The first time you were in Changi
I do not know how it was.
(I suspect there are no words
for how it was).
And tens of thousands
of captured men
went from there to build a railway
and to die.
The next time you were at Changi
I did not ask you how it was;
when you made that pilgrimage
to acknowledge your history
and visit graves.
(Did you lay the ghosts of your past,
or raise them?
Those tens of thousands
of captured men?)
And now, tonight, I stop at Changi.
It's just another airport,
which gleams.
And every day tens of thousands of people
pass through
leading their lives
in the unthinking freedom you fought for.
Do the ghosts of those dead prisoners
shiver,
as we walk so blithely
over their graves?
21st December 2002
You are stuck there in my past
like a fly in amber:
visible,
precious,
protected.
Dead.
The world changed when you left it seven years ago;
and with every day that passes
you are one day farther away from
the reaching fingertips of my remembering mind.
Like a train departing the station
or a river tumbling inevitably down hill,
I am leaving you behind
held fast by a point in time.
All I have to do is lead my life:
I work,
I eat,
I sleep;
and with every task,
with every mouthful,
with every dream
you are farther away from me.
And still I change.
I am no longer the person
who sat beside you as you died,
as you slipped gently into my past,
while I held your hand in mine
and wept
for a time.
9th March 2003
The responses I have received to this poem tell me that I have not managed to communicate clearly. There are three other versions of this poem here (1a), here (2), and here (3). This version is the original, so please feel free to ignore the others. However, I really am curious to know which works the best, so if you email me here with your comments, I will respond. [email protected]
In Epping Forest
the bodies of mutilated girls
lie hidden
deep within the loam.
In the high summer
Epping Forest
is airless,
barely cooler
than the heat outside.
The trees provide scant shelter
from the brutal sunshine.
Beeches
stand all and bright,
and below them,
in the shadows,
last year's dead leaves
cover the floor.
Fallen branches
form obstacles.
There are no footpaths
through Epping Forest.
Young elms grow
beneath the indifferent beech trees.
Striving for the light,
diseased and dying,
attacked from within,
mutilated by beetles,
but - astonishingly -
even now,
there are elms
alive
in Epping Forest.
14th August 2003
There is a place
where the shrunken heads of men
with perfect, restful, human features
the size of your clenched fist
gaze out
on the place
where skulls
bound with rope
their jaws tied shut with hemp
eyes wide open,
some of them with wooden stakes plunged
deep through the sockets,
stare up
at the place
where the Chinese executioner's sword
the velvet hilt as long as the blade
to balance the flowing
double-handed
single stroke
hangs high above
the place
where a sheep's heart
shrunken, black,
the size of your clenched fist
lies
with six inch iron nails
driven clean through
from side to side.
And placed
next to each of them
in neat
nineteenth century
ethnologist's handwriting
there is a label
recording the name of the donor
and the date of the gift.
31st October 2003
This came scratching and sniffing aound the back door of my mind after two visits to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I prefer to think that the date on which it was written is no more than a co-incidence.
She shone in the morning sun,
long-limbed and talented
like a colt,
innocence in the line of her neck
and beauty in the way she faced the world.
Of all the things she did not know
the thing she did not know the most
was how to deal with life.
She took it personally.
She knew the stakes were high,
she traded beauty, joy and talent
to ease her pain
and found their loss more painful still.
What is left
is an empty husk
a shrivelled shell,
the talent washed away,
the beauty bloated,
her life a series of deceits,
disappointments
and betrayals.
But the biggest betrayal of them all,
the one I can't forgive,
is her own betrayal
of that long-limbed colt.
7th November 2003
We searched it, in the approved manner:
from the outside in,
across,
and out again.
We checked a giant with rings
and then landed on the first of the spinning rocks.
A bleak and desert place.
Cold, of course.
No life.
No bacteria, no viruses,
little water, and that was ice.
But signs of something which was not life.
Crumpled metal,
smashed ceramic,
plastic.
Simple machinery,
scattered in pieces,
across the desolate plain.
Someone had surveyed for a safe landing,
and never left.
(A mile to the north,
we'd have missed them.
A mile to the south,
the same.)
We went further in.
The next rock held our answers.
A febrile, foetid humid place:
plastics adrift in the oceans,
and ruined cities on the coasts.
Cities of rats and cockroaches,
and other scuttling things.
5thJanuary 2004
I was trapped in a lift last night.
Not for very long
and I am not particularly claustrophobic,
so no matter.
But I did discover
that I do not want to die
in a sealed box
in an enclosed shaft
in a hotel
next to an airport.
I want to die with the window open
and the sound of birdsong floating
in the sunlit air.
January 13th 2004
All poems copyright © Beth Cargill, 2002, 2003, 2004. All rights reserved.
If you wish to contact the author please email: [email protected]
Quails' eggs and other cock-ups