Image: © Charles Eastwood
Hometown Elegy
Plumstead Road is a zip
in the town’s mended dress.
You’d like the new half, its cleanness.
The posh cafes. Though a cup of tea costs
what we used to pay for a pizza
and a pizza, no joke,
is what we paid for our flights to Rome.
Taxi boats carve up the Thames.
You can take them up town
for twice the price of the monorail.
And all the new flats,
like the old blocks
in their dad’s best suits.
I won’t tell you what they cost —
Your dad used to say, All the gear, no idea.
I think of that, pushing my baby
past the hippy shop that’s now a bookies.
On our side tramps still beg for a pound.
The covered market’s collapsed
like a storm-beaten hay barn.
The pet shop with the anorexic hamsters
— gone.
In the mini-cab office the same woman
behind the glass partition
still an indiscriminate age, taps her fingers,
still yellow from old fag smoke,
asks where I’m going,
tells me to wait by the Wimpy on the corner.
You’ll know who you’re after, babe,
he’s driving a white Honda Civic.
Glosa on Larkin’s The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
– Philip Larkin
Fuck you! scrawled in red pen
along the low wall. Magpies tear up bread.
Clouds seethe overhead. The baby’s crying,
my cough won’t shift, my mind drifts
to the last time we kissed…
my attention span is darting, brief.
And you’re still fucking dead.
The trees are coming into leaf.
This morning I threw a ball
for the dog. Baby took her first steps.
She’s started pointing at round objects.
If I’d told you the end, you wouldn’t believe me,
your body wore bruises like graffiti
you rasped a final croaking breath
(god, you’re still fucking dead)
like something almost being said.
I’m on my own now, cleaning, chopping,
doing laundry, dragging shopping. Your garden’s
overrun with foreign weeds. The rosebush
sleeping, I bent down to it, weeping, pricked
my finger on an angry thorn. I licked
the wound and watched: it bled.
You’re still fucking dead.
The recent buds relax and spread.
She’s not a baby anymore, she’s toddling
and maybe soon she’ll really start to talk.
The windows open, we let a breeze in,
winter’s finished, we’re not freezing, the roses
are waving from the lawn. As our toddler dozes
I spot an army of frogs, led by one fat chief.
You’re still fucking dead.
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
____
Katie Beswick is a writer from southeast London. Her recent poems appear in And Other Poems, Ink Sweat & Tears, Rattle and Narrative Magazine. Her poetry collection Plumstead Pram Pushers (2024) is published under Red Ogre’s chapbook series, and her hybrid book of poetry, cultural history and arts criticism is Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture (Routledge 2025). She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London.