Today and Yesterday

By David McMichael

Written over a number of decades and covering a wide range of experiences and aspects of life, Today and Yesterday has been described as:  “A compelling and poignant collection of poetry … the vivid and colourful verse will captivate readers, drawing them into each piece and holding them until the very end. … The intricate and intriguing themes will leave many readers reflecting on their own lives and experiences as they are taken on an extraordinary and thought-provoking journey.”
This new book of poetry from David McMichael seeks to attain a balance between the modern and the traditional, the real and the dreamlike, ‘today and yesterday’. Only the reader can decide to what extent this is achieved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781398411449

David McMichael

David McMichael is a doctor living in North West England, where he shares his time between the Ribble Valley, and Keswick in the Lake District. Whilst now retired from medical practice, he maintains an active involvement in health care matters. His other interests are family, all forms of the arts and science, nature and the countryside, fell walking, foreign travel, world ecology and the environment, and golf. He writes for his own enjoyment. He is the author of the novel, Shadows in a Photograph, published to high praise in 2016.

Book preview

A Far Peak

A distant peak has haunted me

since first remembered thought,

an elusive view of snow and ice

through sun-filled mist had caught

my vision with its purity

and light, a pinnacle clear

and white above the clouds

above the drab grey plain

and constant squalls of blackish rain.

I thought that all would wish to scale

its ice-clad slopes, to find

some purpose for this fragile life,

a reason for a reasoning mind.

When, with hands hard-hooked, with stretch

and strain, muscles bunched from strife

and pain, above the clouds

then men’s minds would fly

above the rains to a sunlit sky.

It was courage, faith and selflessness

I had in mind to seek,

they needed me as I needed them

to climb that far-off peak;

for without that summit remote

and tall, its challenge and its clarion

call, life will ever be drab and slight.

Yet I’ve still to gain that cloudless height.

After the Bomb

The swirling cloud, black streaked red,

as thick as any night,

begins to lift

and nightmare is revealed:

the fires of hell burn not as bright

as the billion torches here;

the face of hell seems kindly

against this evil-visaged scene.

In a landscape like a lava flow

of blackened bricks and blocks,

gaunt skeletons of twisted iron

stand buckled at the knees;

water flows to clouds of steam,

the ground itself red hot,

from which miasmas,

of gas and drains,

join that of blood and rot:

the smell of roasted bloated meat,

flesh flayed raw and wet,

is the smell of folk,

scattered, thrown,

or crouched in fervid pain.

Cries and screams, loud as they are,

are drowned by a louder moan,

the moan of a vortex-driven wind and

the moan of anguished man.

Scattered trees,

not one erect,

charred black, in jumbled piles,

glint and glisten with shards of glass

sharp driven in their lengths:

the glass that had been a city,

gold mirrors to the sun,

but, in an instant, lethal blades

that shredded flesh to bone.

The summer sun once silvered streets,

shop fronts, cars and parks;

the fireball whiter than the sun

had fused them dull and dark

and fuelled a furnace ten miles wide,

igniting clothes and skin,

searing eyeballs milky white

in blind agony of pain;

and fed the blast,

that banshee wind,

solid as hurtling train,

glass and debris

in iron fist

a screaming bolt of death

and hateful hateful pain.

Then comes the dust

and with it rain

that should be cool and sweet

but carries death

in silent form

to burn a cringing skin.

From the choking veils of dust and smoke

comes a woman perhaps I’ve known;

her skin hangs down in dripping shreds

through clothes that are charred and holed.

She carries a bundle,

wet and white,

a swollen naked child

from whom comes groans that tear my guts

vile torment to my mind.

‘Doctor? Thank God! Is it you? Please help my child and me.’

I stare right back

in mute disbelief:

what help can ever be?

She senses my grief,

‘Where is it, then,

the help they said would come?’

Wearily I say, ‘Like the ghosts of men

who’ve led to this,

blown to a whimpering end –

there’ll be no help,

the whole world must be the same’.

And for those alive

the gaunt figure of death

will stalk us one by one

with haemorrhage

infection

cancerous change

hunger

murder

and cold,

and then in the end

when we seem to have won

with mutations –

his last laugh of all

I lift my face to God and the sun,

but see only black icy skies.

Tragic the few who’ve survived the Bomb

and fortunate those who’ve died.

1986

Boredom

Boredom nods

its empty head and smiles

its deadly smiles

and descends its hand

like a grey wool pall

that weighs a thousand pounds

I hang my head

to scuff my toes

through miles of gutter dust

I’m full of work that

no one wants

blank eyes all greet my pleas

there are no hobbies

in the world

in which I live

(though live is an empty word)

and interests are those

I have been taught:

to gain, to