I read this last night at the Cafe Poets first meeting in Halesworth Library, after the usual meeting place, ‘Pinkys’ had been burnt in a serious fire. Given the current heat wave it was like reading in a sauna! It was a follow up to my other longer poem that I also read, ‘Back Amongst The Rangoons’, (which is elsewhere on this site). ‘Complex Signals’ is a sixty-nine year event firmly marked in my memory. Mike and I were both five years old when the lorry hit him.
After the single knock
she grabbed her son’s hand,
held it high,
as if unwillingly he had been dragged there
down the street she always forbade him –
the street she had grown up in –
to a long ignored door
that opened to a single act.
A Sunday dress on a weekday morning
arms miming an unseen burden
heavy with a slow dignity of grief
she invited them to view her dead son.
Keenly the boy moved forward
to check for tyre marks on his friend
and explore his new condition,
surprised to be jerked sharply back
to the uneven blue-black pavement.
He memorised its diamond pattern
as the women faced in silence.
