Poems by Patricia Beer

PN Review 47, January - February 1986

ELECTION NIGHT

'Politicians are a race apart' says a fellow viewer
Far into election night. We have lost our sleep
With those strange people. The winners, like counting
    horses,
Have got it right and been led off home.

We see the losers, in a junket dawn,
Heading out of yesterday along the M4,
Overtaking frowsy trucks, driving at ninety,
Stopping on the hard shoulder to confer.

We see them again drawn up before their houses.
Flowers which are neighbourless and neglected
Straggle and gasp over synthetic urns.
The affronted cat holds its back legs stiff.

They are unreal, yet they haul their luggage
Out of the boot like anybody else returning.
We are aware of the contents: toothbrushes and pyjamas
Smelling seedily of gum and groin.

The show is over. Through the window in the stairs
We see the magpie, our own returning officer
Land on the back field among the buttercups
That make a mayoral chain around his chest.

DYING ABROAD

Writing a book on Wessex shovels up
Expatriates who died abroad, some lost
When parents threw them out into the mist,
Some looking for Lord Byron and escape

From righteousness. I came across Tom Hoare,
Son of the banker, sent to Portugal
To be a businessman, showing a frail
Talent for sin, how he could drink and swear

And fornicate. 'The Nastiest Citty' - Lisbon -
'As I ever saw' was where he died
Some years before his father in his proud
And honourable old age expired in London.

William John Bankes jumped bail and lived abroad
Content to die in Venice on a pension
Having sent home to grace his long-lost mansion
The works of art for which his brother paid.

I could have died abroad. And on high heels
In varicose old age trooped round the square
A new feather in my old hat each year.
Friends out from England would have carried tales

When to their own cremation they went home
About my keeping up appearances
And whether to believe my bag of princes
Too fascist then and too fat now to name.

In gibberish I would - my English shattered -
Have died perhaps boasting of some invitation
To a cocktail. Happy in a situation
Where for ten minutes every so often nothing mattered.

The sun shines less here. Nobody can deny
Anything. I have not died so far
But trudge to glory in these mediocre
Fields, not Grade A land. Neither am I.

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Patricia Beer was born in Exmouth in 1924. Her Mother died when she was 14; an event that deeply and far-reachingly affected her work, life and perspective on death. She began writing during World War II and from 1960 wrote full time. She died in 1999.