Welcome Mine Poem by Richard Blanch

When monks behind their walls squabble over precedence
Or who has planted leeks in a carrot patch, intense
With fury- and resentment grows faster than sense
Can justify it or reason invent

A reasonable pose-
-Do you suppose

The simmering bile pours, eyes snapping, glancing,
Up, out and over their careful Spring planting?

As mine does over your picture, well oiled
As it is with memories, now that I have spoiled
It with too much fingering and wishing, coiled
Round it like barbed wire? How I have toiled

On the telephone, deliberate, often, intent
On proving you wrong when mine stays silent.

I have turned from the window to look at the page
Where I list things. Things I think of, begrudge.
Or write letters which quest and entrap and cage
You in cheerfulness, false bonhomie, while I rage

When the too-frequent offers – they’re really demands
Are of course nicely refused. I have taken your hands


Seen the little sky die, pleasure glaze out of eyes
When I say, ‘Well, you could have, or so I’d
Have thought- could have rung, have said yes, ’ while hurt pride
Loads its cart high with ‘That weekend, that night, that time,

This minute.’ And so I make clay clods in little
Hard pebbles which grind you and grind me with blame. It


Is why, of course, all the days have gone grey
Like monastery walls, and green as a May

Washed in vomit.