Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2024.
Ordinary days, poems by Fred Johnston.
Ordinary days
‘even an hour of this
would be too long . . . .’
– Diane di Prima: War Haiku: Lebanon. July 2006
This is what we mean by ordinary days
Ordinary slaughters in foreign parts
Safely tucked in the frame of a TV screen
And faces full of opinions and the bills more or less up-to-date
And nothing treacherous through the letterbox
Or dangling in the Inbox; no GP appointments, if it is winter
There is an icing of snow on far hills
The dogs have been given their worming pills
That ache in the lower intestine seems to have receded
You have a vague, weird notion of being needed
You will not see out another decade, but that’s fine too
The Big Amazement came for others, it’ll come for you.
You have lived snug inoffensive days
At least the police have stayed away
No midnight knocks, no gulag apprehensions
You read the novels, that was quite enough, how terrible
The lives some people endure, fortunate you
To be where you are, with your milk and honey
Pasteurised and plentiful and the weather fair to mild
Nothing rattling in the closet, no traumas defiled
A more-or-less ordinary soul, though that one incident
Forty-odd years back, if you dwell on it, turns you penitent
Even that can be classed as ordinary, (she’s over seventy too)
It’s what happened in those days, and it happened to you.
A poem of no consequence
My grandfather’s moustache
Had the warm smell of pipe tobacco
And even now I settle
When I smell pipe smoke in any unfamiliar room,
He’s left me that comfort
When he died they said he possessed at eighty-five
The heart and lungs of a man of forty –
There was no physical reason he should lie
In a hospital bed and fade out
We said his wife of sixty years had just died
He’d switched off, the rooms he inhabited
Had no further use for light –
He was the best man I’ve known
He was quiet and sturdy like an old wall
Or deliberate and absolute as an old wall
But when she went she pulled him after her
And that can happen
Two wars and a revolution couldn’t do it
Her gasp for breath was the storm and fury
Her midnight chest pain
Was the bullet passing through him
It was uncomplicated, all of it
Simple, and we all should be so lucky
No lingering, no peevish hanging about
Just a sweet lightness in the head
Be the only one to know exactly what’s happening
Feel the room darken in the middle of the day
It’s not personal. Not unique. There’s nothing to say.
Drone footage of an exploding man
My strange brother
Putting more weight on one leg than the other
As I often do
On a flat surface
Of sand and stones, you become empty space
As I often do
Dark suit
A human image in a sandscape. figurative, mute
In a blaze of sand
Editor’s blur
As if a drone’s remote indifferent eye sees more
Than mind can stand.
© Fred Johnston
Fred Johnston was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951. Working as a journalist for some years, he was a poetry reviewer with Books Ireland and The Irish Times, among other publications: he also reviewed for The Sunday Times and Poetry Ireland Review. His work, both prose and poetry, has appeared in The New Statesman, The Guardian, Stand, The Spectator, Iron, Orbis, The Irish Times, The London Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, The Sewanee Review, Southwards, The Moth, The Stinging Fly. Founder of CUIRT international literature festival (Galway,) his most recent poetry collection is ‘Rogue States’ (Salmon Poetry, 2019.) He is also a novelist and short story writer. He lives in Galway in the West of Ireland.