Out of the Blue by Helen Dunmore Read Free Book Online Page A

roses:
    cold, greeny things under the snow –
    fantastic hellebores, harbingers
    of the century’s worst winter.
    On little fields stitched over with drystone
    we broke snow curds, our sledge
    tossing us out at the wall.
    For twelve years a plateau of sea
    stopped at my parents’ window.
    Here the slow Flatholm foghorn
    sucking at the house fabric
    recalls my little month-old brother,
    kept in the house for weeks
    while those snow days piled up like plates
    to an impossible tower.
    They were building the match factory
    to serve moors seeded with conifers
    that year of the Bay of Pigs,
    the year of Cuba, when adults muttered
    of taking to the moors with a shotgun
    when the bomb dropped.
    Such conversation, rapaciously
    stored in a nine-year-old’s memory
    breeds when I stare down Bridgwater Bay
    to that glassy CEGB elegance, Hinkley
    Point, treating the landscape like snow,
    melting down marshes and long, lost
    muddy horizons.
    Fir thickets replace those cushions
    of scratchy heather, and prick out the noise
    of larks in the air, so constant
    I never knew what it was.
    Little hellebores with green veins,
    not at all tender, and scentless
    on frosty ground, with your own small
    melt, your engine of growth:
    that was the way I liked you.

I imagine you sent back from Africa
    I imagine you sent back from Africa
    leaving a patchwork of rust and khaki
    sand silt in your tea and your blood.
    The metal of tanks and cans
    puckers your taste-buds.
    Your tongue jumps from the touch
    of charge left in a dying battery.
    You spread your cards in the shade
    of roving lorries whose canvas
    tents twenty soldiers.
    The greased cards patter
    in chosen spaces.
    I imagine you sent back from Africa
    with a tin mug kept for the bullet hole
    in at one angle and out another.
    You mount the train at the port
    asking if anywhere on earth
    offers such grey, mild people.
    Someone draws down the blind.
    You see his buttons, his wrist,
    his teeth filled to the roots.
    He weakens the sunlight for you
    and keeps watch on your face.
    Your day sinks in a hollow of sleep
    racket and megaphoned voices.
    The troop-ship booms once. Laden
    with new men she moves down the Sound
    low in the water, egg-carrying.
    But for you daylight
    with your relieved breath
    supping up train dirt.
    A jolt is a rescue from sleep
    and a glaze of filth from the arm-rest
    patches your cheek. You try to catch voices
    calling out stations closer to home.

In memoriam Cyril Smith 1913–1945
    I’ve approached him since childhood,
    since he was old, blurred,
    my stake in the playground chants
    and war games,
    a word like ‘brother’
    mixed with a death story.
    Wearing shorts and a smile
    he stayed in the photograph box.
    His hair was receding early.
    He had Grandpa’s long lip and my mother’s love.
    The jungle obliterates a city
    of cries and murmurs,
    bloody discharges
    and unsent telegrams.
    Now he is immanent
    breaking off thoughts
    printing that roll of film
    one sweaty evening,
    Four decades
    have raised a thicket of deaths around him
    a fence of thorn and a fence of roses.
    His mother, my grandmother,
    his father, his brother,
    his camp companions
    his one postcard.
    The circle closes
    in skin, limbs
    and new resemblances.

    We wanted to bring him
    through life with us
    but he grows younger.
    We’ve passed him
    holding out arms.

The parachute packers
    The parachute packers with white faces
    swathed over with sleep
    and the stale bodily smell of sheets
    make haste to tin huts where a twelve-hour
    shift starts in ten minutes.
    Their bare legs pump bicycle pedals,
    they clatter on wooden-soled sandals
    into the dazzling light over the work benches.
    They rub in today’s issue of hand-cream.
    Their fingers skim on the silk
    as the unwieldy billows of parachute flatten
    like sea-waves, oiled, folded in sevens.
    The only silk to be had
    comes in a military packaging:
    dull-green, printed, discreet,
    gone into fashioning parachutes
    to be wondered at like