Adam Reading Dad
I’ll always remember those Sunday drives home.
How a blackening silence came over us
with the night. I’d look back at the road
we’d set out on when our weekend had begun:
singing songs, stopping at petrol stations
in the back of beyond, turning off the beaten
track and finding a pub for lunch –
with swings and climbing frames to play on.
But all that was fading fast, as signs marked
the dwindling miles, oncoming headlights
dazzled us, the final catseyes blinked past
and the road emptied – losing its nerve
as we curved off the motorway. Then the real
darkness set in – the chill of parting
making me numb. I’d run upstairs to my room
without a word spoken, and from the corner
of my window watch your silver Citroen slip
into the night; a final sliver of light then total eclipse.
Another week of staring into space in classrooms,
waiting for our next outing all together. Save mum.
Adam Reading Google Earth
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
doth glance from heaven to earth,
from earth to heaven.
Theseus from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Act V Scene I
We started in Africa, the world at our fingertips,
dropped in on your house in Zimbabwe;
threading
our way north out of Harare into the suburbs,
magnifying the streets – the forms of things unknown,
till we spotted your mum’s white Mercedes parked
in the driveway; seeming – more strange than true,
the three of us huddled round a monitor in Streatham,
you pointed out the swimming pool and stables.
We whizzed out, looking down on our blue planet,
then like gods – zoomed in towards Ireland –
taking the road west from Cork to Kinsale,
following the Bandon river through Innishannon,
turning off and leapfrogging over farms
to find our home framed in fields of barley;
enlarged the display to see our sycamore’s leaves
waving back. Then with the touch of a button,
we were smack bang in Central London,
tracing our footsteps earlier in the day,
walking the wobbly bridge between St Paul’s and Tate Modern;
the London Eye staring majestically over the Thames.
South through Brixton into Streatham –
one sees more devils than vast hell can hold –
the blank expressions of millions of roofs gazing
squarely up at us, while we made our way down
the avenue, as if we were trying to sneak up
on ourselves; till there we were right outside the door:
the lunatic, the lover and the poet – peeping through –
the computer screen like a window to our souls.
Adam Reading Pinter's Pause
It was the height of summer.
We sat in the garden reading a play.
I played him and you played her.
Before long you said, ‘Do you know about
Pinter’s pause? – those silent moments –
pregnant with words unsaid ...’
I wasn’t really listening, I thought I saw
a fox in the undergrowth—
stopping by the hedge to eye up his purple gloves.
Everything was in flower.
We read the play right the way through.
I was him, she was you.
Looking up during each pause—
I imagined him creeping beyond our garden
wriggling under the gap in the fence
behind the clematis and convolvulus—
or whatever it was? The twist of hedgerow,
the turn in the lane, the height of the day.
Just then, everything stopped,
caught between the hands of a clock.
The sun was at its zenith;
I thought if I put my hand out,
I could catch it and put it in my pocket.
I didn’t want to say anything, to break the spell.
Then it moved on—like a great cog
in a grandfather clock. The season was passing,
our lives were turning before its eyes.
Those soft paws padding the undergrowth,
gingerly treading between the hedgerows—
beyond the clematis and convolvulus
Adam Reading The Door
I sit in the garden
taking the late sun
as it sinks and slides
between the side
of the house
and the hawthorn.
Trailing the bench
across the lawn
to catch a final
finger of warmth,
a golden stretch
comes to rest
on a patch
of grass at my feet —
like a door.
A door in which
I wait for your
shadow to darken;
the door, which is
always left open.