Nia Broomhall

Tulips

There are tulips today
that she won’t see, red
and yellow and blossom
on branches of apple.
The laburnum isn’t
flowering yet. There are
daisies today. There are
small blue ones with
names I have forgotten
and tiny leaves. It is a blue
day that smells of earth.
I will plant geraniums
and busy lizzies that will
bloom until September,
and when that arrives
she will not be here.
I will plant them anyway,
for the pink and white
when I come home from
work, but she will still
be gone. I will plant them
anyway. She will still be
gone. I will fill the green
jug she gave me with
water and tulips. The sun
will move across the sky.


*

Morphine Driver

We could hear it was working from the soft shunt of fluid
through the tube and the reassuring whisper

she’s fine, but we searched her face for the relief and found
cloud-clenched lids, thin-needled nothing and
 
today they are rehearsing for the airshow. The house is full
of the noise of nine planes, arrowheads and revolutions

though every time I look up there is an edge of a wing
or a tail of nothing or red smoke bleeding into a blue

that is full of just noise. A sky is a big place. Somewhere in here
there is a tiny panic at a window that might be closed or

a bee or not or a bluebottle trying to leave. A sky’s a big place
and we will not believe in things we cannot see.
 .

*

Nonostante

Again I find myself saying this word. It stands
at the top of a garden with my grandfather
outlined against an Italian sky or an English one.
It speaks clearly into the yellow or white light,
the shaking heads of tall flowers. It starts
with the soft tenacity of no, of no, of two footsteps
on the doorstep, the echo there of nostro, nonno,
nevertheless. It is a step forward of a word,
a refusal to move, a promise to stay after all;
a withstanding, a standing, the clasp of
his steady brown hand underlined with soil.
He seeded these sounds in the garden, tying stalks
and cutting them, the star-shaped strawflowers
we called everlasting in dry bouquets in the shed,
the nonno we called Grandad who stood quietly
to enlist, to handle a gun he would never fire,
to surrender arms, to board the boat, to work,
to work, to say I do in English in a church
that wasn’t his, to have his paper stamped,
to have his paper stamped, to have his paper
stamped. And despite it all, tutti gli anni, this word
that ends in tutting disapproval, it is a word
obstinate enough to take root, to lean into
the italics of the wind, to love regardless, to stand,
to grow paper-petalled stems the colours of the land.

*

Backalong
Somerset sonnets: 7

We never need to know how long ago
it was. It happened backalong. It was,
then. It has been. There’s comfort in the close
and far of those soft vaguenesses, the years
or hours ago, the Spring, the war, the Spring,  
those Christmases, or when he said he’d stay 
or when they built the Tor, or crowned a king,
or made the songs, the laws, the motorway.
And backalong keeps all these things behind 
a gently locked glass door. Their shapes are blurred
inside. It doesn’t matter when. She died
backalong. See? Backalong, ice covered
the Earth. Backalong, one hot afternoon,
she walked fast through the grass to feel it move.

7     Nina, who is still here
8     Ice
11     The Floods and the Frogs
12     In / Eleven Hours
13     Tulips
14     Morphine Driver
15     Still
16     My Parents’ Accent
17     Nonostante
18     Nevicata
19     After she died
20     Folly
21     Dutch Elm
22     Lemon
23     Ajar
24     Hedgerow
25     Three ways to look at it
26     Varifocals
27     New Year’s Day
28     Green
29     Collect
30     Backalong

32     Acknowledgements