To seem a man

Am still feeling a bit sore about that result on Saturday - goodness knows how the Scottish players are feeling? ... anyhow; was just a rugby match ;-)

I have a particularly busy week coming up, but luckily have amassed a bit of a poetry-backlog (7 newly purchased volumes, to be precise) from a variety of recent bookshop visits; so am just going to post a poem, from each newly purchased collection, every day of this forthcoming week!

Thus; here's the first one, from the pictured Alan Jenkins' collection, which was published in 2000 - I really like it:


INHERITANCE

Herringbone and fern, this coat
Materialized out of grouse-moor,
The ground my self-made great-grandfather treads
Ten years before the First World War;
Shotgun cartridges, tobacco-shreds
And dry-flies in the pocket of his coat,

And the slender hip-flask,
Silver in its leather sleeve,
Tarnished now from trying to relieve
My grandfather’s thirst, take off his fear
Of rats and snipers and the feeble cheer
That goes up as they go over. Last-nip flask.

On the way to art-school dances
Or a Left Book Club lecture (Spain)
My father glances at his gold-plated watch
And slips the flask, half-full of scotch,
Back in the pocket of his coat. At Alamein
It stops a shrapnel-shard as he advances

And he comes home, when the war is ended,
To a place where quiet lives are led
(Grandfather, father both long dead,
Grouse-moor and money all long gone);
A wife and child are all he gambles on
But some things, like the fence, are never mended.

And he gives me, not yet twenty,
The flask, that I will later lose,
The coat and watch, that I will wear and use
To seem a man in the world I have not fought for,
Worked for, even spared much thought for.
This is my inheritance. It is plenty.

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Alan Jenkins (1955 - )

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