Steve Whitaker, Literary Editor
Poem: Keep Smiling By Steve Whitaker
Keep Smiling
Mutton, steamed veg, spotted dick.
The wind-up clock's incessant tick.
The measurements of Miss Leith's days.
Her promptitude, her savoury duck,
her graceful middle years, her luck
at cards, the green baize royal flush
and nightly modest blush of pride;
a greater show of joy denied
behind a fan of privacy.
When pots and pans are safely stowed
and evening comforts guaranteed,
she leaves her 'boys', her travellers
to fugs of navy plug and ale
from cellar'd jugs, or India Pale.
And now as tongues are oiled, the talk
flows free; the laughter muffled in
the hall where Miss Leith stops to turn
the key, and pause, and hear
the skittering mice inside the wall.
Unmoved, unties her plait, lets fall
the thinning grey, and climbs the steep
and spiralled stair to find her room,
a cell to which no stranger comes
nor leaves behind faint vestiges
of breath, as broken moths leave dust.
Miss Leith is still. The opened case
reveals well-wrought inventories
of chastened days and empty nights,
her boat approaching harbour lights
of memory, of crucifix,
of photos in a silver frame,
now run aground on banks of shame
or salting fears in secret coves.
Undressed, anointed, newly bathed,
she lays across the shore of bed
and seeks the endless drift of waves.
As once was found, before Messines,
in this same attic ship, two moon-
bleached dreamers cast adrift in tides
of love, so now the only love
is hers, each token breath yet proof
of faith beyond the wind-drained withering dawn.
Image by Peter H from Pixabay
I once knew a hairdresser of the old school, a 'short, back and sides' barber whose everyday valediction to newly cropped customers never varied - 'keep smiling!', he'd say as you left his upstairs shop.
I now recognise the trivial farewell as time-locked, an echo of an earlier era of stoicism, of hunkering down and waving cheerily as the bombs fell, or the last tanner went into the meter.
The expression is both hackneyed and redundant, but it precisely describes the mood I intended to convey in 'Keep Smiling'. Set in an imaginary boarding house of the 1930's, whose temporary residents are travelling salesmen, the tableau is stylized like a scene from a Priestley drama, a shabby but jolly facade through whose windows the reader peers.
If the poem's early tone is cheery - the victuals are similarly time-bound and unavoidably comedic - then the device is served up in an accordingly jaunty metre and with brazenly heavy-duty full rhymes.
Miss Leith, the landlady, holds it all together like a well-coiffed plait. The maternal geniality of her role is maintained in the spirit of stoicism, of 'buggering on', as Churchill would later have it. Until she ascends to her nocturnal 'eyrie', her daily pain and the shadows of an unresolved past, remain unharvested. Reaching her room, the full rigour of memory is restored in the impedimenta of personal tokens, and in the languid delivery of the words used to describe them.