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Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on
Facebook https://www.facebook.com richard.fleming.92102564/
or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com
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Introduction
I’ve written a great deal of verse over the years, much of which I’d happily disown, but amidst that unruly scrub-grass a few flowers have blossomed. The bouquet presented here comprises a mixture of formal and informal verse, including a number of older poems that have appeared elsewhere: there are also several more recently written ones that have not previously been published.
The Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, is quoted as saying: ‘a poet’s autobiography is his poetry’ and that may be true to a degree but let’s not forget that poetry is a creative art, a flight of fantasy, therefore poems that, at first glance, may appear to be autobiographical will almost certainly have been embellished by the writer’s imagination.
The selection leans strongly towards rhyming verse: my preference, despite the fact it seems to have fallen from favour in the world of modern poetry. What odds? I’ve never been one to run with the pack. [RF]
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Richard Fleming: Ten Poems
CURTAINS
He draws back curtains on a winter’s day.
It’s eight a.m. A charcoal sketch of trees
confronts him. All the world is grey
and unappealing. Nothing guarantees
a lowering of spirits as do scenes
like these. He peers outside. The thuggish sky
scowls back at him. Of all his small routines
this is the worst: he knows that, with a sigh,
he’ll draw these selfsame curtains yet again
in no more than a few hours’ time, when night
comes slouching from its prehistoric den
and all the birds of fortitude take flight.
He is a detainee, his heart in chains.
Love is a star long dead whose light remains.
SUITCASES
Crouching in attic gloom,
where skylight beams illuminate their pool of silver dust,
old leather suitcases doze like alligators
dreaming their prehistoric dreams.
They sleep soundly having eaten up my father’s life:
the photographs, the hearing-aid and collar studs,
the safety-razor with its rusted blade,
the letters
and the wallet with the ticket stubs
yet I am so afraid
that when I kneel beneath the skylight
to prise apart those sagging, alligator jaws,
the life that I will find compressed within
will be too small
to match my memories of him.
BOY
He closes his eyes while, around his head,
like playground shouts, a flock of angry birds
explodes. He feels an overwhelming dread,
remembering his irate father’s words
and what the words preceded: those first blows
that pummelled his thin shoulders and his ears,
left him confused and with a bloody nose,
his much-loved, navy T-shirt stained with tears.
He blinks, refocuses. The birds have gone.
And, looking at his wristwatch, he can see
hours have slipped by like buses missed. A pawn
on life’s great chessboard, he stands helplessly.
Time flows around him. In it he will grow
to strength while it diminishes his foe.
THE PRAYER
I remember the cold, high-ceilinged room
where they had laid him, the smell of incense,
brass coffin handles shining in the gloom,
an aspidistra, dusty and immense.
To this small boy dressed in a mourning suit,
he seemed reduced, much less than he once was:
his scalp, without his cap, bald as a coot,
his fingers criss-crossed on his chest like claws.
I thought back to the day we watched geese rise
high over wetlands blurred with morning haze,
the laughter always dancing in his eyes,
his warm, familiar smell, his turn of phrase.
Life is so short while memories are long.
We the bereaved are left with words unsaid.
At the day’s end, he’d sing a lulling song
as I rode his strong shoulders home to bed.
A prayer unbidden reached me on a whim:
Preserve in me the things I loved in him.
MEMENTO MORI
An ambulance howls like a hurt cat;
parts traffic as Moses did the waves.
Worms burrow in awaiting graves.
A police car buzzes like a gnat.
Stuck in a jam of steaming cars,
I contemplate how life transforms
in moments. How they wait, those worms,
so patiently, for us, for ours.
SUNNY AFTERNOON
Book discarded, like excess baggage shed
by someone who has rapidly pushed on
into uncharted regions far ahead,
he sleeps in an old deck chair on the lawn.
Gulls circle, skaters on an ice-blue lake,
while he dreams on, oblivious, his face
unshaded by a hat which, when awake,
he wears with equanimity and grace.
What does he dream? Is the unreal more real
than those pale gulls that spiral high above?
In sleep, has youth returned? No longer frail,
does he relive time when impatient love
was everything and all his heart desired,
before life tricked him, left him old and tired?
CATHEDRAL
Centuries it took them. Young men
grew old. Their sons, the skills passed down,
with treasured ageless tools, resumed
the sacred task. Great columns loomed
above the human ants, nut-brown
and shaped by labour. Four in ten,
perhaps, lived to grow old and sere.
The rest, their lungs and backs destroyed
by endless toil, bequeathed their tools
to others: sturdy men, young bulls,
upright and proud to be employed
in God’s good work that final year.
Sunlight, through stained glass windows, fell
on crowded pews. A city grew
around the great cathedral’s walls.
Priests crouched in dark confessionals
while prayers and supplications flew
upwards like doves. The solemn knell
of bells, as loud as God’s own voice,
tolled births and deaths, called men to prayer
while generations slipped away.
In latter days, in disarray,
God’s spokesmen found their greed laid bare,
their declarations merely noise.
Now tourists come, their visits brief,
in groups with cell-phones or alone,
to photograph and contemplate
this monumentally ornate,
historic testament in stone
to Man’s unreasoning belief.
RED UMBRELLA
It rained.
You held a red umbrella high,
leaned into me and whispered,
Sod the rain.
I realised that something had begun
that was unstoppable.
Time’s devoured
a lifetime of embraces since that day.
Now pain spreads like a red umbrella
as you lean into me.
The pillow, like an angel’s wing,
kisses my bloodless lips.
SONS
On a yellowed flyleaf, half a century ago,
my mother wrote to say Birthday Wishes
and Mum, that name that buries self away.
I was her firstborn, headstrong, loving,
exuberant, wilfully astray.
My childhood fears, unbidden tears,
the small, lost battles of the day,
she dissipated in her arms.
My daughter holds her sons that way.
THE ATTIC
The attic, once unreachable, taboo
in childhood, is a temple laid to waste.
I climb the ladder, face the overdue
clear-out of debris with a mild distaste.
A View-Master, kaleidoscope, a kite,
a rocking-horse in much need of repair,
a reel-to-reel recorder I’d recite
poems into as though speaking them ‘on air’.
I dust them off, then pack them in a case
and glimpse in a chipped mirror on a shelf,
the look of an intruder on his face,
a fellow who can only be myself,
the last one left, unsportingly miscast
as tomb-raider, despoiler of the past.
HIS ROOM
It took five minutes, more or less,
to fill, with what he left behind,
a cardboard box and to compress
into its space, his life, unsigned
in much the way some paintings are,
then stash it in the waiting car.
In those five minutes, I remained
there in the small, vacated room,
while the red-faced landlord explained
a small arrears. Would I assume
responsibility and pay?
My conscience made me easy prey.
THE MASTERS
They deemed us empty vessels to be filled
with formulas to memorise and dates.
We kids thought school was just time to be killed
until we’d spill out through the ornate gates.
A motley bunch, those schoolmasters of old:
the idols, the degenerates, the mad:
we learned that we must do as we were told
or get struck by a well-aimed blackboard-pad.
Four years at prep, then four years in long pants,
seemed an eternity when we were young.
Eight years of plaudits interspersed with rants
until, at last, the final bell was rung
and we escaped to grow into the men
who bear the scars or stars received back then.
The High Window 