PIHW 3 Tuesday in Holy Week - History

The kick-start for this poem was a glimpse of an old Barça match on the TV which showed Camp Nou packed, with not a spare seat to be seen.  People packed together and having a rousing time.  It seemed like something from a previous age!  Did people really behave like that?  How did they get away with it!

     It was that sense of strangeness that informed my responses.

     Although not as fine as yesterday there was a ‘space, wisp-fringed’ that allowed sunshine to illuminate the terrace on the third floor and I felt that I should take advantage of it and indulge in a little light sunbathing.  As everything we now do is seen through the lens of the present crisis, I wondered about my frivolousness in using my time to get part of the way to the mythic brownness that I seek.  I had previously tried to do some writing, and in the pauses of writing, I observed the group of kids from the houses opposite us play basketball.  There was no sense of competition and there were no cries of appreciation for baskets made and no sorrow for baskets failed.  It seemed to be something that needed to be done on a Tuesday that wasn’t really a Tuesday during a Holiday that wasn’t really a holiday.

     In my mind this then mixed itself into the videos that have been replayed on TV and reshared on social media of people recreating Events in a domestic setting; videos that are funny and wistful at the same time.

     The one thing that truly shocked me was how ‘old fashioned’ the sight of a full football ground looked and how long ago such an event appeared to be. 

     The last line of the poem is, I think, a real question!

 PIHW 3 Tuesday in Holy Week

History

Today, the sky is mottled;

cloud-Morse sequences that

stutter to a kippered blue

confusion of the sea and air.

But overhead, directly overhead,

a space, wisp-fringed

is letting sun shine down.

Can sunbathing be justified?

To lie out, freezing time, in heat

behind closed eyes, but open ears

to hear

cheese-wire voiced,

the kids play on: play basket-win

and basket-lose (success

and fail equality) because

the points are not the point,

where then today and now the past

are all together as a life.  Of days.

Where only the last letters number

differences.

The month’s insistent, cool, soft breeze

suggests a season past, not yet to come.

We play at relativity,

say metaphor’s the way to go,

so we can joke-pretend

reality is almost like normality

and we can see

Olympics staged in sitting rooms;

Cross Channel Swims in a domestic bath;

Wimbledon fought out on balconies;

Summits gained up flights of stairs;

And then, TV, a replay of a Barça game,

Camp Nou filled up with not a space

for social distancing.

Whose past was that?