New Poems (2017 - )
Autumn afternoon
In a slumbering afternoon classroom Mrs Donovan is reading ‘The Hobbit’,
the walls and windows are the Shire, the air is thick with dwarves and dragons,
and on the blackboard the first words in French we ever knew, la maison, maman,
while across the empty playground with its abandoned air raid shelters
from two decades ago, though it might as well be another age,
and beyond the wide school field, if you screw up your eyes you can see
the sun-dazed roofs of the still new houses on the still new estate,
where you my mother and all the other young mothers,
with little ones sitting comfortably, still lost in their early worlds,
are unaware that you are living in ‘The Sixties’
and that I am hovering above looking down from the future,
like a Dickens ghost or like something from Chagall,
unable to escape the sense that since God exists and nothing is ever lost,
you are still there, still young, still doing the ironing, looking at the clock, thinking,
in another half hour it will be time: to wake up the youngest,
set off with the other mothers (because back then it was only mothers) for the school gate,
and you will be doing that forever, and I will always be nine years old,
slamming my desk shut, running out into the sunshine, up the long school drive to meet you,
and you will not be as you are now, in your eighties, and all of us half a century older,
and somewhere it will always be an autumn afternoon
when we and the world were young.
(C) Martin Robb 2017
September
On Monday morning, driving into the day,
I was taken aback by the amber glow illuminating houses, trees,
and the chill air’s abrupt arrival,
beneath an absolutely empty bird’s-egg blue sky.
Our summer slumber is over.
The uniformed young are back on the streets,
stirring memories of other Septembers
when everything was ahead of us:
the undiscovered country of new notebooks,
the promised land of reading lists.
September is where life happens:
these weeks of wheaten dailyness,
a field for the mind to grow into,
days to get things done.
May this ordinary time extend,
this month go on and on,
let autumn not fall too soon
or Christmas come too quickly.
So when you ask what I hope for,
now the year’s and our days are numbered,
it’s not a surfeit of startling springs
or an abundance of sprawling summers.
I wish you long life, my love,
and many more Septembers.
(C) Martin Robb 2017
In a slumbering afternoon classroom Mrs Donovan is reading ‘The Hobbit’,
the walls and windows are the Shire, the air is thick with dwarves and dragons,
and on the blackboard the first words in French we ever knew, la maison, maman,
while across the empty playground with its abandoned air raid shelters
from two decades ago, though it might as well be another age,
and beyond the wide school field, if you screw up your eyes you can see
the sun-dazed roofs of the still new houses on the still new estate,
where you my mother and all the other young mothers,
with little ones sitting comfortably, still lost in their early worlds,
are unaware that you are living in ‘The Sixties’
and that I am hovering above looking down from the future,
like a Dickens ghost or like something from Chagall,
unable to escape the sense that since God exists and nothing is ever lost,
you are still there, still young, still doing the ironing, looking at the clock, thinking,
in another half hour it will be time: to wake up the youngest,
set off with the other mothers (because back then it was only mothers) for the school gate,
and you will be doing that forever, and I will always be nine years old,
slamming my desk shut, running out into the sunshine, up the long school drive to meet you,
and you will not be as you are now, in your eighties, and all of us half a century older,
and somewhere it will always be an autumn afternoon
when we and the world were young.
(C) Martin Robb 2017
September
On Monday morning, driving into the day,
I was taken aback by the amber glow illuminating houses, trees,
and the chill air’s abrupt arrival,
beneath an absolutely empty bird’s-egg blue sky.
Our summer slumber is over.
The uniformed young are back on the streets,
stirring memories of other Septembers
when everything was ahead of us:
the undiscovered country of new notebooks,
the promised land of reading lists.
September is where life happens:
these weeks of wheaten dailyness,
a field for the mind to grow into,
days to get things done.
May this ordinary time extend,
this month go on and on,
let autumn not fall too soon
or Christmas come too quickly.
So when you ask what I hope for,
now the year’s and our days are numbered,
it’s not a surfeit of startling springs
or an abundance of sprawling summers.
I wish you long life, my love,
and many more Septembers.
(C) Martin Robb 2017