Wrong Ticket Home

By Glenn Telfer

Poems about war and its place in our mind and our soul.

The last century has witnessed killing on an industrial scale. Too many got the wrong ticket home from their foreign trip. Is this the price of glory, is it worth it? You can ask the question, but who has the right to judge the answer.

The collection considers this issue from a decidedly British perspective, although the sensibility is 20th century Scottish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glenn Telfer
• Release date: Apr 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310942181

Glenn Telfer

I am now almost fully grown, being born in 1956 in working-class Glasgow, Scotland (from Kinning Park, Dennistoun and Ibrox, if you’re asking). The hammer and tongs, coal-powered world I grew up in is as gone as Troy, and with it the industrial working class that served it. What seemed so solid and forever, disappeared almost overnight and is rapidly becoming unknowable except through people like me. The hasty departure of a way of life and its replacement by globalized uncertainty is both the background to my life and the raw material of my art. Considering what’s gone, what’s here, what’s yet to come is what I’m about; itemising the bill of life through my writing. Other poets have explored this too, but none are as like the poet as he is himself. This is my special qualification. Imagine being able to write a book? Even when I was a wee boy throwing stones and playing street football I wanted to be a writer. And all the while I thought I was living my life backwards and sideways I was actually tracing a Celtic knotwork to here. Whatever the reason for this want, this writing may be the cure. May be is also maybe not.

Book preview

The Commando Monument

PART 1

Audrey drove me here because this is where

they say you trained and I want to be

close to you in this special year,

when you’ve been gone for sixty of them,

sixty. Sixty waiting years. You’ll know,

if you know anything, that I don’t need

an anniversary to be reminded.

When you decided I thought you seemed

an unlikely commando; can you kill

with kindness? Even after you came back

from Scotland and I nearly swooned

with desire at what they had done to

your body when you took off your shirt;

our daughter that night.

As their reputation grew so did I with pride

you looking like a god, your old wardrobe

given to scrawny cousins and still so gentle

even though, as you must have been, its

opposite sometimes. Making Audrey stories

with you as the hero you really were

fighting crocodiles rescuing Goldilocks.

Fear a thing in my stomach always, but

I banished it as you must have done. And

have done since every single day since

that day. And although married again and

well to a decent man that surrendered me

time with you, gave our child siblings, but not

a single day have you slipped from my mind

like having two husbands and two parallel lives

both real in their allotted realms and crossing

over through Audrey. But here, now, just the one

in this godly place half way up a mountain

and almost journey’s end. Long way for a cup of tea,

and I hear the smile so obvious in your voice.

And I say back, Not when you’re here too!

PART 2

And sixty years coming here

a heart ache big as this sky

feels somehow lessened

by the magnificent scale

the clouds, silly thought really,

carrying all the tears away

to be renewed