ENGLISH RAIN

This rain, this unremitting stoical drench

that defined everything by fully soaking it

in a war that never started. Men were smoking it

in offices through rain-blurred windows. They stood

in melancholy doorways, mentally stroking it

as you might a sodden dog. Rain was a  hood

you wore in the street and took off once at home.

you lived by for months on end, that would come

on time like buses that once arrived don’t go.

This was childhood in winter, the proper medium

for study and squalor, into which you’d grow

like a plant into soil, putting down your roots.

Each shower was eternity, an endless flow

of sustenance and drowning. Pull on your boots,

wear your raincoat. It’s winter now forever.

It is time in one of its worn-out old suits,

that glorified gentleman inclined to shiver

and grumble. Meanwhile you watch the children run

like something ending that has not begun.

PEASOUPER

Sometimes the whole place merges into grey:

lampposts, bollards, shop windows, buses, vanish

into a soup that’s neither night nor day

but blankness, like a face without a blemish,

a steamed-up mirror with a picture of nobody,

nothing but fog, nothing from start to finish.

The streets are soaked. Grass verges, slick and muddy,

are slush-filled pulp. You tread through clots

of thickening  mist that seems to pulse and eddy

like the sea while tying itself in knots.

Where has everyone gone? Perhaps they’ve drowned,

or hidden in invisible dark slots

that won’t materialise until they’re found.

Then one appears, a vague form looming up

then swaying off, an apparition gowned

in fog, discolouration in a half-full cup

of forgotten tea. So spirits one by one

appear then fade at the point where things stop

being things. This then is the fabled London

of the novels, where everyone is lost

in stories that tail off, then carry on

without them, without echo, at no cost.

THE BIG FREEZE

To be so cold and out of sync, snowed in,

snowed out, trapped as if for ever, white

as if for ever, next to the paraffin

heater that stank of danger every night

was fun at first, then farce, then edge of doom

to watch it pile up, brilliant and bright

fading to brown, sky a permanent gloom.

It was history-as-present where we were

suspended in time, locked inside a room

with England covered, frozen in a blur

of swirling snow, all definition gone.

We were another country, made of fur

and language, with our woolly sweaters on,

layer on layer, in a land of Ice Queen eyes

like frozen darts. Snow was falling by the ton.

If something as soft as this could paralyse

the country what might a fat bomb not do?

It was a land of slippage and surprise.

What wonderful icicles, what splendid new

patterns on glass! We looked on the bright side

of life and knew that somehow we’d get through,

another chapter in the nation’s pride.