Selected poems
Its fur so shining-smooth
We couldn't bear to kill it in the end,
the bright-eyed rat that hid,
all unhygienic, in the walk-in robe,
sleeping in amongst our clothes
and, one night, in a shoe.
Our foolish cat had chased it from the wild
and lost it in that crowded human space
headlong up the walls,
its narrow whiskered snout so ratty-cute,
its fur so shining-smooth,
its cunning tiny paws
gripping the smooth sheer paint
in rodent terror.
Our cat watched for the small beast
through one long night,
his blue eyes shining eerie
in the dark. Sometime round three,
he even knocked the shoe the rat hid in
down to the floor, but lost his prey again
amongst too many scarves.
I spent the next few days and nights
of splintered sleep piling up
great heaps to wash and disinfect
once the poor beast was gone.
It's all been wiped with disinfectant now,
or washed and hung in sunshine and fresh air.
I'd never pitied Herakles before.
The problem in the wardrobe wasn't
so much Augean filth;
Ratty's small spoor was a sprinkling
of needles in a haystack.
It's harder than you think,
to wash a whole haystack.
The cat was less than helpful,
sulking beneath the king-sized bed,
useless as vain Achilles pretending
not to care.
At last, I caught the rat
(inside another shoe)
under a basket.
Success; but Ratty
was a neighbour now.
The tiny beast had lived too close to us,
too long, scuttling up blank walls
and dropping into shoes.
It knew all our clothes.
Even the sudden merciful blow
from the heavy brick was not acceptable.
We could no more bear to kill the rat
than kill the silly cat who'd brought it here.
This one had won its freedom.
It twitches long whiskers and scuttles
up bulrushes, now, in the small wetlands
that pass for the Elysian Fields around here.
Live long and prosper, little rat.
Some slight redemption
Coventry Cathedral had been bombed,
I knew, during the last great conflagration
of the world,
had lost some of its roof
one night of far too many deaths —
though nothing to the horror
our own side rained,
flaming, down onto Dresden.
I had some vague idea
the church had been rebuilt —
another war memorial.
Not even close.High-windowed walls
stand tall around
paved empty sacred space
big as a playing field,
wide open to the sky.
Stumps of once-proud columnsrise lower than my knees.
Some of the stone walls
still hold window lead,
maybe a little fractured glass
but not a hint of roof.
The fabric of the building
tattered stone and iron lace;
the light behind it blinding blue,
or dumping summer rain.
In not-so-distant Oxford
each church, it seemed,
held its small monument to martyrs
of the Reformation. Always
Catholics and Protestants alike,
never just one side.
Never a hint which One True Church
might have been right,