Jamie Grant: Three Poems

Allergies

 

 

As a very small boy, before my memory

begins, I was prone to skin complaints

and other reactions. Given the allergy

test, where a doctor paints

 

the essence of various substances

over a series of scratches down one’s back,

I turned out to be sensitive

to almost everything, from haystacks

 

and pollens to house-dust, mould,

eggs, milk, and animal products such as cat,

dog and horse hair. The specialist told

my parents that

 

they would need to rid their home

of all these things. My father smiled.

“Wouldn’t it be easier,” he asked, like an evil gnome,

“to get rid of the child?”

                                                                     Jamie Grant

 

Generation Ajar

They cannot open a door

without leaving it ajar.

If they open a jar

the lid is left lying there

beside the cupboard door

 

that is also left unlatched.

Through the garden gate

they walk, leaving it

to bang in the wind.

All of this is matched

 

by lights allowed to shine,

fridges gaping,

bathroom taps dripping,

heaters in empty rooms:

the pattern seems to combine

 

to tempt one into attaching

the title “Generation Ajar”

to those with untucked

shirts and dishes unstacked.

The habit is catching.

 

Unbuttoned and unlaced,

I hurry out the door.

Is my concern

about this nothing more

than a matter of taste,

 

or is there a moral failing

in the generation

who articulate

fleeting thoughts

and the deepest feeling

 

by way of abbreviations

and acronyms?

Among such whims

there is no firm reply.

To confine emotions

 

to a plastic screen is to miss

the associations

of human connection

that the letters

spelled out would express.

 

To leave incomplete

a sentence,

a shoelace

or a shirt button

is perhaps to commit

 

a long-forgotten sin, the one

that Cranmer’s prayer

alluded to where

he said, We have left undone

that which we ought to have done.

                                 Jamie Grant

 

 

Legion d’Honneur

 

 

The first woman among the Allied forces

who came to liberate Paris at the end

of the Second World War happened to be

my mother—although at that time, of course,

she was yet to become a mother. She

belonged, instead, to the WAAF, tasked to send

 

messages in code as a signals

officer. The city seemed untouched by

the war, the wide nineteenth century

boulevards, the monuments and cathedrals,

buildings that survived their own history,

the Eiffel Tower intact as a New York sky

 

scraper—all had been spared, it was rumoured,

by the order of Hitler himself. The Germans

had left by the time my mother arrived,

and the Parisians were good-humoured,

on the whole, as most of them had lived

through the invasion in the way that humans

 

do, acting as though nothing much had changed.

But then the Germans came back, and that,

said my mother, was “quite interesting”.

There was a day when she had arranged

a rendezvous with her commanding

officer in an area patrolled by flat

 

eyed teenage boys, who were Resistance

fighters, hunting for collaborators

to punish in their way: they liked to rape

the women, and cut off their hair. From a distance,

to those boys, it appeared the horseshoe-shape

shoulder-flash that she wore had the letters

 

AUTRICHE, or Austria, rather than

AUSTRALIA. She was seized, and about

to be stripped and shaved, for the young boys

in their ignorance did not know the German

for Austria begins with an O; the noise

of the incident fortunately brought

 

some Allied troops to the rescue.

After

that, life went on, and seventy years went past.

To celebrate the centenary of Anzac

Day, the French Government made a gesture

toward the Australians who came back,

and who were still alive, with the highest

 

of their honours, the Legion d’Honneur.

Among the Chevaliers, my mother

was the only woman. A ceremony

took place in an underground lecture

theatre beneath the Shrine of Remembrance. As many

wheelchairs and walking frames and other

 

aids to mobility as the motors

in peak hour traffic cluttered the foyer

outside the sloping auditorium

where the French Ambassador pinned honours

on two dozen nonagenarian

former soldiers as well as my mother,

 

the only woman, mispronouncing most

of their names, and describing warfare

as “Ell”. Young men who had marched in formation

along tree-lined roadways while the French dust

coated their boots, or proved a nation’s

mettle, as fearless pilots in the air,

 

were reduced now to quavering, mottled

near-skeletons unable to stand for

the ceremony. Yet when they noticed

a female in their company they battled

one another for her attention, enticed

to rekindle lechery even war

 

could not extinguish. Each one in turn

spoke softly to her, leaning on stout canes

or metal frames, and she was delighted

by the evidence that she could still earn

such tough-whiskered masculine lust, however belated.

Outside, the skyline was bristling with cranes.

                                                                       Jamie Grant