Simon Zonenblick

Selected Poems

 

 

The Choice

 

 

Frosted bracken crackling underfoot

you edge along the wood,

inch inside a crest of fern

 

and soften steps on sludge-soil

brown buttered in a yellow blush

of sun.

 

The year’s young,

an ovary of bulbs and shoots,

a creamy-coloured prelude

 

tinted silver;

fledgling, morning has uncurled

and taken its first flight.

 

Listen -

a tinkering tack-tack,

burble, chirple -

 

this is the hour

Peace reclaims.

 

These are the branches,

these are the birds,

this is your heartbeat

telling you you’re happy

 

and yet he somehow still expects

you’ll want to spend the day

watching Rugby in a scruffy noisy inner city pub.

 

 

 

 

 

Kingfisher

 

 

A seed of autumn morning

beginning to enlarge

 

drizzle softens into sunlight

bringing bricks and bridges into view;

 

the motorway extrapolates

into a pinnate fretwork

 

stemming to a track

of sand and bramble.

 

Through this walkway

walled by spray paint

 

ascend at roadside,

yawn of chalk and rubber

 

and see beyond the slip road

a rising grey concretion.

 

Like a rainy old folks’ outing

Rotherham emerges.

 

Turn in along the bulrush

bank by dunes of weed and gravel

 

and tuck inside the wooden snugness

of a hut.

 

There -

across the mudflat, above the sandy shallows

a tiny blaze of blue

disappears like a shooting star.

 

 

 

 

 

Railway Station

 

 

Beyond the barriers where the ticket clerks

wait behind the glass

stretches a vastness

         of staircases and monitors

 

Like a mechanical rain cloud

bursting torrents of track and steel

the panorama flows:

signs and doors and drinks machines,

escalators,

lifts

electronically ascend

from a plain of platforms

to the balcony above the throng,

edge illumed in the plastic light

of Starbucks.

 

It wasn’t always like this.

 

Ten years ago,

you passed the gate

and walked into a junction

of tracks and stairs

and straight ahead a sloping tunnel

plunging dimly into the bowels

of this post war structure

 

the walls were punctured here

and there with offshoots;

otherwise the alley was a throat

of a subway, dank and draughty,

more shed-like than hospitable,

that you rushed through

always seeming late,

always wary,

sometimes bumping into people

you hadn’t seen for ages.

 

And it was in that burrowed underpass

One night when we hot-footed to the train

that would carry her past business parks

and floodlit factories, blackened B-roads

and outlying, empty stations

that, penless, she slid out lipstick like a magic wand,

rubbed my number on a pad,

before we reached the steps,

emerged into a jungle of electric light

and her train crawled up.

 

I’m not saying it was better

or that it was worse.

I’m just remembering the way it used to be,

that’s all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Relation

 

 

He sat in corners

at Christmas or New Year,

a retired tiler, gruff and old

with puffy cheeks

and always smoking.

 

You learned to take for granted

his moans about the blacks

or grumbles at “the paki’s tekkin’ over.”

Tinned up, he slurred alliance

with a Germany more comfortably forgotten -

      yes, it was a shame about the Jews,

           but…

 

Sure, you pitied him that day

years before, the time he got in

from work to find his wife, a brassy

battleaxe who didn’t bother working,

shagging his best mate,

and more for when his son got killed

by a speeding car.

 

When he finally got cancer

and went into the Home,

they said you had to feel sorry,

find it sad,

which, you suppose,

it was.

Though quite who actually enforced

this strange unspoken obligation,

this decree of requisite regret,

was unclear.

Certainly, it was not him.

 

 

 

 

 

11th September, 2001

 

 

After an early shift

I pass the hairdressers and the paper shop,

clean, spaced uniforms of houses

where an old friend lives -

semi’s, Vauxhalls, hanging-basket-driveways.

 

To save time, I cut along the Ring Road

and down an avenue of bungalows

and bounteous gardens full of fuchsias,

roses and chrysanthemums.

 

Its quiet

but then again its Tuesday afternoon;

sunlight is cemented in a frosty sky,

just a clip of coldness

advertising autumn.

It is that time of year when, uneasily,

you sense the changes in the air:

shells appear on pavements,

webs straddling the snickets,

and a knowledge, on these hedge-lined

afternoons, that there is no going back.

 

Walking through the door, I see him hurry

from the landing

with a face like someone’s died.

“You haven’t heard, have you?” he says.

 

 

 

 

Anthem

 

 

God save our gracious Queen,

Long live our noble Queen,

While the peasants count our blessings,

May Her Highness reign supreme.

 

Blessed be the Princes

Whose bills we toil to pay

While our Nursing Homes and hospitals

Slide into decay.

 

Who cares if kids get cancer

And die on under-funded wards?

We must not expect our money back

From Princes, Dukes or Lords.

 

So we slaughtered a few darkies?

So we colonised the Scots?

At least we used the loot

On palaces and yachts.

 

May we subsidise the spongers

Until our dying days,

Funding drawing room refurbishments

And Harry’s holidays.

 

After all the good they've done us

Ingratitude's obscene -

Which is why we raise our glasses high, and say as one:

"God Save The Queen!"

 

 

 

 

copyright © simon zonenblick

2008