Mathew
Martin
Family Photo Album
like apples, the commoners of
fruit,
the men and women face the
camera, fallen and bruised
by the soot-blackened bricks
into which
the gravity of their
working-class lives propelled them,
the hard lines of the
tenements.
in the wedding photos the faces are scrubbed and
softened,
men in uniforms, women in
bows, gloves and fitted dresses:
shined
on empire's
dirty sleeve
before their skin is bitten
through to the core;
then tossed, juice spilled,
seed scattered.
only the children strike the eye with fragrance,
still bending the bough and
sucking the sap
that feeds their
flesh’s succulence.
in vertiginous delight they
dare the camera
to watch them grow bigger.
History and Geography
Lessons
restless in the scorching
Niagara summer night,
my body aches for it,
longs to remember
the skin-tingling,
breath-taking collision
with a cold and still prairie
winter morning:
it brings you up sharp.
these photographs arouse no
such longings.
they are my family’s
English history,
proof perhaps of the myths my
parents told me
of a burning empire and a new
found land.
but they are photographs: I
touch only the edges.
who then are you, and whither
are you going
bright little boy, last of
the line
of photographs my mother
assembled for me?
Beeston Fields
at Beeston Fields my father
knocked the local boys
for six, bowled their innings
out, sent them
packing, limp bats dragging
over the pitch
recalls my father’s old
mate as he tunes
his glass on mine, toasting
the giver of such golden
memories, across the
foam-stained expanse
of the bar table gazing to
find my father
ghosted.
in tweed, I killed him
as he slew his saturnine
Welsh farmer sire
with every stump-splitting
dipping googley he hurled.
merely a murderer’s
shadow now, he plants
peas and beans and potatoes
in the spring, giving
away bags of frozen
vegetables to the neighbours.
I cannot bury him. there is
no body
to bury.
last call at the mead-hall
long since passed.
night’s low tide
of neon and mercury vapour
light washes
up human forms, beer bottles
and other
scattered treasures of the
shipwrecked day.
searching for my hotel I find
myself
my father’s son: just
as he taught me,
I lick my lips and whistle
in the dark.
t
p
u
