Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Hickory Dickory
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Summary
Keep us, O Thetis, in our western flight!
Watch from thy pearly throne
Our vessel, plunging deeper into night
To reach a land unknown.
John Davidson
Today
my mother's not herself.
She's
a scuttering mouse,
an ominous clock,
a nervy nibbling snout,
Big Ben.
Her words
tick tock,
sniff sniff,
until, that is,
that seat-edge second
the clock pretends
it's momently stopped.
But it's a wind-up!
There's
a timer on the bomb.
It is
the telltale hush
before the great big clang
that will blast us, mouse and all,
to Kingdom Come.
Now he, my father's
muscling in
with his old rhyme
of Charlie-Charlie-Chuck-Chuck-Chuck
who went to bed
with three white ducks …
one died,
the others cried …
Somewhere outside,
Herr Hitler
in glossy jackboots
is fee-fo-fumming,
clunking down the beanstalk,
smelling blood,
while hickory-dickory's
scuttling mice
and making white ducks cry.
Something's brewing locally.
At Cammell Laird's
the submarine Thetis
is slithering out
on sea trials, trying the depths
of Liverpool Bay
while on the Great Orme's
grey bluff,
Bully Zeus, the Thunderer,
is watching,
spying on
the comeliness
of nymphs
and plotting Troy,
wounds, deaths,
where brave Achilles,
Thetis’ son …
On radio's Home Service
a clock strikes,
a bow-tie London voice
drawls Shortly after three
this afternoon …
Test cock
in number 5 tube
blocked
with bitumastic,
rear door gaping,
bow cap
naked to
the ravishing sea.
Ninety-nine men perished
when she plunged
to the kelp-fluttering seabed,
bumped down
like a muffled bell
whirling sand
in skittish slowmotionings.
Rescuers could hear
tap-tappings,
tock-tockings
in the murky undersea
then silence,
ocean silence
taking the wind
out of Liverpool
filling streets,
a rhyming boy
with ghosts.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Getting There , pp. 15 - 18Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001