Splinters

The tindered voices crackled in tentative sparks,
then kindled into smoke and ignition.
They soon were ablaze, infectiously feeding the
four-walled hollow with mirth –
raucous and buoyant.
The room was afloat as comedy-jazz took
hold of the senses, running through ears like a
Munro breeze. Sonorous air it felt like.

Yet against this scene he cut an etched silence:
carved in chalk, white shirt,
the blank epicentre of the flapping flame,
a pale stitching in this quilted vibrancy,
his heart burnt to charcoal and dust –
ground to splinter,
his eyes staring out from phoenix ash.

There was, I thought, a winter’s journey
playing there: homeless-wandering.
His mist-swum face and Heine’s ghost,
for linden tree and blossom
borne along the cinder path.

A single seat lay vacant at his side
as minutes before she had pulled the cord,
the laughter too ringing, the music too careless;
the width of her waist had receded to haze.
And out in the air her sockets bent under
the encumbrance of drowning eyes.
Two hearts asunder like a ship’s
splintered hide.
Sun-sweltered love adrift now in
vapour; the dregs of salt water
stinging their guts,
and two stricken bodies,
wrenched in twain,
left – oceanless – to drown in themselves.

And all the while – face set, frame rigid –
he was drenched in Jazz and laughter,
and the echoes dissolved
and swam to her.

Warmth

Warmth

The shoes are back in their box now.

The best I ever had.

I lifted them off the shelf, and felt them.
Brand new, they shone from within,
And though they pinched at first, each was
The perfect fit (soft like Christmas socks…)
The best I ever knew.

We met when it was cold outside
And we had to run to stay warm;
Fingers linked tentative and rushed –
All at once.

In the early nights I watched her melt – slow –
Into darkness,
Then the timeless hours when she whispered me her dreams
And her passion punctured me like God.

But the fit wasn’t right – not then, not yet –
And it ended in cold, as the chill stole our breath
In night plumes and swirls;
The embers were doused and our newness was stolen.

(How to sum up the word of words?
‘Warmth’ I think does it some justice.
The cold gnaws, claims all,
Lays anchor to living.)

And I lay in frost those next three months,
Watching her float, nestle, soar on the spew;
The frazzled memories clogging my head like
Frayed rolls of cassette film, jarring the blood flow.

Three months I preserved her intact
Till the taste of exotic burst in on new lips.
I thought I’d let her go. I was so sure…
But, against the tide, we fell.

Again, it was cold till we made our own heat
In a moment dazzling and blessed.
And love steamed up our eyes
Like condensation screening us from the world…

There was that rush of childhood, then.
Trying for size, pacing back and forth for as long as you dared,
Glorifying in the newness, and glint, and shine.
Of course they scuffed, they wore away
So gradually you almost couldn’t tell.

The shoes are back in their box.

The best I ever had.

Dorothy Bohm

Dorothy Bohm


We walked from frame to frame,
each a life frozen in time -
a novel to be poured over.
The photograph fulfils
my deep need to stop things
from disappearing.
How apt the statement reads to us,
the hour closing in.

Dorothy Bohm, you enthralled her.
I wish you could watch how rapture grew
on her face with each story she read:
tales your eye may have cunningly spun
out of ripped advertisement hoardings
or in a puddle’s reflection.
These novellas that all lay breathing amongst us,
waiting to be found, to be told.

The fourteen-year-old Jewish girl from East Prussia,
arriving in England in tow with her father’s parting gift -
his Leica camera.
Emerging in Manchester where she began capturing the world:
the war time baby clutching the necklace around her mother’s neck,
the pendant that to her could stave off fire and hunger.

We followed the years around the room
like the turning of the earth,
and smelt the sands of Cairo, and dipped
our toes in the ripples of the Seine,
nursed fragile trees in Andalucia, and I tripped
on a step in Spoleto which made you laugh.

And the world was ours, and we were the world,
and we wanted suddenly to be frozen in love
forever, in the back cafes of Venice, or else
captured in a Provençal garden, or
sitting clutching our knees by a fountain in Spain.
Somewhere in the frozen colours and rushing stills
this fractured world seemed whole,
and I loved you more than I could say.

We later stood in the foyer, and, for
a moment I was lost from myself. There
was some clicking and I turned. You looked wide
eyed, slightly short of breath as a lady
approached you. She was old, eighty-six in
fact, but never frail – strong, a softly etched
face, and kindness in her mouth. She held her
camera as if it grew from her hands
and was attuned to her eyes.

I’ve just taken the loveliest photo of you, she smiled.