Sidney Road
A lookout on the world: next door’s wisteria,
its purple leaching out, half hides
a railing that needs paint;
nine wooden planks, enough to stand on.
My freedom as a ‘free lance’.
An interstitial age. Hardly neighbourly,
I know fewer names than the years
I’ve been here. Rows of identikit SUVs
line the road in lieu of trees
I’ve seen cut back, then down.
Somewhere between coma and contentment:
well-tended green spaces; a family butcher
embarrassed by its raft of sausage circuit garlands;
too many rugby shirts around to feel at ease –
spring-evening joggers stir from hibernation.
I was the future, for a week, a while ago.
At a summer garden party, I met
a looted favourite poet:
over his empty, one-use flute, he wrangled
about the etiquette of ‘watering the foliage’.
A marginal constituent, I’m more witness
than antagonist to flourishing damp.
The months pile up since my last confession;
wheels spinning slowly, hazards on,
just low enough for running down the battery.
Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands
Joe Louis, mid-clinch,
is lifting his opponent –
the six-foot-six ‘Ambling Alp’, Primo Carnera –
into the air.
In the Hague,
Italian and Ethiopian officials
have come to the end of their first day
of arbitration talks.
Here, in the Yankee Stadium,
Carnera will sink to his knees
‘slowly, like a great chimney that had been dynamited’.
For breakfast this morning, Carnera consumed
a quart of orange juice, two quarts of milk,
nineteen pieces of toast, fourteen eggs,
a loaf of bread and half a pound of Virginia ham.
If he took the Washington Post
he would have seen a cartoon showing himself and Louis in the ring.
The illustrated Louis cast a dreadlocked shadow,
his shadow wore a crown.
Louis starts throwing bombs in the sixth round
and knocks the Italian down twice
before a right-left combination
ends the fight.
Louis will touch a glove to Carnera’s lower back
after the bell, and return to his corner
without celebration.
Louis has been given seven commandments
by his new manager to ensure he progresses
towards a title shot unhampered
by comparisons to Jack Johnson.
He is never to have his picture taken with a white woman.
He is never to go to a nightclub alone.
There will be no soft fights.
There will be no fixed fights.
He will never gloat over a fallen opponent.
He will keep a ‘dead pan’ in front of the cameras.
He will live and fight clean.
In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr will write,
‘More than twenty-five years ago, one of the southern states
adopted a new method of capital punishment.
Poison gas supplanted the gallows.
In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside
the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers
might hear the words of the dying prisoner.
The first victim was a young Negro.
As the pellet dropped into the container,
and the gas curled upward,
through the microphone came these words:
“Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis…”’
The Range
I
‘God save all here.’ That’s what you scored
into the metal of your childhood range.
The house was ruined when I saw it, a bored
boy of six or seven, nagging for a change
of scene as soon as we got there. Twenty
years are gone; I’ve not been back
to the village, the house, not for lack
of chances. Life is away, plenty
of it. You only asked that He save you. All.
You are dead, as is your mother.
Copyright © 2023 by Declan Ryan
