Three Poems by Ian Duhig

Toad Poetry

Why should I let the toad ‘poetry’
   squat on my life?
I could write like this, just prosy
   simple stuff

that won’t take a whole year to grow
   like some flower. Arse!
I see those through the bus window
   when I pass:

in no imaginary municipal garden,
   they’re real as toads
but don’t find blossoming a burden,
   nor eat words.

Folk struggle to buy their family
   enough to eat:
I’m lucky to be writing anything.
   Words are cheap.

Yet something poetic and unkillable
   still fuels my soul,
firing me to find the run of the mill
   beautiful,

like bird song I know means Stuff
   off! or Stuff me!
(the latter at bottom still the stuff of
   poetry).

Dogshit too, blossoming by birds
   on bush and branch,
the black plastic seed case spreads
   its high stench;

even such can flower bright words
   in good time:
not just in Hull are toads and turds
   a full rhyme.

Auk Roosting

Auk sounds like how it goes
and its direction: awkward,
flying or walking. But water
is a language an auk knows

backwards, sideways, forwards,
its own tongue untelling the tails
of fish which are water’s words
to sing their descending scales.

This auk is black and white,
a little red – like my poetry
you said, yet it’s hard to write:
I’m unauklike when all at sea,

like one on land and as for air,
my poems do so struggle there
they could even pass for auks.
One roosted here. Now it talks.

Dents-de-Lion

for Jane

For Marvell’s four hundredth anniversary,
and our fortieth, driving to Nun Appleton
we’d find our world locked out, the estate
invested in ruination by some new owner.

Coming back, we turned at a gate opening
onto a field plush with dandelions in seed,
old Belisha beacons losing their white hair.
We stopped to see clocks shower soft tufts

into May air and birdsong, blowing over
iron gates and chain-link fencing to leave
pads on stalks like buttons on green foils.

Sweetness, let us hold each other and roll
in our quilt until it bursts like a blowball,
while we may, while our own roads allow.

Ian Duhig has written seven books of poetry, most recently The Blind Roadmaker, shortlisted for the Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes. A former homelessness worker, he still works on projects with the socially marginalised as well as with artists, musicians and filmmakers. His New and Selected Poems is due from Picador later this year.