Happy International Day of the Midwife! 

______________________
My oldest sister was delivered 

by Caesarean section

The one who followed her had forceps.

But the first words I heard

As I was born

“I think she’d like to do it by herself”

I took to heart.

The first person who showed her faith in me

Was a midwife.

There are certain indications 

When an ecosystem’s sick

When the water in the river 

Is gelatinous and thick

When the ocean’s full of plastic

And the air is full of smog

And the only wild predators 

Are packs of feral dogs

The signs are unequivocal 

It’s right that we feel nervous

When the kind of scum I’m thinking of 

Comes rising to the surface.

The kind of world we’re living in

Is giving me the fear.

When fucking Piers Morgan

Has a media career.

Seeing strange wildlife on holiday
And being disbelieved by parents, later,

Is a common enough experience

(It happened to me outside a guesthouse in Grasmere.)

But when the same deer showed up
At opposite ends of the country
(Like atoms proving quantum entanglement

On mammal scale)
Nobody’s dad was fooled twice.

Unless
Those ragged, fish-boned deer visit the children
Destined to become poets.
And all of us, 
In some forgotten notebook
Have written the same lines.
But even then,

 

You were the only  one who did it right.

I write carefully, thoughtfully;

Honestly,

Speech is not my medium.

In person we 

Were friendly, polite.

Kept things on the level

Of colleague. A distance

Between us.

But we tapped out messages

Between our

Separate screens

About our deepest 

Fears, identities, dreams.

Tears were only ever implied

By careless spelling

Or unfinished 

Lines.

The night before you died

I read your last letter

And promised myself

When I saw you again

We’d really talk.
 

Overheard…
I used to have this girlfriend

She used to say “chipottle”.

I never did correct her.

I never had the bottle.

She was absolutely gorgeous

And the sex was really  killer

But I never could get over 

How she said “kwessadiller”.

Yvonne Tonk got lost up the mountain

Left the body she’d grown in and flew.

With her misshapen teeth

Flapping in the breeze.

To go somewhere new.

Yvonne found new homes.

A lizard flashes a grin at a tourist.

An alpaca flutters her eyelashes.

A monkey bites his lip

And inclines his head.
Yvonne Tonk is not dead.

For Margaret Aspinall, with the very deepest respect.

—–

I couldn’t just think about him:
There were ninety five more needing justice.
If I’d only thought of my son
Well.
What use is a woman who’s broken by grief?
I had to go on.
But they showed me a tape of him,
There in the stands
Just before it
All 
Kicked
Off
And then lying ignored on the pitch
Just a few minutes later
My lad
Dying all on his own.
I wanted to drive off the road
But for ninety six voices
Still crying for justice.
Well. 
Now at long last, 
The truth can begin to be known.
And I’ll spend the whole rest of my life
Just loving his bones.

This is a guy I saw and heard perform tonight.
—-
In a West Yorkshire pub,
Far away from the place he was born

He tells us the names of the trees

 Cashapona 

 Caucho 

Castanha-do-para

• 
  

In the Amazon basin. We listen

And though we are laughing,

We try to repeat. We invoke.

Awarra

Ungurahui

Shapaja

• 
  

As he sings and he’s playing music that grew

In the fields behind  coffee plantations

The soundtrack to graceful resistance 

Huicungo

Huasaí

Huacrapona

• 
  

And far far away, I believe

There’s a poet from Leeds in Brazil.

Trying to look for his voice in the hills

Elm

Elder 

Ash

• 
  

But he watches the great giants fall

And he thinks of the trees that he knew

Growing up, in the parks and the fields 

Beech,

Birch,

Blackthorn.

• 
  

And the locals repeat the strange words

Though it seems like a joke 

With the giants all falling around them:

Willow

Alder

Oak.

In solidarity with the Junior Doctors’ Strike

We’ll look back on today

In the decades to come

When we see what our health

Services have become.

And perhaps we’ll say “can
You remember the time

When our government really 

Committed such crimes

Against healthcare providers?” 

We’ll sigh, shake our heads
“And remember the way 

That they fought back instead?

And they saved our health service

For never again

Would the people stand by 

and just watch it be drained”

When the junior doctors stood up and said no

Well, we knew then that Jeremy Hunt had to go.

Or perhaps we will sadly think back to this day

“Remember how frightened we were?” We will say?

“Remember when doctors on call day and night

No matter your income, seemed normal and right?

So that when they stopped playing the government’s game

Went on strike for their rights,

 well, we gave THEM the blame?

And the National Health Service
With none to defend it

Was so weak that the Tories were able to end it?

If we’d only supported them, what might have been?

Just think what we lost, back in twenty sixteen.”

  
I sang along to your songs

Long before I understood them.

Get you doing things you thought you’d never do/

Do it in the kitchen on the tabletop/

Twenty three positions 

In a one night stand/

Music, sex, romance.

I suppose,

In a way

I was right.

It was all just a dance.