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Beating the Mats
She hadn’t much, no husband, no children,
but the house shone and the garden blossomed,
inclining upwards with two washing lines
in parallel hung between cement pillars
leading to a lilac tree overlooking the houses
behind. Out of the goodness of my heart,
every year I’d cut the branches and withered
blooms. It grew and I grew as I snipped
dead heads at the end of a path skirting
rose beds, red and yellow, and the whiplash
broom, its black pods split for tissue-thin seeds
and sealed in a screw-tight jam jar for reasons
left unknown. Anyway, there I am, on my way
to the neighbours’ fence, the Palmers
and Bones, bending below the two sagging lines
heavy from the weight of imaginary dust
held by the hearth rugs and doormats,
each throttled with a floor brush by a tiny woman
at full height but small enough to move
between the draped textiles and strong enough
to make all the difference all the time.
The Old Orchard
Mullantine
Through the fire and ice like replicas of warriors
who fought for this earth that once kept their elders,
they may have been born here, to stand naked
amid smoke against pettifoggers, begrudging windfalls
and hating winters until the robes of spring wrapped
all in beauty and devotion. Children loved them,
motorists pointing them out on this resurrection ground
where roots held firm as if nothing would happen.
The Shell-Grotto
Margate
By train and coastline, then a brisk walk into the ordinary,
poetry defined, looking both ways on a terrace brilliant
in the southern sun, where a man sat, a child around his oiled
and illustrated shoulders, and talked to the slithery python
on his lap about sunburn and the mawkish meaning to life.
He was just muscle and tattoos, so the revulsion was all ours
to the seedy, weedy hill street and over-stated entrance,
the tat and merchandise, not yet ready to shell out
for unskilled paperweights, cockle- and clam-lamps,
the twisted mussel figurines and deranged ashtrays,
as we take the fuliginous stairs to the grotesque cavern,
temple, chapel for the satanic and uncouth, the compulsive,
not to say, repulsive, horror vacui of obsession
and black-clothed mania; bottom feeders, fixatedly,
insanely, arranged in patterns for no earthly reason
beyond psychopathy. Someone paid someone to make it,
and everyone visited until it became a foul metaphor.
Of course, Eliot and Emin found a congealed and haunting
madness, loneliness of childhoods, the mordant mustiness
of old hearths, chimney flues, soot and suffocation;
the uncanny woman in crinoline who visited at the final turn
to the high-vaulted chamber, sinister but saying nothing,
hovering and pointing as in a horrible daguerreotype,
here, where death is both a feeling and a place
beneath fusty postwar houses fussy with ornaments
Howard Wright lectures in Design at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. He has had poems in Cyphers, The Frogmore Papers and Abridged. Other work has recently appeared in The North and Stand, and several were longlisted for the Ver Poets prize 2025.
Copyright © 2026 by Howard Wright, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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