MOTIF ON AN OLD SCOTS BALLAD
O
where have you been, Lord Randall, my son?
I walked over the Park to ALDI, under the
pylons
Where the joggers obsessively go, through
the rain-sot grass
With my head down all the way.
O
what did you see, Lord Randall, my son?
Nothing. No one. And I assume I went
unseen
The sooner it was done, I was coming back
again
To touch flame to a hearth fire.
O
who did you meet, Lord Randall, my son?
I met no one. It was not a day for meeting
people
What would we talk about? A new plague?
Nuclear war?
I prefer to take the car.
O
what did you hear, Lord Randall, my son?
Nothing. All sounds are one sound now. I
have a hole
In my right sock, an ache under my
breast-bone
I fear the postman.
NEWS JUST IN
I’ve had enough of death by text and
Messenger
First thing in the morning, like Great War
telegrams
Reports of old friends living by machine
The vigorous, vivacious ones especially
Who are not slipping at all peacefully
Away, who cannot speak or hear, drowned in
morphine.
There is no response – I have no response
To the flat hysteria coded in the flat
language
On the ‘phone, sentences that barely say
The obvious; that a world has fallen in
That God’s a joke, there’s only dark
within
The rooms once loved; all life turned
past-tense anyway.
Give me wars on gigantic scale
I can take all that, buttering my
breakfast toast
Rendered down and carved into newsy
McBytes
Digestible as weather, familiar as milk
In tea, death in silk
A marmalade of information, sporty
interviews.
But not these others whom I know and knew
The drain of the duty they unthinkingly
impose
Death is selfish, the sick are
narcissists, there should be
Some warning in advance of it all
Just time enough to let the right words
fall
On the scripted tongue; or the screen, if
necessary.
CANTICLE
I was more than a little in love with Mary
From my schoolboy’s nest up top at the
front of the ‘bus
I would spy her waiting to board
In the green uniform of the Fort of the
Little Pony
And the head of a pony was badged to her
jacket
And the late afternoon went down on our
Council estate
I could net the smell of her short hair
faintly
From three seats over. Lust-sick enough
for both of us
My clay-struck homunculus roared
In silence, with the violence of being
young and lonely
The head of a pony was badged to her
jacket
We kept no clocks, our unformed hearts
would regulate
When we rose together abruptly
Descended the curling stairs to step
across
To the doors, intimate as skin; the big
‘bus snored
Itself hoarse and caressed the kerb for us
very gently
The head of a pony was badged to her
jacket
And the late afternoon fell over our
Council estate.
*The Fort of the Little Pony is a translation from the original Irish place-name.
Fred Johnston was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951. His most recent collection of poems is 'Rogue States,' (Salmon Poetry 2019.) For some years he worked in journalism and in the mid-Seventies, with Neil Jordan and Peter Sheridan, he founded the old Irish Wtiters' Co-operative (Co-Op Books.) In 2019, he received an Irish Arts Council Literary Bursary to complete a new selection of short stories. Recent work has appeared in The Spectator, STAND, The Dalhousie Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Temenos Academy Review, Dreich, among others. He lives in Galway on the West of Ireland.
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