Poetry:

2 Poems for the Weekend

by James McGoram

15 November 2009

Garlic

if i could ask you for the key
to the grass beneath my feet, to unlock
the music of generations that have
lain against it here
in sun
in rain
and in death

and in the hope that we would be here
to suck it in

that there is no death
no song too foreign
no heart that wouldn't be here

instead of course I stand in the shed
and look at a wall of tools
and wonder what in the hell
I'm meant to use,
and take a guess.

Gulls

I walked around the gardens
where the gulls did a little dance for an
old drunk who did nothing but laugh
And I suppose he’d seen gulls fight in the past when
The darkness was not a blanket to push through with his hands
But more a land of imagination,

It’s seventeen or nineteen degrees perhaps
When the rain starts to come down.