Keep on counting

National Poetry Day 2024

There’s a time and a place for poetry….and apparently it’s here and now! Happy National Poetry Day, one and all. This Thursday in October always makes me feel light and jubilant, as if it’s poetry’s birthday. I want to walk down the street smiling at people and wishing them good words. I half expect the poets to receive gifts, or at the very least cards embossed with rhyming gold messages. I’m reliably informed (by the internet) that the theme this year is ‘counting’, which put me in mind of one of my favourite Donald Justice poems on the theme of time and measurement:

Men at Forty
Donald Justice

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices trying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

1967

Perhaps ‘Men at Forty’ feels particularly prescient to me at the moment because on Saturday I entered the last year of my thirties. But I love how this poem captures a state of suspension for men caught between boyhood and old age, fumbling with immaturity and grimacing at the spectre of death, ‘more fathers than sons themselves now’.

The first stanza is uncanny, almost sinister. They have learned to become tidy, these men, but the rooms that they won’t return to are metaphorical. The second stanza evokes that feeling we’ve all had (perhaps middle age makes it more acute) of being carried through a life we only half recognise. The swell is ‘gentle’ but felt all the same.

I like the way the sea imagery and the notion of the ship’s deck subtly carries over into the third stanza, the face uncovered ‘deep in the mirror’, swimming towards them, full of vulnerability. It is so tender - the memory of watching a father shave, ‘face…still warm with the mystery of lather’. In my case, it makes me think too of how I sometimes help my father shave now that he’s older and less able to do it for himself. ‘Mystery of lather’ is just right.

We might find the ‘something’ of that stanza’s last line imprecise if we couldn’t imagine its bittersweet presence so clearly, helped by the compelling image of the ‘twilight sound / of the crickets’. Then we have the mortgaged houses. Oh, the mortgaged houses! They are a symbol of commitment, achievement perhaps, responsibility. But they also bring our focus back to time and its finite nature, the word ‘mort’ meaning death (as so many well meaning people tell me when they encounter my surname). That word ‘mortgaged’ is like a lock clicking shut at the end of the poem. We are locked in there, perhaps. At best, we have closed the door softly.

Here’s a new poem of mine which acts as a kind of parallel piece to this one (not that I would ever compare the quality of the two!).

Pushing Forty

Already the wind’s been in to rattle morning’s pockets, fleece the hedgerows
for everything they have so as you drive, what’s left is sparse and familiar,
a heart-shaped, grey-barked twist of tree, a hare in the lane outstripped
by its own shadow. Petrol and hay in the air. That sense of the day
carrying on without you. Cow parsley coming in fountains from the verge.
A buzzard on a telegraph wire and a girl, blonde shock of hair
behind a gate, turning to watch you pass, trailing her blue skipping rope.
Something flashes from the grass, glossy, like tape unspooled from a cassette,
the tangled stuff of your childhood. A wren reveals itself.
A farm dog barks. It doesn’t wake them –

your little son with his mouth peeled wide, your mother breathing slow
and next to you, your dad with his eyes shut, the world reflected
in his glasses. There’s nothing on the radio and you don’t know
where you’re going, but you know it is your job – forever now –
to drive them, take the corners steadily, watch the road ahead
as the car deletes it.

Happy National Poetry Day to all who celebrate and all who count and are counted on!