Poem | Not Quite the Dark Ages by Phillip Gross

 

 

From his collection Later, out in September, the poem ‘Not Quite The Dark Ages’ enters a stage of early boyhood and makes the reader smile with rediscoveries. Not of school-yard crushes or the humanness of parents. More walkie-talkies and torturing insects. Distance is measured in gardens rather than metres and a conference table is laughable rather than makeshift. The year might be 1957 but there is nothing inaccessible here for anyone born after the ’50s. This is Phillip Gross the landlubber, yet his observation is impeccable, his digressions relevant, and the richness augmenting the familiar content will make the reader’s nostalgia a question: My childhood, not much different to the narrator’s, was equally fiercely vibrant?

 

 

 

Not Quite The Dark Ages

… nor quite the Enlightenment,

 

more like a small sketched country —

shall we say developing —

the modern and the feudal

leaning on your doorbell side by side

 

and which is the good news, which

 

the bad, you have to choose. So:

1957 – great

inventions. Like the wheel

scavenged from a buckled pram

 

that held the tramp’s stash in the Cutting.

 

Electricity: an old car battery

filched from Chris’s

uncle’s garage, for

the first experiments on life:

 

touch Plus and Minus to a worm’s

 

two pinkie-tips and see it thrash and coil.

Then, broadcasting:

an Army Surplus walkie-talkie,

squawk-crackling mouth-piece to ear-piece

 

like a submariner’s last dive dive dive

 

lost in the boom of mid-Atlantic

              murk where Chris’s

          never-talked-of dad

might be still struggling to the surface

 

up a rope ladder of glittering bubbles.

 

Cargo cults, verging on magic. But this

was the small state I was,

bluffing for a place

at the conference table, two oil drums

 

and a plank, in next door’s garden shed.

 

The older boys swapped cigarette cards,

Players’ Navy Cut,

and strange diplomacies. I

came with a blueprint, inked in rather prettily,

 

for the atom bomb I was about to test.

 

The others sniggered, but uneasily.

I got to slip out at night

— well, mid-evening; night,

that was another country — on mission

 

to creep twenty gardens to Chris’s and back

 

like a spy, like a sapper, the maquis,

              my face as blacked-up

          as I dared — ducking, squeezing

through chinks till… a snag on my sleeve

 

that I’d fail to explain in the morning

 

when I flinched at a dog bark somewhere;

the smell of damp earth

against my cheek, grit

in my breath, no words for what

 

I was becoming, what my father

 

would have shuddered to see: me,

like a cartoon remake

of himself, what he’d kept,

he thought, safe,    un-spoken in its own

 

dark age: a no one, anywhere: a refugee.

 

 

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