ASE

If you want the semblance of my Great Uncle
Open Alice in Wonderland to Tenniel's picture
Of Humpty Dumpty. The likeness is uncanny
Except Humpty looks arrogant and Ase
Looked only kind, like a benevolent ogre
His child-eating days long behind him.
Surely he wasn't always bald and craggy
With a grinning, gaping mouth and eyes
Droop lidded but still seeing wonders?
Unlike my grandfather, his younger brother,
Who was small and deft and dapper
Ase was large and sprawling. His fat fingers
Could not do card tricks. What choice then
But to learn magic?

A MOMENT IN 1933

Most powerful, I’ve heard, the spell left undone;

Just one gesture more and a new world

Spins in our place. The wizard drops his hand

And we go on, unknowing, unthankful.

But I do not think that this is so.

On the Holyhead train in 1933 two men sit,

They do not speak (they’ve not been introduced)

The elder is white-haired, word-haunted, lean;

His fingers are too long; he half-shuts his eyes

And asks himself if the moment’s come.

When the train makes its halt, near island’s edge,

The youth is ten seconds older than his years

And remembers two things he never saw

A curlew calls in the sun by the water’s edge;

A rook flies against the dark at day’s end.