February 1981

By 1981 in Poland, the Solidarity-led challenge to the Soviet-maintained Communist system was growing rapidly. And in the U.S.A. President Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981 with a large-scale programme of economic reform.

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Invalided in my chair,

Subject to a spouse’s care,
I extol the virtues of
Sympathetic wifely love;
Cast a bleary, saddened eye
At the landscape and the sky
Where a February chill
Tempts a crocus to the kill.

Distant by some freezing hours

Poland prods the angry powers,
Seeks for meaning in the lie
Of an ideology.
Russian drivers give the gun
To their tanks but not for fun,
Trample underneath the boot
Any lively, stirring root.

Westwards in the U.S.A.

Great reforms are under way,
Laws rescinded, taxes cut,
Unresponsive bureaux shut
So that righteousness might yield
Joy behind a nuclear shield:
Loud-mouthed children shouting, “Yuk”
Pick an early flower for luck.

Through the window as I write

Comes a most depressing sight,
Rain before the frost has gone
Starts and then goes on and on.
Trying to arrange my thoughts
Into sentences of sorts
I arrive at twenty-one
Euphemisms for the sun.

This then is material

For a short confessional
Poem by a sickly man
Having ’flu as best he can.
Elsewhere as the day is done
Options narrow one by one,
People for their actions die:
I sit here bad-temperedly.

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© February 1981