Jamie McKendrick
Jamie McKendrick Poems
We don't know if tomorrow has green pastures
in mind for us to lie down in beside
the ever-youthful patter of fresh water
...
As if I had nothing better to do,
and who says I have, than putting the house
I haven't got in order, I sit at the oak desk
I have got, though really a table not a desk
...
That first day, to break me in,
my hardened comrades
sent me scampering like a marmoset
...
The digging creature has been at work again
out there — first a modest trough with a crest
of dry earth, fit for a starling or a thrush
...
A friend of mine met the son of a man
who it seems was eaten by a polar bear
in Iceland where the bear had stepped ashore
...
The needful thing is missing from the day
but everyone proceeds as though it's fine
— like when we waited for the nightingale
...
I spent all morning in the cafe talking
to a man who'd just survived a car crash.
...
The year began with baleful auguries:
comets, eclipses, tremors, forest fires,
the waves lethargic under a coat of pitch
...
Red-eyed and flinching, Flavius
was applying a depilatory paste
of ivy gum and crushed centipede
...
Jamie McKendrick Biography
Jamie McKendrick (born in 1955) is an English poet. McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. McKendrick has published five collections of poetry. He is the editor of The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004).)
The Best Poem Of Jamie McKendrick
Salt
We don't know if tomorrow has green pastures
in mind for us to lie down in beside
the ever-youthful patter of fresh water
or if it means to plant us in some arid
outback ugly valley of the shadow
where dayspring's lost for good, interred beneath
a lifetime of mistakes. We'll maybe wake up
in foreign cities where the sun's a ghost,
a figment of itself and angular
starched consonants braid the tongue at its root
so all sense of who we are is lost to words,
and nothing that we know can be unravelled.
Even then, some vestige of the sea,
its plosive tide, its fretwork crests will surge
inside our syllables, bronze like the chant of bees.
However far we've stumbled from the source
a trace of the sea's voice will lodge in us
as the sunlight somehow still abides in
faded tufts that cling to bricks and kerbstones
on half-cleared slums or bomb-sites left unbuilt.
Then out of nowhere after years of silence
the words we used, our unobstructed accents,
will well up from the dark of childhood,
and once more on our lips we'll taste Greek salt.
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