Winter hearts

finger-written on
a rear windscreen
in the snow:
      I 
 





   you


still visible next morning
though slipped a bit
sagged by gravity
and a slight thaw:
a metaphor 

Two poems by Chris Carroll

I

One enters sleep

with a sliver of hope:

that fragile childhood thread

still connected to the wobbly tooth

and wakes to find it gone.

II

Fragments from a lost heart

Life simpliciter

Glimpses of passion and purpose

From another world

Fall as shadows

Around the walls of this prison

Deportation

Colnbrook Immigration Reception Centre

Deportation

Sunday morning early

most homes still curtained-blind

I saw a pair of shoes

gaudy-gold giddy

night-out for fun shoes

some dozen yards apart

a half-pint bitter glass

abandoned unfinished

a lost thin silver ring

unconnected except

by my morning walk.

Tuesday morning later

I recognised a shoe

a grubby once-gold shoe

footloosed but not free lost

some distance from its old

place quite unconnected

except in my telling.

This morning early

homes still hard-blinded shut

against the dawn your door

exploded dragged vanned you

forcibly flew you back

not-home disconnected.

Plus ça change

I remember when Margaret Thatcher entered No. 10 with the words of St Francis of Assissi and Tony Blair to the sound of Things can only get better. Both in defiance of reality.

This time it's strong and stable, working arrangements, and new politics.

Ludo

Ready. set,
hundred metre dash, off
before you know,
ready,
ready,
hit-drop-run-run.
wait,
wait
run, run, home. Again
hit-drop-run-caught
out,
oh,
but, angled for though
a surprise,
on the board
playing chess from the inside
not sure where to move
or when, or why,
or whether there’s pleasure
in another piece captured
till, didn’t see that coming,
kicked feather-flight so high
I can see the whole game now
every racket ready to
smash me into the
Netball! Yes!
Game! Match! Tournament!
Victory! in fantasy –
in fact I find
whist too slick for me
I knock,
lay my bones down,
quite dominoed now
told each card to play
in my final cribbage.

Pen

A pen is
not a word

a word is
not this shape

the shape is
not a sound

the sound is
not a thought

a thought is
not a pen.

Fountain

Fountain




Described by stylus into the

parterre, a fountain: in design

quatrefoil, lilypads perhaps,

the waters of creation held

by a low concrete wall, its eye,

a double Janus-head, addressed

the four corners of the round world,

stone-blind. Its north face was carved as

a child, the next a chimera,

the third was that of a soldier,

and the final was agèd, each

spouted limpid water as though

it were given truth, the life-cup,

the tale of wealth and bought vision,

as though it were cheap as bone, and

all the splashed blood were washed away,

forgot, and each hour o’ the clock

a watchman’s shout, a phallic plume

declared time’s subjugation,

the Sisyphean victory.








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