Beyond the Storm - The People’s Vote

Occupation: (Lockdown April 2020)

Here

in the garden

in that dark corner

behind the outhouse

with knots of fern

and sullen moss

I’m kneeling

and jabbing

at rubble

like

there’s no tomorrow-

a cold sun behind me

the wind blowing

my body

stiff as a spade.

So I’m picking out

old bricks and clinker

the pallid worms

slowly recoiling

and I’m thinking

that under this crap

there’s some earth

we can use

but really

just marking time

into bundles of stones-

a secular rosary if you like-

and whether we’ll use what I find

I don’t know.

Short-Term Investment

I am not here on holiday. This shift
is not a day-trip – selfie and move on.
Here in the ICU I work as long
as home-grown doctors, am exposed the same
but with more risk. I do have darker skin.

When my wife sees me off I see the fear
that’s written on her face. If I get ill?
If I transmit infection to our son?
And if I die, who’ll get the mortgage paid?
Will they be locked up? Shoved on to a plane?

My visa is extended for a year.
So, just enough to see this crisis through
and then we’re back to normal, where I’m shed
like soiled PPE. Disposable.

Corn Chandelier

The road bends, stalks past stippled fields. The January sky is fallow:
cloudless and blue. A lightning spliced oak leans on its charred elbow
like a farmhand. Our estate agent waves. We pull up in a bus-stop.
Put our hazard lights on. At two in the morning the Chinese state
authorities issue a notice. The white, cut crystal sun sparkles. I shuck
my heavy winter coat. Which causes an exodus. The hills bristle with a
stover of cut pine and spruce. Three hundred thousand people. Inside
the house it’s calm, crepuscular like a forest. The ceilings and walls
covered by a dark husk of varnished wood. We could rip that out.
C says. By ten a.m., Wuhan is in lockdown. The kernel, eleven million
people, quarantined. This is the beginning. C’s stomach is swelling.
Secretively pushing through the spread leaves of her jacket. The WHO
announce that this is unprecedented in public health history. Inside her
you’re now the length of a peeled ear of corn. A chandelier of grain.
Baby corn, sweetcorn, popcorn, dent. The edible fruit of grasses. It’s
said the corn mother planted a piece of her heart. That from another
world came a green clad stranger with yellow hair. That the first
humans were made from cornmush. Our flesh from maize. How,
despite pestilence, the hunters and gatherers became sedentary.
Formed villages and towns. Irrigation. Calendars. Ceremony. Gods.
The stairs are steep. The bathroom is in the wrong place. We could
move it, I say, tapping walls. There’s increasing evidence of human to
human transmission, the virus scything through the population like a
keen blade. Corn is lined up in irregular rows on the ear. A naked light
bulb dangles from the white ceiling. C trails a finger along the
windowsill, looks out across the valley at the pulsing river, chased
deep into the valley floor. There’s no chance of flooding, she says.
All public transport: buses, trains and ferries are suspended. Bound
sheaves are arranged into stooks in the field. Outside, the small back
garden catches the winter sun like a cough in cupped hands. The
garden path is inexplicably laid with bathroom wall tiles. Be careful, C
says. These are quite slippery. She takes my hand. Pollen’s windblown
from the tassel to silk. I feel confident. It needs quite a lot of work but,
we could do it. Make it ours. We’ve got a drill, a Bosch multi-tool and
a whole season until you’re due. Before modern machinery all work:
tilling, harrowing, ploughing, sowing, was done by labourers and
livestock. A black, metal crocodile creeps headfirst down the garage
wall. We open the locked door. There’s space for a large family
car. On YouTube a darkhaired boy presses his new paper nose into the
lens of a cameraphone. Behind him the reaped street's void.

Dungeness

Before the world shut we drove
a car to the nuclear coast.
Wind lodged in our throats
groaned over pebbles and corrugated
roofs which surely – we agreed –
knew harsher storms than this.

Train tracks led to nowhere.
The smell of fish wrong side of fresh
hung on mangled nets, on air and
carpets of biting stonecrop where
I crouched to piss because the pub
was closed. We couldn’t speak
for gusts so we held hands, sunk
and clambered over debris made tender
by years of salt and promised the place –
one day we would come back.

Newly Qualified

You tell us about the x-rays, the cloud-blind

lungs, cratered. I’m coping, Mum, don’t worry.

You send us pictures of your hands, jewelled

with scabs, a livid bracelet at each wrist.

Martyr’s hands. Not some flashy being eaten

by lions, but a patient, daily scourging.

Trussed up in apron, mask, visor, gloves, sick

of your own breath and sweat, the hems of your

three sizes too-big scrubs trail the ward floor.

A queen with no one to carry your train.

I send expensive cream through the post, dream

of kissing those swollen knuckles back

to rosy, baby plumpness. Grown up hands,

now, the future flowing through them like sand.

Wet Washing

wet washing
hangs in dirty windows
keeping rooms half dark
in the corkscrew afternoon sun

wheezing on my bed
I suffocate under the t-shirts shadow
falling on me like funeral grief
for a friend I couldn’t stand