Landscape with father
Laid out you became the hills
found here, the brown
flanks with stubble, slopes of scrub
and the wind-smoothed creases
in your forehead of grey stone.
An ochre thorp in your cheekbone,
an olive grove in the palm of your hand
grows over your fingers.
Now it’s a warm season
above your feet. Playful
clouds welcome the coolness
of evening. Cooing
dovebirds sleepily nest
in the woodland of your hair.
As the rain comes this winter
it gets your eye lazily open:
here the clear water in the drought
that comes with summer. Children
spend hours pond-dipping
leaning over your lids.
What a surprise landscape. Had
you yourself ever thought you could be
that—so still at last?*Translated from Landschap met vader by Dutch poet Willem van Toorn, during the 8th International Golden Boat Poetry Translation Workshop at Škocjan, Slovenia, 2010.
By the way, if you would like to buy my most recent collection Jizz, published by Kingston University Press, it’s available here.
'John Davies’ New and Selected Poems presents a range of his work from 2000-2016. The selection follows the arc of a life, like the flight of a bird, perching at significant moments to observe, explore, question or celebrate. The poems were selected by the editor, Dr David Rogers, Director of Kingston Writing School, Kingston University, who writes:
“John Davies is a versatile and accomplished poet, and in Jizz he again displays his delight of language and his versatility, the confidence that informs the playful inventiveness of his free verse and longer poems matched by his command of conventional forms and metre. His voice is engaging throughout, down-to-earth and witty (hearing him read his poems aloud is a treat), and his attention, whether directed to the past, the present, the political or the personal, is infused with an unsentimental belief in the human desire for relationships and love, which ‘chases you and me’ and which we chase ‘endlessly,’ and in the need, no matter what, to ‘treasure what [we] have of’ it.”
