Resolution
Hungover in the cow-fresh air,
they leave their after-party friends
to stuffing frosty cars with leftovers
and sleeping children. She wishes
that they had a dog, or tartan travel rugs.
The pub is mulled and mistletoed,
ashine with polished warming pans and holly.
The Sheffield Pipe Band skirls into the bar and out,
unlikely in their kilts. The landlord smiles at her.
The band leader, the men in bright new scarves,
the other fireside lovers: everyone is smiling.
She removes, too late, the reindeer hat.
He heaves her uphill to the torpid castle:
kisses her against the wishbone walls,
scowls at glockenspiels and trumpets
blarting up through crow-filled trees.
They march down singing Wenceslas.
This is going to be a fruitful year,
she thinks. Or better than the last.
Jo Bell
New Year Canticles
1.
The new government is the old government,
The new year is the old year in new shoes,
The new testament is the old one reversed,
The new man is the old man newly cursed.
The new poor are the old poor plus a few.
The new itinerant is the old bum.
The new lie is the old lie, and then some.
The new Titanic steams on through old scum.
2.
When they blew away the dust they found
a brand new darkness underneath.
It surprised them. They prodded it with sticks.
It didn’t move for ages, then it stirred.
It wanted naming but they couldn’t find the word
3.
You think of your children in the early light
of the new era. You think of birds in flight.
You think of a cup in the kitchen in the broad
sunlight of mid November, of the faint noise of the road.
You think of the rhetoric of time
as a faintly bombastic ticking. You think of buds
ticking away in the branch under the rime.
The emblematic delicacy of soap suds.
4.
And the notion of an uninterrupted passage
towards happiness, the joy of the unkissed moment
waiting to fly past you, reassuringly off-message,
like a ludicrous, airborne, angelic monument,
Cupid on a bender, a sweet urgent gust
of well-being. Love among the just.
George Szirtes
*Jo Bell works across the UK on a huge range of poetry projects, including National Poetry Day and Ledbury Poetry Festival. She has no sense of humour at all so won't be adding a witty comment about her hobbies.
*George Szirtes: Intended scientist, drawn into bad company of poetry and art, leapt into translation. Published shelffuls of books, won some glittering prizes. Bits of radio and telly but only in an obscure kind of way. Talks a lot.
really liked the Jo Bell one
I really liked your poem George. It made me think of the Black Swan factor and randomness, but the joy of ordinariness too…Factors in our lives that can be really quite refreshing. I liked the way from stanza 2, the rhythm of your poem changes. Thanks.