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CAUGHT IN THE NET 108 - POETRY BY
RICHARD McCAFFERY
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|
It didn’t contain the tools of her trade:
French-ticklers, a skint wallet of old plastics. Instead
it stank of salt, the sweat of ozone.
The rusty
buoy’s distant garnet bulb,
from; Flotsam by Richard McCaffery |
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CONTENTS
1 - BIOGRAPHY
2 – POETRY
Fairy Pools
Dedication
Blackboard at St. Cuthbert's
Mother
Rust
Flotsam
Willow Pattern
The Professional
Het Lam Gods
4 - AFTERWORD
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1 – BIOGRAPHY: Richard McCaffery
Richie McCaffery was born in Newcastle in 1986 and now divides his time between Winchester and Warkworth, Northumberland. He is a Carnegie scholar at The University of Glasgow, writing a doctoral thesis on the Scottish poetry of World War Two. His first collection from HappenStance Press, entitled 'Spinning Plates' has just been published. He has been the recoent of an Edwin Morgan Travel Bursary, a Hawthornden fellowship and is soon to take a month long writer's retreat at Hugh MacDiarmid's cottage 'Brownsbank' in Biggar. His poems have been accepted by such magazines as The Rialto, The Dark Horse, Magma, Stand, The Reader and many others.
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2 - POETRY
Fairy
Pools
We pitched our tent that evening
in the basalt glower of the Cuillins
and went barefoot for firewood.
In the pines, in a fern glade
a burn ran
like marbles over rocks.
Huddled around your pocket radio
that
night, we danced blanketed.
A song called 'Secret Heart' came on.
Through
hailstorms and squalls
a voice from the dark wavelengths.
I held you
like a decanter
in the tent, pouring splashingly.
We were the only people
alive.
I was all kaleidoscopes and adrenalin
and never told you it was my
first time.
_________________________
Dedication
In an underground copy
of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’
a shaky plum inscription.
To
Renee, my sweet –
from
holocaust,
2/8/40, Sid.
All that way in a kitbag,
through panzers and
snipers.
Bullets hitting the water
like kingfishers.
In the chalky trough under the blackboard
are lessons dusted and already forgotten.
The teacher is squawking away once more,
scratching into the dark Welsh tabula rasa
the truths so far about God and arithmetic
with the expungible white of fossil shells.
________________________________
Mother
When my mother arrived,
no one would sign for her,
left out like a parcel
on a stranger’s
doorstep.
Bundle of birth, fly-tipped,
swathed in a linen bag
stamped ‘Tate and Lyle sugar’
seven lbs too heavy.
No mobile, just
rain clouds,
her lips sapphire blue,
tiny lungs like strawberries
full
of pneumonia.
___________________________
Rust
In the dunes at
Warkworth beach,
wartime barbed
wire corrodes
in marram grass,
coiled like cilices.
All the gins in
the Duke’s woods
lie shut in leaf
pulp, their teeth
stuck in a
lockjaw of oxidation.
The languages I
used to speak,
that ferric tang
when you cough,
the staples in
booklets that failed us.
They found her
faux-leather handbag first
with the usual tidal stuff, shore-froth, pincers,
bits of broken
shells, ragworm casings.
It didn’t
contain the tools of her trade:
clot-red lippy, war-paint, a Stanley-knife,
French-ticklers,
a skint wallet of old plastics.
Instead it stank
of salt, the sweat of ozone.
The rusty buoy’s
distant garnet bulb,
a jittery tabernacle on the rough sea.
Somewhere,
with lungs of brine, wet clothes
rippling as fins she floated, eyes
amphibious.
The tide was turning, they needed the boat.
____________________________________
congregated by swallows.
A broken pocket Bible
sits on a driftwood lectern
in the tiny Rocket Kirk.
Sea wind cannot
preach
more than its sting of salt.
Outside two lovers lie
boxed under
marram grass.
__________________________
We
spent the day mudlarking in a newly tilled field
and
found little beyond dud currency of big pennies
that
might buy us defunct brands or extinct flavours.
But
we have collected enough broken pottery to make
our
own mosaic service to shatter again in our time.
I
offer you the gilded handle of a chintzy porcelain cup
that
may have been dashed in malice or by accident.
This
is the fractured toast of the dead to our future,
no
matter how many pieces we gather, we’ll never
make
the same as once was. I break open a rut clod
to
find a bit of the ubiquitous willow pattern plate
that
depicts only one lover with a soil-stained crack
between the other who may not even lie in this field,
clawing its way through
such acres of domestic moraine.
You ask what I do for a
living
and I don’t think I can
say.
There is something in
the way
I take this teacup from
you
without the tell-tale
click
of ring on hot
porcelain.
You ask will this take
long.
maybe. My questions
must
be answered. Some are
pointless
as wasps and the pain
they give.
Others will take you
many lungs
to satisfy the depth I
need.
You’ll remember my
dolphin smile,
my signature like
snake-crossed sand.
You will notice some
day soon
that all your cups
carry my trademark –
a faint hairline crack.
I specialise
in such subtle,
half-bearable damage.
_______________________________
Het
Lam Gods
Saint
Bavo Cathedral in
the
size of fifty quarries, and in a plain back room
stands a medieval barn-door that was painted
in
polyptych by brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck.
Tourists pay to spend hours examining its keyholes
of
Edenic voyeurism. Though our eyes were in
a
kind of heaven, it was the marble floor we studied.
In
one corner slab we found a tiny secret escutcheon
of a
white heart, laid centuries back, perhaps forgotten.
As
low as the soil and bruised, in this musty vastness,
our vision whittled to
the smallest labour of love.
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3 - Publishing History
Fairy Pools published in
Northwords Now –
issue 16
Dedication published in
Envoi
–
issue 157
Blackboard at St. Cuthbert's
Rust
Flotsam
Willow Pattern
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4 - Afterword
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