Broken biscuits
for H and PB

The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school

we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home

across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take

the pennies offered up in supplication
for the fearsome shards of ginger nut

the sugar-crystalled shortcake crumbs
the candied brandy snaps

made of the hardest nothing
hollow like the rollers mothers used

at night nothing in the gaps between
the gaps spun on somehow air

hardened as though calcified reduced
to skeletons of some secret

architectural confection
we would never know

scoured of flesh and sinew brain and
motivation like the ruined sea-shells

and the wasted crabs whose eyes we
winkled out with pins then washed

them in the sea out first discoveries
and you came round for tea

today and couldn’t find the sitting-room
every time

you held my latest book and
you were generous

I thought it was emotion
your mouth less animated

still remembered smile
your hands forgetting how to stop

I passed a plate of biscuits
which you no longer eat you no longer eat

and you looked up as though ashamed
I saw the colour washed from eyes

that knew me once
the long walks home

across the heavy heat of afternoon
with paper bags of broken biscuits

on lucky days.

Stephen Keeler is a poet and memoirist. Originally from the north-east of England, he moved to Sweden as a teacher, in 1973. During a forty-year career in international language education, based in London, he lived and worked in China, Vietnam, former Yugoslavia and in most of the eastern European satellite states of the former USSR.

Widowed in 2003, he moved from west London to the north-west Scottish highlands to write full-time, in 2010. He won the first Highland Literary Salon Poetry Prize (judged by John Glenday) in 2012. He received a New Writing Award from the Scottish Book Trust, in 2014. His first poetry pamphlet, While You Were Away, was published by Maquette Press in 2018. A selection of his poems, Scar Tissue, won a Coast to Coast to Coast imprint award in 2019, and his second pamphlet, They Spoke No English, was published by Nine Pens Press, in
2021. His poetry is widely published in magazines, journals, anthologies and online and has been short-listed for numerous prestigious poetry prizes.

His memoir ‘in fragments of a foreign language’, 50 Words for Love in Swedish, was published by Archetype Books in 2021 and won the 2022/23 People’s Book Prize Beryl Bainbridge Award and is described by the author and critic A L Kennedy as ‘a deeply companionable book about the ways we know each other’, and by the novelist Marika Cobbold as ‘a joy from beginning to end’. He recently devised, edited and introduced Ten Poems About Running for Candlestick Press (2022). Small Unnecessary Things is his latest collection written during his writing residency in Skara, south-west Sweden, in November 2023.