Nativity/In Lockdown with Brecht

By Kelvin S C Yearwood

Nativity / In Lockdown with Brecht is a moving collection of poems on many modern themes, including globalisation, hopes invested in the next generation, our guilt concerning the terrors of their inheritance, love, comradeship, mental stress and troublesome romance, but often with a light and elaborate touch. Each poem invokes a contemporary experience of the world that will resonate with a wide range of readers.
Nativity / In Lockdown with Brecht makes demands of the reader that will be repaid in new perspectives on and ways of feeling about the world today and in the foreseeable future. It also employs humour, satire and a sense of the absurd at times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398493292

Kelvin S C Yearwood

Kelvin Yearwood lives in the city of Bristol, UK. In addition to writing poetry he is a modern jazz and groove musician and composer, he likes independent cinema and theatre, reads widely and is looking for that new thing to pique his interest. He is currently working on a short novel.

Book preview

Nativity

I make a choice,

Rent public space

Where I rustle other’s leaves,

Give inspiration an insolent squeeze

In bookshop café muse.

Pressed by a pulp of rich ground bean

I stir and versify against the grain.

On Sundays we played,

Child energy congregate

All authority withdrawn

On abandoned Sunday building site

Across scaffold raised for elevated neighbours

And lofted elusive playmates.

We grew to short horizons

Of envious cannibals;

Malevolently levelled

And ate our neighbour’s children,

Sucked our marrow lives

Cradled in creels of vinegar chips

Swaddled in pressed and bitter leaves.

My virtual peers now range wide,

The world stilled,

Homed in, phoned in

Within a hand-held shield.

I run my finger along the edge

Of blithest suburbs

Blunt crescent scimitars,

Snub-nosed cul-de-sacs,

Detached,

All recognitions scratched,

A sublimated rust-belt,

Unmindful hell resisting fates of common toil.

Behind low walls, dry beds,

Manicured grass and weeds

Bleached unyielding fish-heads gape,

Bulbous eyes swivel and dilate,

Drawn to the nets,

Their membrane lip,

And suck and nose the glassy play of shadow light.

Happily snapped and overruled by snarling pugs

They do not thrash

In their shallow churning air

But slow distil in oaken skins,

In dreams of home-brewed rolling hills,

Vintage promise of years to come

In long suspended drains of cup, joyful drink,

Until inundated care, full-spectrum shielded,

Calls the vet on what remains

Of toothless, stinking lapdog;

The undertakers,

A cask of mouldered ribs, they bag and bin,

Tilt the keg,

Its bitter liquors, coldest ash

Matured for flushing down the gurgling sink.

Nostalgia’s creep,

The toxic years all end good years.

Each coming end, raise high the fairsome lamb

Marked by an attic raid

On chained light, hanging coils of snaking paper.

At feast’s end,

Renewed flesh willing

The cold and cut-price ham

Forked in the side,

Encrusted with the crumb of bread

Washed down with boxed creeper yield.

The café drags me back.

Young mother, babe,

Peal fat rung bells

Amongst our clinking rank,

Our scatter-thin communion

Between lip and coffee cup,

Ceremony of ceramic goblet, cracked saucer dink.

Despite our retiring selves

The infant in us rises, keen,

Raises hell within our whispering chapels;

Turns the tables,

Rattles spectre being,

Spits on our drip of coin.

For now she’s happy, happy to scream

Across the toasted tea-cakes, coffee pots

Happy to sit, happy to shit the latest nappy.

Led by the muzzle

Dogs perk up.

Well… all catalogued ‘dog’

And gesture, eye and brow, dilating nose

‘Can you not hear the dinner bells’

So free, so fresh, so generous,

So resoundingly magnanimous.

There is life, life’s spilling cup

A banquet

Baked in a bairn’s pink pot

Steeped in a fulsome jug

Of richest pre-digestive juices

On which to mount a tractable bolt,

But thoroughly disposed of now, child in manger

At the designated baby-changing unit.

A young son dares to quietly whimper;

A mother unsure

Dives for respite at the coffee counter

In small talk, guarded laughter.

Beneath a chair, a hound

Discreetly tends to its behind.

The season’s quickened burst

Of till-ring, closing clatter

Rhymes with the bookish judiciousness,

The murmurs of its customer base,

But for a local character spike

In the audible texture.

And ’tis jolly not to be an out of season churl,

Run tears

Raise shamefaced rosiness

Down your young child’s