Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock Read Free Book Online

lime juice;
    grudging grants of mustard and pickle;
    split peas, raisins, currants, rice,
    and half a pound of biscuit a day.
    A diet for the young and fit:
    monotonous, but not starvation –
    and Martha traded half her ration
    for extra lime juice from the crew.
    Their quarters, also, adequate.
    So not the middle passage; no.
    But not a pleasure cruise, either.
    A hundred days of travelling steerage
    under capricious canvas; Martha
    newly pregnant, struggling to manage
    the first four (Tom, Eliza, Joe,
    Annie); to keep them cool and clean
    from a two-gallon can of water;
    to calm their sleeping; to stay awake,
    so heavy, herself; to protect the daughter
    she rocked unborn in the swaying hammock
    below her ribs (who would be Jane).
    True, the family was together.
    But who could envy Martha? Sick
    with salt meat; thirsty; and gazing on
    a sky huge as the whole Atlantic,
    storm-waves like Slieve Gallion,
    and no more Ireland than went with her.

Train from the Hook of Holland
    Not pill-boxes, exactly: blocks
    of concrete, octagonal, serrated –
    house-sized fancy buttons, roofed
    with green turf. ‘Hitler’s Atlantic wall’
    says the man in the corner seat.
    On the other side of the train
    lambs running, and, yes, a canal.
    Then the low sun through a sea-haze
    neon-red over – Maassluis, is it?
    Some things, once you’ve got them,
    are difficult to get rid of.
    But we are happy, going somewhere.

Nelia
    She writes to me from a stony island
    where they understand none of her languages.
    Time has slipped out of its cogwheel:
    she walks looking at plants and insects,
    thinking without words, forgetting her home
    and her work and her callous, temporary young lover.
    Her children play like cicadas among the hills
    and are safe. She cooks when they are hungry,
    sleeps at will, wakes and runs to the sea.
    I remember exactly the colour of her daughter’s eyes –
    glass-green; and the boy’s light blue against his tan;
    hers less clearly. But I see them now
    as blue-black, reflecting an inky sky –
    pure, without motes or atmosphere – that extends
    uninterrupted from her to the still sun.

Moa Point
    At Moa Point that afternoon
    two biologists were searching rockpools
    for specimens. It was low tide.
    I watched. They rolled away a stone,
    fossicked in wet weed, described things
    rather self-consciously to each other.
    Then one of them put into my hands
    a cold heavy jelly: my first sea-slug.
    I peered gratefully down at it,
    turned it over – did nothing, surely?
    for them to laugh at. ‘See that?’
    said the one with freckles (they were both quite young)
    ‘it doesn’t seem to worry her.’
    ‘Oh, well,’ said the other ‘these local kids…’
    I kept my eyes down for a moment
    in solemn, scientific study;
    then said in my recently-acquired
    almost local accent ‘Thank you.’
    And firmly but gently (a vet with a kitten)
    handed it back.

Briddes
    ‘Briddes’ he used to call them,
    out of Chaucer – those cool
    early-morning creatures
    who tinkled in the elm trees.
    Briddes talked us awake
    and punctuated our childish
    medieval loving.
    All other birds were birds.

The Famous Traitor
    His jailer trod on a rose-petal.
    There were others on the stone floor.
    His desk tidy; some lines in pencil,
    the bible open.
                             Years before
    he’d lived like a private soldier –
    a bag of nuts and the milk ration
    for long days’ marches. And under
    the uniform a mathematician.
    Puzzle-maker. After power:
    which he got, this pastor’s son
    turned agnostic.
                               The nature
    of his ‘new kind of treason’,
    his links with the Nazi high command,
    the deals, the sense of mission,
    are well-documented; and
    beyond every explanation.
    He died ‘with dignity’ some said;
    some that he had to wait an hour,
    died shivering in the bitter cold.
    It looked like fear. It was fear:
    or it was not. And he did,
    or did not, shake hands