Jon Silkin
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of Jon Silkin. All works are copyright and may not be reproduced or published
in any form without permission.]
Durham bread
Streets of terrace houses cover
the hill, the sun's tufts and hollows
in lilac smoke turning the stone
to honey. The railway steps
through on arches. This is Gala
miner and minister, bands that break
lugubrious cries. The hushed brass,
its softly hurled quick touches
a friend's death: yes, I loved you.
Living, like smoke
on stone property, patches of brick
darn a worn fabric, its patch
of small-builders. With stepping
between, a miner,
a lawyer, fragrant and striped
as a cardamom. A tall bird
uncurls its neck
and rises like a figure
off a tarnished penny.
Its streaks of bodily black force
drift at the dun stone
of church architecture.
Some choose not to have
that church. Christ so imbues them,
these workers in Frosterly marble,
their fossil columns, they drop
their Christianity
in heaps of languid clothing
on the river side, swimming until
their bodies with tiredness fill,
naked as the soft opening
they started through.
Walking, what I see,
the air lifting between the stepping arches,
its how their spaces
are like the thick slices of Durham bread, cut
against hunger,
slices like generations of boys' mouths,
this boy, Dick, even
now, cramming his
with white, thick unbuttered bread. He feels
that bub, that generative, pert
tenderness of his wife's breasts. His hands
echo her shapes. Durham
bread, as the trains wing it, where
some have neither bread nor love. Slovenly
clothes crease the frail height
of a man buying his stamp,
whose monarch's head removes
a letter to his friend. Take the bread.
(FOR DAVE BELL AND JACKIE LEVITAS)
[from The Lens-Breakers, 1992]