46

CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies

Michael W. Thomas 

Only a rose
Only a rose 

in an area window 

telling the tale 

of a sportive yesterday

or pressed in haste on someone 

by somebody else in a bar 

who’d been stood up but even so 

wished love to dance over the evening

the rose knows nothing 

of what it was meant to say 

how it was dressed to say it 

all it wants

is to sing back the glow of the moon 

which never says what it’s said to say either 

but happily listens while nosing apart 

the dark of the rose’s room

fixing the way an old-gold blouse 

pours down the back of a chair 

the way a clock-hand 

tickles the low hours

only a rose 

only a moon 

doing what nobody sees

free from mortal chat 

of urge and contrition 

in all the old co-opted places 

platform   calendar    bluff

THE WRITERS’ CORNER



47

THE WRITER’S CORNER

if the rose dreams 

it’s of rain’s delirium 

arching clear 

of its birth-soil

if the moon dreams 

it’s of birthing its own light 

no more the cold courier 

of sun-sweat 

Almost
1961
When you were young, a thousand helpless miles 

lay between, say, the tenth of December 

and Christmas—which stood there, mule-indifferent, 

knowing fine it had you fast in its heart,

that even now you heard the morning roads, 

the last shunt in the fire-pluming night 

as other than the regulated drone 

your breath and bones were made of.  Round the school,

the stony faces of alcoved torment 

in Friday church, the iron air thinned out 

and lifted: something else drew on, ahead 

of fidget-arsed nativities, tea-towels

on kingly crewcuts, cards of solder-glue. 

Time softened, the blood rose to its face.  Bells 

almost rang beneath the hoosh of buses, 

the clouds were undersides of magic ways

where angels got into first position, 

shepherds took form in sputnik-space, prepared 

to be unprepared, mithering, scared stiff. 

Then all at once the last Wednesday of term



48

CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies

with the ex-Navy barber (Dads and Lads), 

and you high in the chair, buffed, clippered, set 

to meet the only land you loved.  Mirrored, 

the brushings of the dead year fell like snow.  

Travellers
They are made of mist, a seasoned need 

to step light and thin round  

the mires of the world.  The ends 

of unlettered roads will find them, 

possibly, if a caravan rocks its green roof, 

betrays that it is not after all 

the high skirt of midsummer.

But the first steeps of autumn 

draw them out: to the broads of grass, 

say, beside a rat-run island. 

Bits of them appear 

with the middle days of October: 

a bassinette against a wheel, 

tarped horses posted up and back, 

a pot to simmer the damps 

of another year going.

Bargees, they could be, 

but with a course  

laid secret through the earth. 

Windscreens show them 

seeming to be about themselves 

on the usual levels of the day. 

Only someone in the back, maybe, 

with a child’s distaste for wherefores, 

might see them truly, 

flowing where they stand, 

their past dropped over a tailboard, 

the future not even the first twitch 

of a dream.