Shall We Dance?

Those pre-war movies – Rogers and Astaire
glide through a world of shining surfaces.
They move as one; her perfect fall of hair
swings as her silky gown swirls round her knees.

High hells make her almost too tall for him
and when he sings his voice is just off-key,
which suits those witty lyrics by Berlin.
His boyish smile dispels all mockery.

‘The opium of the people?’ Marx was wrong.
This potent drug for one and six a week
would keep you dreaming in a world of song,
and while you whistled ‘Dancing Cheek to Cheek’

You could forget the Slump, the Spanish war
and news of German troops along the Rhine –
troublesome questions you could well ignore,
lulled by a drug more powerful than wine.

Today, such sweetness sets our teeth on edge.
We have no taste for saccharine romance.
Inclined to sneer at wealth and privilege,
we’re down-to-earth, mistrusting elegance.

And yet, Arcadia always did exist.
Take Sidney, man of nymph and shepherd swain.
Escapist? He was willing to enlist
And died in Flanders fields, resisting Spain.

Re ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’

A sunny Sunday afternoon.
The car park full, we walk out of the town
over the fields and downhill to the river.
Hawthorn in leaf, a bank of celandines,
the chestnut trees lifting their glistening buds,
the water polished, dazzling in the sun.

On our return, leaving the riverside
we come on police vans, ‘underwater search’.
Flattening ourselves against a wall,
we watch a hearse edge down a narrow lane.
Inside, what seems a temporary coffin.
In thoughtful silence, we move on
but soon forget it, chatting over tea.

Later, the local paper
devotes a few lines to the suicide.
Auden was right, and Breughel too.
Yet, what could we do?

The Colour of Love

My father loved to ‘contemplate
the countryside.’ He had an eye for colour,
for instance, Mother’s hair.

Deep red, deep as mahogany,
not at all carroty,
it framed a rather ordinary face.
She wore it round her ears
in heavy lustrous plaits.

It was cut and permed when I was young,
but I can see the box she kept it in,
its shining coils smelling of lilac soap.

When she was old she kept it tinted red
discreetly, but no dye could match
that lovely Titian glow.

Allegro

Spilling down the mountainside
in milky skeins , and bounding over
rocks and boulders down the valley,
sparkling, bubbling through a gulley
bearing twigs and leaves along,
swirling round where dippers dance
to hurry on towards the ocean.

Merged in ocean, how the current
sweeps into a towering crest
reared up to crash along the shore,
withdraw and fall again, again,
rolling in unceasing motion.

Source of life, part of our being,
precious and powerful.
 

Third Movement - Allegretto

Seagulls riding in the wind,
trees that bow before its power,
palm tree fronds that tremble,
as if by harpist’s fingers

as our lungs fill,
our first triumphant cry,
our final sigh.

Perfectly blended balance we destroy
so easily, too late become aware,
of how we harm you, air.

THE AUTHOR

Joan Sheridan Smith is a retired teacher of English.

She grew up in South London,and after war-time service in the WRNS, took an honours degree in English at University College. London, where she met her future husband.

After a few years they moved to Norwich, where they brought up their family. Her husband gave up teaching to become a free-lance translator, and Joan taught at Norwich City College and later at Notre Dame convent grammar school.
 
Joan has three children and four grand-children. She sings in two choirs and runs two classes for the local University of the Third Age, and is learning Italian.

She has published three full collections of poetry and several pamphlet collections, the most recent being ‘A Garland for David’, a tribute to her late husband.

On ‘Sailing to Byzantium’

Believe me, it is not too late.
It never is till our last hour,
to let imagination flower,
despite the years, the time, the date.

Age need not keep us on the straight
And narrow. We can climb the tower.
Believe me, it is not too late.
It never is till our last hour.

Though body age, the soul is great,
Wide-ranging in its awesome power,
and inspiration’s golden shower
still quickens those prepared to wait.

Believe me, it is not too late.
It never is, till our last hour.

 ‘And We In Dreams Behold The Hebrides’

Sometimes a line vibrates like a plucked string.
In this I hear the sighing of the seas,
the pibroch’s thin
lament, the autumn wind among the trees,
the yearning of the exiled for their home.

It isn’t just the plight of refugees
bereft their land, their longing to return
that moves me. Deep within the human heart
there lives the sorrow of a vanished past,
imagined Edens lost.

Walking With Catherine

You swing along at quite a different pace
from your poor father, and that suits me well.
The Suffolk mud is soft beneath our feet.
Snowdrops are sprinkled here and there among dead grass
and a few celandines, closed in the cold.

Suddenly, the sun comes out.
We’re walking by a little river,
through a shallow valley. Small round stones,
a distant flock of sheep on the hillside.
The hunt left hoof-prints all along the way.

We talk of that. I find I’m torn two ways.
Part of me still responds to ritual.
Those scarlet coats, featured in many prints
in country pubs, the hounds with swaying tails,
but I can’t share the huntsmen’s lust for blood.

We lunch in a well-tailored pub; it overlooks
a pleasant sweep of land. The fancy food
Is what you might expect. The coffee’s good.
Yesterday they were overrun, the waitress says.
 We talk of matters nearer to the heart.

 
Charlotte

Somehow she kept her pen serenely bright
while tending to a querulous invalid.
Perhaps she worked by day and wrote by night
to let her starved imagination feed

while tending to a querulous invalid,
preparing meals and washing up again.
She tried to let imagination feed
when taking in the clothes in moorland rain.

Preparing meals and washing up again,
and ironing shirts and dragging in the coal
to dry the washing soaked by moorland rain.
So many tasks to mortify the soul!

While ironing shirts and dragging in the coal
she must have longed to stride across the moors,
a restless yearning tugging at her soul,
though occupied with endless household chores.

She must have longed to stride across the moors
but had to work by day and write by night
Though occupied with endless household chores,
somehow she kept her pen serenely bright.

Singing The Blues

Poetry Collection

ISBN 978-1-907401-33-6

Paperback A5 210x148

60 pages

£6.50

ORDER NOW

CLICK LOGO

OR

Tel: 44 (0)845 458 9910

Email: mo@centralbooks.com

Nothing To Do With Us

After Mozart’s sunlit waterfall,
Schumann’s dark clouds,
But as the storm broke in the orchestra,
whispers behind us –
a different drama.

I looked over my shoulder.
One of the audience had collapsed
across the seat.
A uniform arrived and then,
a man in shirt-sleeves bending over her,
presumably a doctor.

Not our affair. We turned back to the concert.
After, the white-haired husband
apologized for interrupting us.
It was the heat, he said.

Later, as we drew near our bus-stop,
blue flashing lights signalled an accident
The driver let us out. We walked on home.
Nothing to do with us.

At Gainsborough’s House

At first you’re taken by the clothes.
Folds of satin shimmering in the light
tempt you to run your fingers over them,
but then you see the faces.
Not the poised children in their fancy dress,
but faces over waterfalls of lace,
full-bellied velvet waistcoats.

The painter does not spare a double chin,
a calculating eye. Remove the wig
and see a stockbroker,
a councillor, a shop-keeper –
faces you meet today.

One boy, not posing for his portrait,
looks over his shoulder,
surprised his master
should waste his skill on him.

For Thomas

Today you fly towards the rising sun.
For you the future opens like a rose.
You with the confidence of the young,
expect no adverse fate to interpose.

Young men like you, Tom, of my generation
flew to the Orient, all too well aware,
confronting what was then a hostile nation,
what frightful hazards might await them there.

Japan’s defeat, a sudden dreadful end,
was brought by means that left the world aghast,
although since then our erstwhile enemy,
transformed, a trading ally and a friend,
forgets the tragic errors of the past,
which are for you no more than history.