i.m. Martin Cooke (1955-2021)

‘Behold the fowls of the air’

Matthew 6:26

This is the way it happens: a voice on the phone

explaining that one we took for granted

is no longer there, that junk food

and countless pints that wrecked

your balance and strained your heart

became in the end too much –

even at your shuffling pace.

Refusing to put a penny a...

Read and leave comments (5)

The King of the Delta Blues

The hellhounds always trailed him –

for that’s the drift of legends. 

Fuelling spooks with shots

of malt, he wailed out blues

across the Delta.

Between us now the record

crackles bleakly, his scratchy voice,

a conjured ghost, sings clear

as barrelhouse belles who fleeced him

strut across my sight.

In the rattling dives he ...

Read and leave comments (0)

for Paul

Going upstairs, I think of him still

in the bathroom, crooning. It's Danny Boy

or some doomed melody dredged up

from a past we're unable to share.

Nearly all of the words are missing

as he tries half-heartedly to reinvent them;

while the tune is sprightly,

pepped up for a night on the tiles.

When I played my records he told me

that music always need...

Read and leave comments (2)

All those years of it, the same

vague journey every place we went,

driving to work each holiday

in a choky, smoke-filled den

at the back of my father's Transit.

Life was the business of earning

your keep; no peace for a drone

in a house where you paid your way.

And each time my school books

were laid aside and the pencil-work

had ceased, it was back to early

s...

Read and leave comments (1)

Il faut parier Blaise Pascal

Bound over for playing pitch and toss

or, more portentously, having gambled

on Her Majesty's Highway,

my father was always an expert

at weighing up the odds,

made light of his brush with the law.

His gambling a science and pastime,

he never lost much, but knew

in the end that the world is flawed.

At best you could only break even.

...

Read and leave comments (1)

The clanking compound of the brewery

– where Dad did casual shifts

when building work was scarce –

is buried now beneath the floors

of a multi-storey car park

and chat that drifts across

from cappuccino pavements.

Born to a scant inheritance

of rushy Sligo acres, my dad was bred

like his brothers to follow the work,

sending remittances home

from London, Readin...

Read and leave comments (1)

The closest my dad ever got to poetry

was when he savoured some word

like pugilist, or the tip-toe springiness

he sensed in bob and weave,

his unalloyed delight in the flytings

and eyeball-to-eyeball hype

that went with big fight weigh-ins.

And maybe I should have been

a contender, when I did my stint

in the ring, my dad convinced

I had style and the stamp of a w...

Read and leave comments (0)