Two poems

 

My Father Took a Good Degree

After Robert Burns

 

My father took a good degree, and high-jumped for his college,

but ’30’s England lacked the jobs to dignify his knowledge.

He scratched around to earn a pound but little could he score-O,

until he joined the Royal Army Educational Corps-O.

 

This Oxford grad, now paid and glad, soon learned the army dance,

a cipher-jig with telephones in 1940s France.

As panzers churned and Dunkirk burned and France took to its roads-O

my father’s fight was shedding light on mild or fatal codes-O,

 

gave Fritz the slip by taking ship, he sailed from St Nazaire,

and ended quick in Reykjavik decoding Arctic air.

Then further north he found a berth in pretty Akureyri,

and passed his hours refining powers in Iceland’s syllabary.

 

As time went by my father’s eye fell on his landlord’s daughter

who brought down to his boiler room his tea and shaving water.

He tried strong verbs and nouns on her to stimulate liaison,

Lovestruck, he told his journal, “Que le bon Dieu sauve ma raison!”

 

Along the beach my dad made speech to Valgy Bjarnisdottir.

He said her lovely nose required the whiskers of an otter.

She told him Englishmen were full of surplus roasted beef-O

and he replied her beauty simply beggared all belief-O.

 

My father courted properly and went to Valgy’s father,

with formal word he there averred he loved his daughter rather.

Old Bjarni smiled and blessed the match … bring on the wedding jelly.

But army plans are army plans, they sent my dad to Delhi,

 

where he must sit in tropic kit beneath the ceiling fans

school havildars for India’s post-independence plans.

Each night he filled an airmail form and pressed it with a blotter,

contrived its rise through wartime skies to Valgy Bjarnisdottir.

 

Ten million folk with lots of smoke converged upon the Fuhrer,

but text supports my father’s thoughts had seized on something purer.

His airmails, hurled across the world, to Valgy Bjarnisdottir

could not attract one ounce of flak or hostile aircraft spotter.

 

The bunkers burned, the peace returned, belligerence extinguished,

this Iceland bride now smiled beside her groom as she was Englished,

the weird post-war brought kids galore, among them petit moi

who could not tell what was the spell of daddy’s sheer voilà.

 

My father travelled through the world and never felt an alien,

He rose to brigadier in armies British and Australian,

retired to build grandfather clocks and farm his self-possession,

a fluent mind which when inclined, we said “was now in session”.

 

 

Dave Judge on Wells

 

This well is called Adrenalin,

it’s deep and bricked and you fall in

to look up at that “O” of seeing

with dark circumference round your being.

 

You tread a stuff you think is water

aware it keeps your fate for later.

But water here is volatile,

and this perplexes you awhile …

 

Eels? Down here at this extreme?

Then where the elvers, where the stream?

No light to see the seethe you feel

dismaying nerves that are not steel.

 

Then in that dark, at once, you know

the truth about that tangling flow,

It’s brownsnake, blacksnake, writhing tiger

that nosed for water, were too eager.

 

A few still live, though most now rot

to recompose as you do not.

Dave Judge at Tilley’s made this live

with quiet smile and fine reserve.

 

 

 

Alan Gould