Brian Wake Poems

At thirteen forty five our train begins to move, and, late
to board, what seats remain face not toward but from.
I shuffle off and fold my overcoat and sit, do battle
with a newspaper to find a decent page and settle down
...

Eighty seven or eight years old,
she was, quite deaf and yet
we'd bawl our names as though
to rouse her from the slow
...

There is nothing to be frightened of, she said,
but come along and lie here on the bed.
We spoke of country dancing and of how
so very sad it was to have to dance alone,
...

Goethe’s clock is ticking in an empty room.
He sits quite motionless. All art, then peels
a curling strip of wallpaper from a dilapidated
wall, begins, he says, from what we know
...

During the war, their breakfast, every morning
on the devastated farm, was either, nine times
out of ten, an extraordinarily renewed determination
or remorse. The cattle gone, the sheep, the horse.
...

He fills, with pink, polluted dregs,
a yellow plastic can, and Lake Muhazi
fills again with water bleeding through
its pot-shot bullet holes.
...

A good, Cain sighs, book, counting the steps, four, five, then resting,
six, for a moment on the seventh in his cell, is quite, good morning sir,
the purest essence of the human soul.

I’m best inside, he says, best locked away.
...

Lucky for you, lucky for you
I lived not in the glass house
of my fathers, not in the bricks
and mortar, in the mud and bullets
...

An unexamined life, thought Daniel,
settling for the night on an eiderdown
of lions, is not a life at all.

I was hardly born until a little while ago,
...

Hiding from me at bedtime, my daughter
sneezes and giggles from inside the wardrobe.
I wonder where she is, I act. Pretending
not to see her four small fingers clutching
...