Ken Smith

The Wall

There is the one side and the other,

and between there is the wall. Each side 

has its monuments, its flags, its currency, 

its bulletholes, its notions of the other.

Over here we say the beaten in the lobby 

of the crestfallen. Some days we pity them. 

Over there they watch us through binoculars. 

Over there they call us fascists.

There, here is over there, and their maps 

of where we are are coloured white, 

as ours are of them. No one

over there can fall in love over here.

Here the street ends and there’s wall, 

and on the other side the same street: 

tramtracks, kerbstones, streetlights

coming on, pedestrians about their business.

They do not wave or look back. It is

as if we were each others’ ghosts. Either side 

history comes with a wall round it.

We are each other’s terra incognita.

Somewhere there’s a piano playing boogie, 

and on this side a late-night argument 

strung out with booze and bamboozle 

till the word gets lost in the many

qualifications of itself, and it all ends 

in tears. Over there the long silence 

broken by dogs at each change of shift, 

some border guard on his two-stroke.

And everywhere it seems a night bird 

fills the dark with long pulses of his song. 

He doesn’t care to be one side or the other. 

His song is all of him.

I understand where this late night music 

of a sad piano is coming from.

I understand where that long

leashed baying of manhounds is coming from.

But I don’t understand where the nightingale 

in these long pulls of music through himself 

and the buildings and the trees 

or from which side of anywhere he is singing.

*

Days on Dog Hill

A season of loose connections, bells

and weddings through the rainy summer.

I woke with my head in a crock,

I had dreamed of nothing.

I’m into town and out, down the hill

and up again, muttering waggontruss,

windbrace, through the tall woods

along the old pack road that no longer goes anywhere,

and like the windy leaves never still,

always on the way to some thought

lost in the traffic and the chatter,

the town below fading into voices off,

a hammer’s knock travelling beyond itself,

a man shouting his name over and over,

lives made from the sounds they make.

These things do not connect:

a yellow flower from a far off country,

linked hearts cut in a tree’s side,

sussura of pigeon wings, an animal threshing

the undergrowth, scribble of bird song

here, here, and your secret names for me –

Old Paint, Wild Root, Scissorbill. I dreamed

the ridge and these massed dark roots of the yews,

anger like a sudden wind. Wild root.

*

The Secret Police

They are listening in the wires,

in the walls, under the eaves

in the wings of the house martins,

in the ears of old women,

in the mouths of children.

They are listening to this now.

So let’s hear it for the secret police,

a much misunderstood minority.

After all, they have their rights,

their own particular ways of seeing things,

saying things, cooking things,

they too have a culture uniquely their own.

                           And we think

they should have their own state

where they could speak their own

incomprehensible tongues, write

their confessions, their unknown histories,

cultivate their habits of watching

by watching each other, and fly

their own flags there, at attention

on parade in their medals at their monuments

on their secret anniversaries, making speeches,

singing praises to the God of Paranoia.

And at the end of the day

bury their dead, publish their coded obituaries

of each other, and rest at last

in their own kind of peace, forever.

The above recordings were made at Ken Smith's home in London (on 29 July 1998) drawing on poems from both The Poet Reclining and Shed and originally released on cassette on The Poetry Quartets 3 (Bloodaxe Books/The British Council, 1998). See page for The Poet Reclining for his reading of an extract from Fox Running.

Five poems by Ken Smith: 'Being the third song of Urias', 'My father with two knives', 'My father fading out', 'Years go by', 'The Donegal Liar' (from the Bloodaxe collections The Poet Reclining and Shed). First transmission: BBC Radio 3, 4 August 2002.