Jamie Grant: Two Poems

The Written Word

The spoken word can sometimes be forgotten,

but phrases carefully set out in hard

clear script, once written, can never be unwritten.

Thus, at the end of a marriage, and at the end

of more than two decades, a wife presented

her soon-to-be former husband

with a children’s exercise book, in which

all of his offences against her had

been recorded, set out in each

case in careful handwriting, where an instance

would be underlined, sometimes, and linked

by arrows or stars to a previous offence,

such as: November 20. Late to come

home, without notice which was connected

to: Once again did not come home,

the two examples being more than ten years

apart. The infractions he remembered

clearly: office functions, with beers

and the last train missed, and he knew as well

that his guilt was never to be questioned,

nor would it have helped to tell

her that most of the crimes were trivial:

Dishwasher—again—incorrectly stacked.

Accumulating over several

years, they…