Quaker Holmes and Other Poems
by
Pete Owen Williams
This book is dedicated to Anne Fleming to whom I owe a massive debt of gratitude in so many ways.
Published By:
Lens Flair Wales at Smashwords
Copyright © Pete Owen Williams 2011
Cover designed by Lens Flair Wales
Photograph courtesy of Ian Britton of FreeFoto at www.freefoto.com
Smashwords Edition
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THE QUAKER HOLMES POEMS
This series of poems is on-going. I wanted an Everyman figure, an urban version of R.S.Thomas's Iago Prytherch but he had to have opinions. A figure whom life has beaten down over and over again yet he still survives-just.
11. Quaker Holmes
Quaker perches on his stool at the bar;
privileged position secured by common usage.
A crested flat cap defies gravity
clinging like a drunken leach
to the side of his head.
The altar is spread before him,
a chalice of dark beer drawn
from the depths by hand pump
settles at the start of the sacrament,
only the host is missing.
As if telling a rosary
his deft fingers fill a Rizla,
rotate the paper to a smooth tube,
pinch loose strands and the ritual
is completed with a swift lick.
Not ploughing thick clay on a tractor
nor tending sheep on a bald hill,
his eyes fix on the giant screen,
as Silver Wraith or Trojan Warrior
Fail yet again to live up to their odds.
The bar air is clear now, though the yellowed
ceiling bears witness to the way it was.
Once the rollie would have assisted
in the choice of the day’s runners,
decisions now split between bar and beer-garden.
A red top waits patiently beside the beer
To be opened up, folded back,
Picked over and stabbed by pencil stub
once the litany has begun and runners
are doomed by the pencil stroke.
This dark room his office, sitting room,
den away from the strife, works canteen
for the mid-morning break as he suspends
window cleaning for an hour, ladder and bucket
stand like disgruntled dogs tethered outside.
He is the foot soldier, the bottom line,
Schweyk of the coal mine and steel works
before Thatcher did for them.
First to step up to the plate in the good years,
Always the first to go when times were bad.
He’ll swap a pint for an opinion
from Blair’s destruction of his Labour Party
to the utter uselessness of religion.
Two wives have come and gone,
his only son lost to a car bomb in Iraq.
Quaker caresses the patient rollie
looks at his labourer’s hands,
pitman’s pick and shovel hands,
molten iron and steel-hefting hands,
softened now by chammy and soap.
In his palm he sees his father’s face,
gnarled and grooved as a slab of old oak,
mouth wide, fish-like, gasping for air,
lungs silted with coal dust and grit,
choked by the pit, finished off by the steelworks.
His father paid the poor man’s price,
dust from the mines returned him to dust.
Spent, ignored, gone before miserly
governments coughed up some cash,
scorned the widow with paltry mites.
He could not keep her warm at night,
burnt out for others light and heat.
The memories boil in Quaker’s blood,
the bitterness fashioned his politics,
Injustice and loss his bile.
Now alone, his world is shrunk
to this bar, the streets outside,
to simmering issues that won’t go away,
to horses, to jockeys, pints of real ale
and a tarry tab to take the taste away.
2.Where Were You?
“Quaker, d’yer remember where you were
when Kennedy was shot?” The banter
crackled across the public bar.
“Or Martin Luther King?” yelled another,
spilling his pint in the process.
“What about John Lennon?” squawked
A long haired youth, poised at the juke box.
“And where were you when the Twin Towers fell?”
Quaker’s face remained impassive as his fingers
smoothed the thinness of a cigarette paper.
He layered the moist resinous shreds
of ripe tobacco along the receiving fold
and worked quick deft fingers to form
a roll-up, finished with the tongue tip lick.
Quaker eyed his interlocutors through the match
flame as his smile thinned to a leer.
“I wasn’t born when Kennedy was shot
and five when convict James Earl Ray
took Martin Luther King away. For Lennon,
I was down the pit. My first year
as a rookie miner. I’d just come off
the night shift, stepped out of the cage,
when one going down told me
“Lennon’s been shot.”
I gobbed the dust out of my lungs,
scraped grime off my skin in the showers,
trudged home uphill and played Imagine.
I was chilling out waiting for the night shift
watching some daytime TV crap
when the pictures changed to a plane
swooping into high rise glass,
a dysfunctional swallow blossoming in fuel flame.
The rest of the day, like a rabbit in headlights,
I watched the same newsreel over and over,
took the images underground
where the screech and moil of machines
played a soundtrack to the pictures
as the Twin Towers fell.”
Quaker paused, the eyes narrowing
to accusing pinpricks, the voice sedge dry
as he looked his interlocutors in the eye.
“But where were you when Strawman
let Pinochet go? Or the day
that Flashman shafted us into Iraq?
That upstart Tory ferret,
who’d grinned his way into my Party,
dragging it kicking and screaming to the Right,
across to the dark side of private money
private wars, privilege and personal gain?
And still you voted for him!
In the valleys they say, put a donkey up
for Labour, he’ll be PM one day!
Well you certainly did!
Now, look at the mess, the greed,
the self-serving, as you and me dodge and weave
scavenging enough to survive,
they screw the proles into the ground
and laugh with their second homes,
their profits and pelf, pilfered
from us who put them in place.
Quaker rose in the guilty silence,
stabbing his rollie into the ashtray
and with a withering look,
sought cleaner air outside.
3. Betting Slip
A life mapped out on cheap carbon-copy
Paper, a poor man’s archive of ill-advised
Decisions mirroring the wrong turns taken in life.
A litany of false dawns, flawed hopes
Of a harsh life. If school proved a trial
For Quaker, it did little to prepare him for reality after.
School was good-to-firm, but life was
Heavy going where fences were high
And deep ditches filled with brackish water.
As he limped from one
ailing industry to another
he felt his life was
labouring round a left-hand track
with the odds always against.
At work, at play Quaker
was forever peering into the rich man’s garden.
Even at the races
he found himself gazing into the grandstand
or corporate hospitality
Where fat men who never wore flat caps
gripped champagne flutes with their fat fingers
and pawed at pampered fillies,
gawped down each gaping cleavage,
eyed the sun-tanned exposed legs
and patted their sveldt flanks.
How, even in the bookies, Quaker can bet on anything,
including the likelihood of him getting a job
though the odds against would be long.
4. Quaker’s Women
First wife the real thing – love amidst the
pit grime and the steelwork’s heat.
Money short and labour shorter,
the warmth and comfort of the bed
the quietly free refuge if you
disregard the by products.
It lasted as long as it could,
ground down by penury and progeny,
two children born in the shadow
of the redundant winding gear
and the slowly failing furnaces.
Quaker sought comfort in a long glass,
his wife in the well-lined arms of another,
leaving Quaker with the offspring
as the furnace flames flickered for the last time
and Quaker’s work was done.
After a decent length of time, number two
hove into view. It never stood a chance;
a knee-jerk reaction from a man down and almost out.
She wanted children but couldn’t,
never content with Quaker’s two.
The liaison wilted under neglect
and her inability to prise Quaker
out of the public bar before stop tap.
5. The Public Bar at the Open Hearth
“At nineteen your immortal
indestructible. So, the pits had gone!
There was still rugby, girls and beer
and work, they said, in the steelworks.
I couldn’t look in my father’s face.
Not for the deep crevices time and toil
had gouged like a river on his skin.
Nor the ash-grey complexion
the miner’s sun tan.
No! It was the hopelessness around the eyes
downcast like a whipped dog
beaten senseless until the fight had gone.
The week before our first steel shift
He took me to The Open Hearth,
Steelworkers oasis dwarfed by
cranes and furnace stacks.
It was the end of the day shift.
The pub was empty apart from
Me, my Dad and an old man with
terrier and stick. In the calm
I was unprepared for the storm.
In a silent, almost empty bar
the landlord sweated, pulling pints
Till there was no room left on the bar top.
The storm appeared in the shape
Of twenty or thirty men,
Faces blackened from the day’s toil,
All wore the uniform of steelworkers, soiled
Dungarees, ragged jackets, Industrial boots,
everything damped down with a day’s sweat.
The end of the day shift, close to the furnaces.
Outside, the stacks yawned blood to the evening sky.
Inside, men jostled at the bar,
threw down coins onto the counter,
mingling with the spilt beer
and sank three pints without pause.
Most left soon after, to return to families
and an evening’s rest, others
lingered over a fourth pint reluctant
to go home to argument and strife
Or else there was no one to go home to.
And then the pub was calm again.
The old man Became visible once more,
His dog unmoved by the sudden mayhem.
The landlord scooped the wet coins off the bar
And threw them in a bucket of water.
The bar he swabbed down and dried with fresh cloths.
A hush settled across the room
as the furnaces cooled and died;
dinosaurs in a microchip world
silicone replacing sinew in work
where life is cheap and obsolescent.”
6. Karl Marx in the Commercial
Quaker Holmes stopped dead in the doorway,
stared at the man sat motionless
in the corner booth. There was no doubting it.
The superabundant white beard with contrasting
black moustache, the expansive forehead.
His unwavering gaze focused on an untouched
pint of Guinness, perfectly poured, the end
product justifying the time taken
and a shot glass of vodka, meniscus
bursting to escape the confines of the rim.
Quaker overcame the shock whilst
Ordering his first drink of the day.
Redtop tucked under his arm,
Beer in his hand, his fingers itching to roll
A cigarette, he approached the booth.
Struck by the sad look, he nods at the seat opposite.
Marx grunts. Quaker sits down.
After a draught of fine ale, Quaker eyes
the two drinks in front of Marx.
“Guinness and I suppose vodka.
The Irish would cringe!”
“Because they do not mix in Ireland?”
“No, they would only use one glass!”
A dry chortle in the back of the throat
Erupts to a rasping cough, calmed
By a mouthful of vodka.
Quaker holds his pint. “To what do we owe the honour?”
“I was bored. And I wanted to see for myself.”
“Why it never worked here?” Quaker offered.
A thin smile that could be viewed as a leer
Slightly creased the philosopher’s face.
“The cradle of the industrial revolution.
The venue seemed ideal.
Masters getting richer, proletariat
being exploited, existing
in squalid poverty. How could it fail?”
Quaker slakes a thoughtful draught
As he feels a debate coming on.
“We’re not very good at sharing,
that was your major mistake.
From the top of the heap to the bottom
we like to know what’s ours.
To keep what we’ve got though
We don’t always want it. It’s ours.
And we always want a little bit more than we’ve got.
Some want a lot but definitely more.”