I remember   you were the first man who taught me about death. I was five years old; we were walking across the fields to my school. Do you remember, Ba? It was an autumn morning, I think. The trees dazzled us with their electricity. Po Po had died in June, on…

        Golf Behind Trees   An elegant course is exposed by newly opened air. There used to be a thick hedge, armed with trees. We would hear the thwack of their swings and hits followed by good silence or disappointing scutter. In days gone by, for all we could see, those golfers might…

        On the margin   On the margin of existence on the deep-sea floor between chimneys of boiling water and venting carbon where no life should sensibly occur shrimp-like creatures cleave to life indeed, do flourish on the edge of tolerance in a sightless world of simple purpose Here they say all beginnings…

image © Dirk Skiba         Sonnet for the British-Born   And suddenly, new language: ‘British-Born’, for kids who grew up on terraces in Leeds or tower blocks in Bow, and at weekends tied their bootlaces for footie on the lawn and went to college to study Sports or Business or Car Mechanics and…

        Arachnid: Flight After Deluge   The waters have risen; the signal has sounded in our skeletons of minimal composition. An instinct of age-old urgency has stirred our colonies into motion. Time has come for the next rung of survival, quest for the next habitable frontier – former field, farm, meadow, now stubble,…

        In an Orchard   Shall we drink a while and think of Eden, As in an orchard filled with waspy windfalls Children shout and run? Late summer sun Is angled close to term time, and the walls’ Strong yellow means the days are not so long. Something will go wrong, Slow as…

        The Village that Vanished   All the bitter day waves smash into Smugglers’ Cove and Byer’s Hole. The sky has failed to lift and a shipwright’s hoolie blows doon King Street. Sometime soon we’ll re-pack the van, lock the door, gan from here. Away from foghorn bass and herring-gull staccato we’ll wake…

        Six Months Away   (After Robert Lowell)   Discharged as ‘homeless’, then to a room that felt wilfully hostile (lurid curtains and bristling carpet squares), I was permanently provisional. The whole city became a hospital, a seeping infiltration. Outside was fleetingly better than a condemning four-walled stare. My fat fire door would…

        My father believes in Triclavianism   Inner parts of a grinder, Dead batteries, bulbs, Steel tub of a washer, A few metal strings, A toaster without the bread rack, And several little springs Lie in the backyard, While he tries to find What we never thought existed In our daily things. Back…

        Last   In the religion of my dad one story is that a temple lamp lasts not forever but just a little longer than could reasonably be asked I watch him cover his head with his hand try to dredge up the words from his school-prize siddur I feel the irony of…

        madonna   there’s no art in america, it’s all sugar & war. – sophie robinson   i wake up dreaming i’ve made it here in new york i’ve made it everywhere dreaming of myself as a cheerleader the tassels of my glittering pom-poms are unblemished lines of philosophy the blue sky shines…

        The Burial   And when the pestilence passed through the second time We stood stunned in the wreckage of our lives. I picked Up a shattered picture frame embellished in opal, Since that’s what survivors hold as a symbol of what’s gone. Yet, we’d already lost those sepia days, vignettes of joy.…

        The Elegance of a Simple Soul   Utterly out of place a sloth in a dark café movements too slow to be noticed a glass of port slips from her grip the pristine explosion at her feet in her hair in the lamplight everywhere inlaid an instant dissolves and in the next…

        Ash   He found out I smoked the day I went off to university, and disapproved, of course, but nothing he could do or say. Although, he did, often. He’d have hated seeing us sitting around the fireplace using a bowl as an ashtray, blowing smoke up the chimney, drinking his best…

        When Landscape Becomes Woman   I was eight when I looked through a keyhole and saw my mother in the drawing room in her hibiscus silk sari, her fingers slender around a glass of iced cola and I grew suddenly shy for never having seen her before. I knew her well, of…

Picture Credit: Paul Musso Hay Festival 2019           If Heaven is Her Father’s Land, Her Father Can Keep It   Let the rains come in June not August. Yes, She wants to go where Evasrikuke sings, where she can grow Mbasri side by side, where Ezruli sucks nectar with bees as companions…

        Outside the Turf Club, Piccadilly   There’s too much moustache wax and pastel corduroy, an excess of vetivers, Trumper’s Extract of Lime, scads of green Spanish leather, flush panelling and Old Boys clinking club glasses, dropping cigar ash, enjoying genteel dereliction and discussions of pelf, mud-fresh potatoes and that day’s running at…

        In Between   A rebellious leaf tries his best to remain on the branch. He trembles from pain and air. He’s not a material but a product of life slowly gnawing small bits of the sky. He’s only a pawn in a project intended to conquer the air above. Yet he started…

Picture credit: Jurgen Brocan   Ranjit Hoskote’s The Atlas of Lost Beliefs was published by Arc in April and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2020.         Letters from Ugarit   Fire saved these words cut into clay corded sounds of desert and surf gouged into flesh Father look the enemy’s…