally. This young explorer
(my son) favours hands and knees, and - who knows? -
maybe he'll be the first to swim to the poles!

Though we're the only visitors,
a colony of souls convenes to hush
these halls, to hover round the strong room
where brave mens' letters gather dust.
Like bubbles that burst at a touch, the future
melts as we learn new ways to move on.

Though we are free, this morning, to idle,
this is the tip of time's iceberg.

Newly-exploded into our world,
you’re a jack-in-the-box baby,
lolling at ease now, like an ocean buoy,
oblivious to onlookers and to clocks.

You made your entry with the éclat
of a snooker pro, scattering
multi-coloured balls in all
directions – a masterly first break.

These tumbling spheres are your cells,
doubling and redoubling in cascade
to create new angles – shots I’ll struggle
to make, your playing-partner, your parent.

When your father placed your basket
gently on the path, searching for door keys,
it tethered us all under the marquee
of your perpetual party: anchored, like nomads.

Lucy Lewis

Use this for darning thumb and finger-tips
of much-worn gloves: see how the rounded ends
fit snugly. Or take this glass cone for lips
to taste champagne from. Anything which mends
is welcome, and shakers that sprinkle sand
for blotting letters. Enclose a flower
between the sheets, or present it by hand.
An antique watch can stretch the scantest hour
and make it last. Quirkiest junk-shop finds
suggest that there is hope for life’s loners.
Cuff-links and buttons - one-offs of all kinds -
serendipity gives to new owners.
But who would give a rusting, creaky tool
once used to ring doves? Who’d be such a fool?

Lucy Lewis
2 March 2007

As if sleep were a ship
that had carried us to the edge
of the world’s wide rim
(over which we might slip),
we awoke. Night sucked
at the panes, its black mouth
pressed to the glass. You’d been dreaming
of cliffs and falling. Terror filled
your eyes as they locked onto mine –
limpets in their sockets, jellified.

Nerves strained tight as violin strings,
diaphragm pulled taut as a drum,
it was as if two hemispheres
had met: clamped one to the other
at the seams of the cerebellum.
The brain’s an astrolabe; wrought
more intricately than a compass,
it tells us how far we’ve come.
But if thoughts are stars
to be read, that night was dark.

Clueless in the moonless wood,
we listened as an owl’s screech
eviscerated the silence –
waited for the metallic clunk
we’d both heard to be repeated.
An intruder, or phantom engine
haunting this industrial hulk?
Like siamese twins, we shared the same
heart-beat, laughed the same laughter
when the boiler began its cycle.

Was that all it was then?
As dawn unknotted the tangle
of our gothic panic (showed us
thorn bush, stone wall, mine-shaft)
we discerned the outlines of each
single object, felt ourselves intact.
Yet it seemed that the copper wire
sourced from that Cornish vein had charged
our fibres – making us part
of Frankenstein’s experiment.

For a big man, he was good
at vanishing – his Cheshire Cat act.
He’d hide behind small, round spectacles,
majestically tactful.

Tracking him down often felt
like a treasure hunt. The golden spoon,
found glinting on the ground one winter’s
day in Matlock Spa, was a sign –

or so we supposed, baffled
at his absence, shut out of the holiday flat
he’d hired to share, and looking for the key.
He’d gone off on a jaunt, or a ‘bummel’.

That word he returned to me,
new, once he’d finished the book
I gave (unread) as a birthday gift,
the classic by Jerome K. Jerome.

I’d thought it meant a three-seater cycle.
He corrected me kindly, but with a relish
for truth equal to his love of sweet food,
the maple syrup he brought on Shrove Tuesday

to pour on our pancakes. It lasted
into November, one week after
he died. Odd that I have the spoon,
but no syrup, now, to fill it.

Lucy Lewis
29 December 2004