Three Poems by Fred Johnston

 

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.