Midnight feasting - more selections from the portfolio

Grimoire

Gently poaching in the rank cook fat humidity
Of her cardboard kitchen,

the mother, the universal mother,
stirs a tin pot with a paint stick,

her shame more painful than poverty,
(there would be no prayer)

For regardless of what was about to be received
you would eat every last morsel

fearful to leave even a hint of gravy
there is no love quite like a mother’s hunger

meat was her privilege, her dignity
a starveling chicken

Put aside cigarettes and think a month
on stale bread, the cheapest kind of butter,

all to afford an ill piece of fowl for a foreign palate
sat smiling and nodding without really knowing,

dumb by the sound of cutting figure eight wounds
into a stew where thickness became a virtue

knowing what you spend on shoes
could have bought food for a year,

meat and fish and cheese enough
to see this family fed with cupboard bottoms bulging

Seventeen and to know this is criminal
Knowing you didn’t want to take me home with you,

to see the place withheld beneath a copperplate disguise
Joking about the ‘trouble with mothers’

The Englishman and the station garden gypsy
You who smiled and turned down offers of chocolate,

Said she’d only be offended, was proud and had her self respect,
that it’s not heroic to eat someone’s food out of charity

better to eat like you would at home, dipping rye
Talking with your mouth full; thankful it wasn’t fish

PCW 2005

Arbeit macht frei

Dachau was a mystery to me
Tucked away from the town
With just one bus a day

An old converted yellow
American school bus
An old Charlie Brown

Only the sign read ‘Dachau’
Instead of ‘school’
Quite misleading really

Would hardly have known
It was there at all
Save reassurances

From the guide book
So we took the bus
And while some felt

It was a moral responsibility
And others more a morbid
Curiosity to see

The little wooden huts
The tall wire fences
Restored by the Jewish

Community
So people could get
A sense of perspective

I didn’t even realise
I was crying
Until a blonde German woman

Offered me a tissue
Before the main attraction
The shower rooms and ‘ovens’

Not for baking
Where an American couple
Posed for photographs

In years since Dachau
What remains
Is the ghost of memory

Haunting when I pass
The abattoir in the bad
Part of town

Where you can hear the cattle screaming
Beneath the shit and ammonia
While outside the people

Oblivious to their suffering
Stumble in conversation
And hurry past in silence

PCW 2005