Free Selected Poems by Tony Harrison Page B

bread-tray wood
    groans at the high jinks of Jamaican kids.
    Bless this house’s new black owners, and don’t curse
    that reggae booms through rooms where you made hush
    for me to study in (though I wrote verse!)
    and wouldn’t let my sister use the flush!
    The hearse called at the front, the formal side.
    Strangers used it, doctors, and the post.
    It had a show of flowers till you died.
    You
’ll have to use the front if you’re a ghost,
    though it’s as flat and bare as the back yard,
    a beaten hard square patch of sour soil.
    Hush!
             Haunt me, and not the house!
                                I’ve got to lard
    my ghosts’ loud bootsoles with fresh midnight oil.

Illuminations
    I
    The two machines on Blackpool’s Central Pier,
    The Long Drop
and
The Haunted House
gave me
    my thrills the holiday that post-war year
    but my father watched me spend impatiently:
    Another tanner’s worth, but then no more!
    But I sneaked back the moment that you napped.
    50 weeks of ovens, and 6 years of war
    made you want sleep and ozone, and you snapped:
    Bugger the machines! Breathe God’s fresh air!
    I sulked all week, and wouldn’t hold your hand.
    I’d never heard you mention God, or swear,
    and it took me until now to understand.
    I see now all the piled old pence turned green,
    enough to hang the murderer all year
    and stare at millions of ghosts in the machine –
    The penny dropped in time! Wish you were here!
    II
    We built and bombed Boche stalags on the sands,
    or hunted for beached starfish on the rocks
    and some days ended up all holding hands
    gripping the pier machine that gave you shocks.
    The current would connect. We’d feel the buzz
    ravel our loosening ties to one tense grip,
    the family circle, one continuous US!
    That was the first year on my scholarship
    and I’d be the one who’d make that circuit short.
    I lectured them on neutrons and Ohm’s Law
    and other half-baked Physics I’d been taught.
    I’m sure my father felt I was a bore!
    Two dead, but current still flows through us three
    though the circle takes for ever to complete –
    eternity, annihilation, me,
    that small bright charge of life where they both meet.
    III
    The family didn’t always feel together.
    Those silent teas with all of us apart
    when no one spoke except about the weather
    and not about his football or my art.
    And in those silences the grating sound
    of father’s celery, the clock’s loud tick,
    the mine subsidence from deep underground,
    mi mam’s loose bottom teeth’s relentless click.
    And when, I’m told, St James’s came to fetch her,
    My teeth!
were the final words my mother said.
    Being without them, even on a stretcher,
    was more undignified than being dead.
    Ay!
I might have said,
and put her in her box
    dressed in that long gown she bought to wear,
    not to be outclassed by those posh frocks,
    at her son’s next New York première!

Turns
    I thought it made me look more ‘working class’
    (as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)
    I did a turn in it before the glass.
    My mother said:
It suits you, your dad’s cap.
    (She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:
    You’re every bit as good as that lot are!
)
    All the pension queue came out to stare.
    Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR),
    his cap turned inside up beside his head,
    smudged H A H in purple Indian ink
    and Brylcreem slicks displayed so folk might think
    he wanted charity for dropping dead.
    He never begged. For nowt! Death’s reticence
    crowns his life’s, and
me
, I’m opening my trap
    to busk the class that broke him for the pence
    that splash like brackish tears into our cap.

Punchline
    No! Revolution never crossed your mind!
    For the kids who never made it through the schools
    the Northern working class escaped the grind
    as boxers or comedians, or won the pools.
    Not lucky, no physique, too shy to joke,
    you scraped together almost 3 weeks’ pay
    to buy a cast-off uke