Poetry David Hamson

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: DAVID HAMSON

David Hamson lives in south London, and has been writing for several years. His work has previously appeared in Agenda Broadsheets and Marble. He is soon to be published in Dream Catcher and has three poems appearing in the next edition of The High Window.

Poem 1:

Being children, we didn’t know

Being children we didn’t know things can change rapidly

we knew only routine a route travelled time and again in slightly different fashion

the same way we watched tensions grow and grow and then be resolved.

So when, through our huddle around a closed bedroom door we heard you say

you wanted something more we had no idea what that could mean.

Although in the end you stayed for those long drives, the drab holidays so perhaps neither did you.

David Hamson

Poem 2:

New Zealand

Sun and sea tight on morning skin, labradors shaking themselves happy to be alive

the bay a swollen surf of light, overrunning its edges dripping from a sun poised to dive.

All is clear, bright and guiltless where whatever it means to live might have fallen as a clean rain in the night or washed up in golden sand rounded by tides that left no fingerprints.

We could live here like this, you and I, be bright and guiltless too the way you thought about doing with someone else, years ago.

David Hamson

Poem 3:

April coast

Dunes of horse parsley and kestrels hunting high above the fields

nothing better to feel than sun on the chest after a long winter

and nothing more a relief than to sit in the lea of wind-beaten rocks

where afternoons have stopped to close their eyes, and lower heads beside daisies and thrift.

But there is nothing to dream of here but ragged cliffs and their missing teeth

or how they run like the back of a hand against flashing breeze and spray.

Spring’s passage blown over in budding grass and the salted air

of our disappointment at life returning and nothing more, no different hanging there still

an inch above what we’ve always been close to saying,

above what is blent and locked in April sun, that great tightropist

dangling out over the sea, balancing its cold sprawling weight

allowed only ever a half-step forward or half-step back on its thin wire of grace.

David Hamson

Poem 4:

The new world

Hair covered, cheeks grained with dirt the white teeth of a few grins. Only women of course caught in a moment of reprieve washing clothes together

no need to blend in here kneeling by the water we imagine them chatting through difficulties with a husband, a daughter our eyes trace a certain hardness in the faces of some, a mealy poverty stretched thin over daily decisions, lessons hard learnt to act swiftly when needed

and after, a final shot of the clothes hung out across the street side by side like aspirations for children wrung and spread high up there for a whole neighbourhood to see.

David Hamson

Poem 5:

Hummer

Remembered like a reflex, the songs he hummed next to you in class.

Never a chorus or enough of a verse to identify, a shrugged ‘nothin’ if asked.

Only evasion, distraction, until he went missing for a whole term, and your teacher sat you all down, told you his mother was very sick, that he’d have to change school maybe move towns.

And you thought about him afterwards and those abortive songs of his and how maybe the full round scale of human experience can be sung just as well from any starting point or hummed.

David Hamson

Poem 6:

Waiting rooms

We sit in off-white suspense unsure of what to say, do not want to give away where thoughts tend

to calculation of likelihood, or - worse - costs and aftercare, slump with guilt in yellowed chairs, certain we are doing no good.

But the flowers we bring to cover our absence speak with more sense here, where nothing begins:

ears to the violent hope and loneliness of spring which we’ve all once known they fill the silences of quiet rooms,

unashamed of weakness looming like wayward moons and say honest, brutal, beautiful things.

David Hamson