Forty-Four

Forty-Four

War hung lifeless off a page,
colour plates in gloomy hues,
smudged black and white lithos
led maps to slandered enemies.
Playing on grassy bomb shelter banks
we were never lost souls,
always alive with forty-four,
whatever forty-four meant?

Chalk sports day lines
stopped abruptly in winner’s clouds,
and losers dreams.
Between egg and spoon
we swapped war cards
garish, gory but ours.
Twenty years earlier, bombs fell
single file killers
waiting their howling turn
to flatten life’s hopes
and our parents concern,
but we wanted more.
More information, more pictures,
more tales of how we…..
but listening ears were mute.
No soldier, nor mother,
nor airmen, nor father
would utter a stricken word.
Skeletons in cupboards
wailed and wailed.

Then, sudden as flick-cards
after cub’s church parade,
we’d scurry to St. Nicks back room
where our new friend,
old and always rain-coated,
would spill stories,
at first biblical, but then
bulging with fighter pilots
Spitfires and Hurricanes, before
Heinkels and Messerschmitts tangled them
in the air above our eyes,
wooden straight back chairs,
with rear hymn book shelves
hailed a prayer to our slender aged whoops.
We learned all, those few years,
but mostly,
we learned enthusiasm.

Jerry Pike

Balaclava

Balaclava

1 watch her from the sofa, holding my coffee,
the fire ablaze, an empty bottle of wine.
With nimble fingers she looks across to copy

from a pattern, slowly leads the first soft line
along to its ordained and foretold end
connected back to the needle's metal spine.

The next row follows on like a close friend,
hooked back to the start on pre-arranged hoops,
each curled stitch a little fisherman's bend:

the rest march out one by one like woollen troops.
She goes on like this for an hour while 1 sleep,
but a fault appears dashing her early hopes

and she picks it apart into an unravelled heap
dismissed as a first flawed attempt, a snake
scribbled up beside her, a cartoon sheep.

So she starts again while I get more cake
using exactly the same length of yarn
but with new resolve to make no mistakes

Clicking along, her needles follow the plan,
or should we call it a hidden design?
It's unseen in any single row's narTow span

but will be clear to all when, after we dine,
I'll unwrap it and in mock surprise proclaim it grand
knowing that out in the night, frosty but fine,
my head will stay warm and it will finally be mine.

Peter Keeble