Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Six
November- December 2025
The Last Supper, poems by Ian Watson.
The Last Supper
In the Cathedral Museum, Bremen
Thirteen colleagues round a groaning table;
the gaffer is eating what looks like a cat. The traitor
with the very prominent nose prays
ostentatiously. The bread of treachery
is passed from hand to hand from an oval dish.
The decent squeak of smooth oak floors, designer
lighting, hushed and reverent tourist chat;
a smattering of Russian or Ukrainian.
How plain all this must seem to someone orthodox.
No mediaeval smell, no draughts, no damp,
a volunteer guide who talks to everyone
a polished dagger beyond stainless glass
shining rustless steel from a time
when nothing ever stayed stainless
The crypt is hidden, as a crypt should be
cold oozes from the floor
to my left in the rock wall an electric socket
Warm brown and orange candles
trams rumble from afar
the orange and brown of the bishop’s clothes
what were the original colours?
An elderly volunteer with a farting shoe
replaces the candle. Taking notes, I hear him return.
The Chair
‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne …’ (Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, 190)
‘The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne …’ (The Waste Land, II)
The chair she sat on, like a lean great aunt,
sits straight-backed, tight-lipped and spindly-legged;
its features are gaunt, its tone disapproving
of a story it will never tell.
The sofa she chilled on, like a stranded whale,
gasps briefly at him, creaks as he passes,
oozing bereavement, leaking loss.
Books she never read, like bookends of themselves,
whisper their titles in the shelves: Flesh and Blood,
After You’d Gone, An Evening of Long Goodbyes,
The Sense of an Ending, Paradise Lost.
Bottles she drank from, like bowling pins,
clink dustily together at the breeze-kissed curtain,
trapping the light and bending it green,
certain of nothing but the bottle bank –
wishing for it just to be over.
Enduring Love, like an oblong coaster,
still lies on the wicker stool, bookmarked
halfway, red wine on the cover.
Remote
Up, out on the Mournes it was just him and the sheep
Now the whin is dark and rainswept
There is a whistle in the chimney
Once a week to Tesco’s in the Fiesta
and pick up the Social Security
Newry and Belfast for clothes and bigger stuff
He had noticed her growing aloof
her constant trips to ‘Out’ in the Mini
Was that business with the ewe the start of it
Her indifference grew into distance
The week with a girlfriend in Hull
a weekend with her sister on Inishmore
When he called round the neighbouring farms
to ask the farmer’s wives if they’d heard
some were standoffish, some didn’t come to the door
He looked for her everywhere: in the next-to-one village pub
in the ladies’ toilet of the Loyalist Working Men’s Club
behind and before the counter of the nearest Food Bank
He cross dressed into a meeting of the WI, appealed
to the audience at the Country Women’s Guild
In the end he even stuck his hand down
the back of the clapped-out chesterfield
Intensive Care
Somebody stole his umbrella in the waiting room.
He’d only been with her a quarter of an hour;
she was easily tired but her responses were good.
She could now not only just shake her head, but nod;
no mean feat with that long neck scar.
There were five of them, before and after.
Were they all there together, stuck on standby
for the same news from inside? Or had
they got to know each other in a parallel wait?
When he saw it was gone
(he’d thrown it casually into the corner
when the intercom said he could go through),
he asked of course, but nobody …
They must have taken it by mistake, was all
one lady could say – the one who claimed he’d
taken it in with him. No, he didn’t (the one who could
have been her daughter): In the corner – there, against the wall.
Outside, it was pissing down loud and hard and vertical,
bouncing off the pavement as he hiked up his hood.
As he crossed the forecourt in a rotting vegetable mood,
he too was gathering beasts: of revenge – and none of them verbal.
If they’d nicked it and he’d caught them with it
sitting in the visitors’ café, they would have been
in A&E or back up to Intensive Care post-haste.
But then: if it had been inadvertent,
maybe if they’d received bad news in here,
he just hoped they wouldn’t be standing soon
under a red-and-yellow checked umbrella
at someone’s open grave.
© Ian Watson
Ian Watson is originally from Belfast but lives in Bremen, Germany. He is the author of two poetry collections in English: Riverbank City (Blaupause Verlag, 2013) and Granny’s Interpreter (Salmon Poetry 2016); a further collection Somewhere, Far Away, a Radio, is forthcoming. His poetry has been published in anthologies in Ireland, Britain Germany and the United States, and his recent German-language non-fiction includes Spielfelder: eine Fußballmigration, on football and identity, and Bremen erlesen, a literary and cultural guide to his second-home city in Germany (both with Edition Falkenberg).
He also publishes translations of poetry from and into German and English. He has worked regularly for radio and also made the film Cool to be Celtic for German and French television (arte 1999). He has completed his first novel, East Antrim (working title). He is a steering committee member of the Literaturhaus Bremen.