Issue 36: Paul Bavister

Shite Hawk

My dad could spot them a mile off,
and if I followed his nod across the shop

I’d see someone he went to school with
stuffing a pack of steak down their trousers,

and he’d call them a shite hawk.
Whenever he said it,

it took me back to every other time –
how he wrote off my first bully of a boss,

how he wouldn’t let me play
with the kids over the road

because their dad was a shite hawk.
My dad liked walking away from town

until we reached the woods
then out into fields where larks sang.

When I told him about the beatings
I was taking at school

I got so upset I needed the toilet,
so he sent me behind a bush

and stood guard.
At the critical moment,

there was a scuffle in the leaves
and he shouted shite hawk,

and I fell forward laughing so much
my mind swept over the warehouse,

school, supermarket, then back over
the fields alive with larks,

and us running down the path,
laughing, pushing each other

staying one step ahead
of that shite hawk.

Glass Eyes

I worked in an optician’s
that had sat against the city wall
for more than a century.

The upstairs room was haunted
and when I had lunch alone
I heard whispered conversations

that made me feel like I fitted in.
Upstairs was a wooden box
rattling with glass eyes

and the plunger for lifting them out.
One slow afternoon
I held one between my lips

and chuckled at the image
in the mirror then the boss
walked in and I spluttered

and the eye fell on the floor.
No one ever found the story funny
but I did. I worked there long enough

to start making a ghost of myself
and after forty years
I was sat up in the staff room

rolling an eye in my mouth
when a bright young optician
walked in and was startled at first

but learned to ignore me.

Generosity

Generosity kept us tightly knit –
meals out, then more meals out,

because you got the last one,
so we’ll get this one.

We knocked back any worries
about what we could afford

and said we should enjoy ourselves –
not look back and regret it.

So we kept ourselves poor
and slowly simplified the choices –

until there were no choices

Dictator

The steel statue of the dictator
washed down to a trickle of minerals
that stained the water even darker
in a stagnant lake
between the watchful pines.
The troops had long taken
their ridiculous march
off the parade ground
and appeared as columns of mist
above the still, flat pool.
Through the forest
a grey rust of nickel, manganese,
and molybdenum
settled where carp stirred dead leaves
in the lake’s cold darkness.
The statue’s rare metals
clouded up from soft mud.

Delivery Boxes

We had no room for his books
so we took them to the charity shop.
and were told they would never sell
so we looked up on our phones
what to do next and found a unit
at the edge of town
where books were shredded
as packing to fill delivery boxes.

Paul Bavister has published three collections of poetry with Two Rivers Press. His work has appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Dark Winter and Dream Catcher. His poem, ‘Starlings’ came highly commended in the RSPB/Rialto poetry competition.

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