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What’s in the hearts of families that spoon black bean sauce and beef on our high streets then call the chefs Cs (and I don’t mean ‘coons’ which is Tommy’s word for, ‘Lives we should delete.’) I digress. It’s true, Izzard wore slap and soared with better gags and nails and cuter heels. With me, who knows why the world is enthralled? The One in Which… The second narrative sequence I wrote for Road Trip was an exploration of the uncertainties inherent in raising my Mixed Race children in a part of Wales that is predominantly White. I was spurred into writing this sequence by Friends. Yes, that 90s sitcom whose episode titles followed a distinct format: ‘The one where…’, ‘The one in…’ or ‘The one with…’ I misread these headings and titled my sequence, ‘The One in Which…’ For most of my life, New York, where Friends is set, has marketed itself as a multicultural city. This was the reality I witnessed when I visited the metropolis in 2005. And while there is nothing wrong with homogenous friendship groups, something about Friends was troubling. Even with the extras in crowd scenes, there was a lack of diversity. Psychologically, stories can be viewed as wish fulfilment. With Friends, is that what I had been watching – someone’s dream of an almost all White New York – a place where people with too much melanin were erased? These worrying thoughts stirred me to write about the challenge of parenting my Mixed Race children in a world full of racism. A more poetic influence on this sequence was the Jamaican writer, Kwame Dawes. His collection, Hope’s Hospice, explores the impact of HIV/AIDS on Jamaican society. In one poem, a mother’s prayers, ‘slip through the white/burglar bars’ and ‘dance above the flat/concrete roofs.’ This mix of religion and melancholy is echoed in part two of my sequence where the sweat and dust of ‘Crumlin’s crumbling colliery’ is ‘silenced/like this valley’s churches.’ The Many Reincarnations of Gerald Oswald Archibald Thompson ‘The Many Reincarnations…’ began life as an exploration of my father’s time as a Royal Signal during the Aden Emergency (1963-1967). The first version of my poem only contained ten lines. It was commissioned by the Swindon Poetry Festival where, at night, it was projected onto a garden wall. In that version, I used long, eel-like lines to imagine my dad as one of the British Army’s torturers in Aden (now Yemen). As instructed, Dad, you filled your syringe with too much morphine. Fans hummed. Under Aden’s sun, you ignored the POW’s tears and fed the needle into his arm. In the above extract, the language lacks the punch of powerful poetry. I was tempted to press delete. However, imagining my dad as a war criminal stirred a strange mix of love and longing that compelled me to turn my original brief narrative into something with a wider thematic reach. In On Poetry, Glyn Maxwell writes about the whiteness that surrounds the words on a page of poetry: ‘If you don't know how to use it you are writing prose.’ This quote 1 5 P O E T R Y W A L E S
page 19
compelled me to revisit my poem’s form. Thus the poem, ‘Dosage,’ became part 3 of my 14-page war poem: The office fan hummed and, as instructed, my dad filled the syringe with too much morphine. Under Aden’s sun he ignored the sobs and fed the needle into the prisoner’s arm. Physically, in this version, there is more white space, more time between my fictional father filling his syringe and the morphine-filled needle piercing ‘the prisoner’s arm.’ Consequently, readers are forced to linger with this horror. After listening to Radio 4’s dramatisation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, I discovered all the holes in my story. Thanks, Salman! Rushdie’s narrative also gave me the confidence to imbue my tale with a magical-realist logic. My love of war poetry began with Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est.’ In my early twenties, this love was strengthened when I discovered Yusef Komunyakaa’s Scandalise My Name. In his poem, ‘Thanks,’ the narrator praises God ‘for the tree/between me & a sniper’s bullet.’ Like Owen, Komunyakaa served in the armed forces; he saw action in Vietnam. He tells us, ‘When guns fall silent for an hour/or two, you can hear the cries//of women making love to soldiers.’ Similar bold and courageous imagery can be found in the Vietnam War poems of Ocean Vuong. There is a cold lyricism to ‘Aubade with Burning City.’ The poem sprawls across the page like an elegant mess as lyrics from ‘White Christmas’ mingle with images of death: ‘a nun, on fire, runs silently toward her god.’ We also read about, ‘His hand running the hem/of her white dress.’ These lines speak of rape as a weapon of war. This idea is echoed in the Boer War section of ‘The Many Reincarnations…’ where daughters have their skin ‘creased by soldiers’ hands.’ Whilst Searching for Anansi with my Mixed Race Children in the Blaen Bran Community Woodland (published in Poetry Wales 55.2) After writing about my father in, ‘The Many Reincarnations…’, I decided to return to the subject of my own fatherhood. In ‘Through the Forest,’ Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinksi (translated by Hildi Hawkins) states that he has ‘sometimes wanted to escape.’ Kaplinksi’s poems offer me escape into a world of woodland birches, hazelwort and Hungarian lilacs. Woods remind me of Hansel and Gretel, of magic and the weekend trip I took to Epping Forest as a Year 3 schoolboy. The woods are a place where my children have eaten picnics, played games and laughed. These feelings of freedom and wonderment danced around me as I wrote the first villanelles that became ‘Searching for Anansi…’ 1 6 P O E T R Y W A L E S

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What’s in the hearts of families that spoon black bean sauce and beef on our high streets then call the chefs Cs (and I don’t mean ‘coons’ which is Tommy’s word for, ‘Lives we should delete.’)

I digress. It’s true, Izzard wore slap and soared with better gags and nails and cuter heels. With me, who knows why the world is enthralled?

The One in Which…

The second narrative sequence I wrote for Road Trip was an exploration of the uncertainties inherent in raising my Mixed Race children in a part of Wales that is predominantly White. I was spurred into writing this sequence by Friends. Yes, that 90s sitcom whose episode titles followed a distinct format: ‘The one where…’, ‘The one in…’ or ‘The one with…’ I misread these headings and titled my sequence, ‘The One in Which…’

For most of my life, New York, where Friends is set, has marketed itself as a multicultural city. This was the reality I witnessed when I visited the metropolis in 2005. And while there is nothing wrong with homogenous friendship groups, something about Friends was troubling. Even with the extras in crowd scenes, there was a lack of diversity.

Psychologically, stories can be viewed as wish fulfilment. With Friends, is that what I had been watching – someone’s dream of an almost all White New York – a place where people with too much melanin were erased? These worrying thoughts stirred me to write about the challenge of parenting my Mixed Race children in a world full of racism.

A more poetic influence on this sequence was the Jamaican writer, Kwame Dawes. His collection, Hope’s Hospice, explores the impact of HIV/AIDS on Jamaican society. In one poem, a mother’s prayers, ‘slip through the white/burglar bars’ and ‘dance above the flat/concrete roofs.’ This mix of religion and melancholy is echoed in part two of my sequence where the sweat and dust of ‘Crumlin’s crumbling colliery’ is ‘silenced/like this valley’s churches.’

The Many Reincarnations of Gerald Oswald Archibald Thompson

‘The Many Reincarnations…’ began life as an exploration of my father’s time as a Royal Signal during the Aden Emergency (1963-1967). The first version of my poem only contained ten lines. It was commissioned by the Swindon Poetry Festival where, at night, it was projected onto a garden wall. In that version, I used long, eel-like lines to imagine my dad as one of the British Army’s torturers in Aden (now Yemen).

As instructed, Dad, you filled your syringe with too much morphine. Fans hummed. Under Aden’s sun, you ignored the POW’s tears and fed the needle into his arm.

In the above extract, the language lacks the punch of powerful poetry. I was tempted to press delete. However, imagining my dad as a war criminal stirred a strange mix of love and longing that compelled me to turn my original brief narrative into something with a wider thematic reach.

In On Poetry, Glyn Maxwell writes about the whiteness that surrounds the words on a page of poetry: ‘If you don't know how to use it you are writing prose.’ This quote

1 5 P O E T R Y W A L E S

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