A Commonplace by Jonathan Davidson

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This is an interesting collection, of Davidson own poems and a few by others, which are interspersed by reflections, that give it the feel of a poetry reading, the chatter of introduction you would get between poems – from those one phrase really sticks out “The poem reads me” - how true is that, really good poems have that power to see into our being.

Two of the poems

Didcot Parkway

Never Parkway to us

who roamed around

the platform as boys.

We’d look up the line

to London and see

the nose of a locomotive

seemingly not moving

then suddenly here,

roaring and yellow,

dull blue flanks, its

arrival never as great

as its coming towards us.

Leaving

When we left it was the end of everything.

We didn’t even bother to lock up.

We walked to the craft -

those who could -

and counted ourselves in.

It’s the children I feel sorry for;

what they won’t know about rain showers and thunder;

what they won’t know about crossing a cold brook barefoot

or lying in a hanger of beech trees at evening

and hearing the leaving talking.

I know I romanticise.

I know nothing is immutable.

I know it shouldn’t trouble me

that a beautiful future awaits us:

my children, and their children,

their bodies powered-down to drift

down icy streams to pleasant distant worlds,

their eyes closed, their mouths still.