Ian Watson – Cold Front from the East

Download PDF Here

Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One Nov-Dec 2026.

Cold Front from the East, poems by Ian Watson.

---

Cold Front from the East

The wind has turned. The weathervane
on the baker’s fat corner house
accuses me, not with beak and arrow but
with his big round breast and his comb, –
like he’s cock-a-doodling off to my right.
Herr Meyerdierks’s drapes are dancing
out the open window as he banishes his cigar
and closes out the neighbours with the night.

Then a frosty tap on the top of my head.
And all the while a colder whirl as the next gust,
that feels like straight from Poland, pokes my back.

Somewhere round the corner a toddler howls.
In a disapproving tone, two crows, one now
atop the rooster, Quaaark! in raucous unison.

---

In a Hospital near Home

Ward 5B

Between the beds, a folded walking frame;
hospital is for practising being old.

Outside on bikes and in strolling pairs,
people will be moving without cancer, scars or cares.

I know the view I cannot see from my clinic close to home:
the rhythm and the whine and pull of trams; the copy shop,
the taxi rank, the kiosk on the corner,
now all oblivious to my saline drip.

I want to break out and stride barefoot
on summerwarm cobbles and bare
my fangs to the Amazon vans.

The dappled shivering sun through
the oak tree outside is an anchor,
a promise for later. It moves and
caresses the bed. The voices from
beyond are from a beyond that is
both past and future.

Discharged

Just now, for the time being,
I will not run across the road,
like I used to, to catch oncoming trams,
scatter before me dogs and prams,
but hobble slowly to the stop and
wait ten minutes for the next.

Even without the forearm crutches,
I use pedestrian crossings still,
waiting with the children till
the wee red man walks green.

But when they take the tape off and
the scar stops aching like sciatica
and my fear of stairs has been dislodged,
I’ll sprint diagonally across the busy square
to chase the trams away from their stops.

---

Exile out on the Tiles

Coming home at this ungodly hour
over the bridge with the wind from the sea,
my only companion is the rattle, hiss and hum
on the tracks and trolleys of the red night tram.

It is the tram I should have taken
into the cobbled streets I have come to love.
The lone passenger in a red pompom hat
wipes his window oblivious of me.

I suddenly miss the childhood hum
of the electric Co-Op milkman’s float.
Uch, what a rattle that would make
in the morning to wake the Bremen dead.
But nostalgia is not what it used to be,
so I pull up the collar of my coat.

---

Am Weserbogen

Full-moon summer, and the whole place
swims in Hollywood Night.
On the river wall, rats are flirting
with each other and the boathouse cat.
Moths and mosquitoes dance round the lines
of long trestle tables where pilsners stand
and warm, unnoticed in the chat.

The beer garden hums and gossips;
the river breeze tempers the heat.
We eat pork Bratwurst in a bun and
mustard, with a corn Schnaps and a
half-litre golden pils to chase.

The barges are in for the night,
snoozing soft-lit on the riverside downstream.
Just like at home on the Lagan Embankment,
the streetlights swing out on a fairy light chain
along the curve of the river, in through
the city and port and out to the sea.

I know at least a dozen drinkers in the crowd;
this is a corner where the tourists never come.
This is where the Weser bends, five-minutes from home.
This is my second river, my neighbourhood.

---

© 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 third collection, Somewhere Far Away a Radio is forthcoming in 2027. His poems have been published in magazines and anthologies in Ireland, Britain, Germany and the United States, and his 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 (both with Edition Falkenberg).

He also publishes translations of poetry from and into German and English. He has worked regularly for radio and made the film Cool to be Celtic on Irish popular music for German and French television (arte 1999). After twenty years, he has recently retired as vice-chairman of the Literaturhaus Bremen, is a member of the British Poetry Society and active in their Germany Stanza group. His first novel, East Antrim, is complete and up for offers.