Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2024
A Commoner’s Lamentation, poems by Fred Johnston.
A Commoner’s Lamentation
It’s another rotten day some fool calls summer
With foul rain and wet leaves and a streetful of idiots
And invisible things flapping and snapping
And dogs making fools of themselves expecting
Me to tog up and walk them in that glorious downpour
I can sense the lack of heat and sunlight doing
The sorts of things great grief might do
Worming from the deep inside the rotten planks of me
Until it’s easy to shout Sink! Sink! rotting barque!
I promise not to swim! And mean it, sweet for drowning.
If by any chance a sliver, like a wound, of sun
Applies itself corrosive and ridiculous
Before it’s time to turn the lights on, what mockery!
Too late for promises, I sink stern-first into TV’s dream
And think If this is death, I can handle it. Bring it on.
No Man’s Land
Happy
I’m staring into Niagara, six years old in a yachtsman’s cap
One wrong move and I’m down the slope and under Horseshoe Falls
The noise is absolute, white spray even at this height, and cameras
Held out like offerings over the low railings; Eisenhower
Was in The White House, everyone had a black-and-white TV
Sputnik whistled in the disputed heavens, Elvis played Canada.
Niagara roared, a hand on my back steadied my infant gyroscope –
I would not fall, not easily or by accident. My mother’s hair was
Held in by a headscarf, it was sunbright hair and swallowed light like
A mirror. She must have been young, girly young, and maybe happy.