Poems by Jonathan Price

KILROY WAS HERE A small flint scraper, turned up by a plough, Handled after how many thousand years, Sits between finger and thumb as snugly now As when you held it. Low-brow, hairy-ears,

Did you lose it? Did you throw the thing away And h a p yourself a better one ? A cold Trail leads from then to now. All stone can say Is He was born, grew up, perhaps grew old,

And died as you will one day. Fair enough. I tap the message out in my own style, Shaping its lines out of the knobbly stuff Of language, hoping it will last a while.

I leave it for an umpteenth-century man, Who turns this up and wonders what it said, To translate and pass on as best he can. Someone was here, wrote something, and i.~ dead.

BURNING LETTERS Disconcertingly difficult to burn, Old letters. On a dry autumn day It should be easy, one would think, to turn (With dead twigs crackling merrily away)

The lot to useful ends : to a b e ash, Food for the soil. But it is otherwise: The letters smoulder grudgingly. I mash Them crossly with the garden fork, my eyes

Stung by the smoke. (Ye gods, neighbours, forgive This acrid sacrifice.) The pages curl As if alive. And how should they not live, The hoarded words of one especial girl?

Illusory this burning, this clean sweep. Her warmth quickened my spring, till a late frost Checked what was growing. Fruitlessly I keep Stirring the embers, working out the cost.