John Thieme is a Senior Fellow at the University of East Anglia (UK). He previously held Chairs at the University of Hull and London South Bank University and has also taught at the Universities of Guyana and North London and been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Turin, Hong Kong and Lecce. His books include Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place, studies of Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul and R.K. Narayan, and The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. He is a former editor of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. His creative writing has been published in Argentina, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Malaysia, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA. His collection Paco’s Atlas and Other Poems was published by Setu Press (Pittsburgh) in 2018.
Special Collection: Creativity in the Time of the Pandemic 2020>>
Five Poems
April 2020
All houses are Gothic,
when those we love
no longer climb their stairs.
All corridors are haunted,
when the breeze blows unattended
between half-open doors.
All dogs are orphans,
when no owners
take them for their walks.
But the varicoloured tulips,
still stretch upward to the sky
and the cherry blossom casts
its fleeting beauty to the wind.
B.C.E.
I remember B.C.E.
as if it were yesterday,
though it ended several weeks ago.
I revisit it each day on television,
shouting at the ghosts of people,
gathered close in careless groups,
exhorting them to keep apart.
So many apparitions
from an unenlightened time of love.
I have lived two life-times:
one in the now-departed years of B.C.E.;
the other in the present, yawning days of C.E.
Articles accumulated in my house
close ranks against their former friend, the postman,
who brings new debris from the walking world
that breeds distrust in these suspended days.
Racoon
May I tell you about the racoon.
an uninvited guest who gate-crashed several parties –
an anagram, unseen, yet ever-present in the room?
Shall I tell you of the rumours
that surround his litany of loss?
They say that he spiked drinks
and those who drank them
never went to work again.
They say he multiplied in thousands
and travelled here from there and everywhere,
from east to west, or was it west to east?
No one knows …
Best not to tell these stories, couched in gossip?
But we need the information,
to trap him any way we can.
Screens
He was never a very tactile person,
but in these days of virtual contact,
he wants to reach into his devices,
to hold the people that he meets online.
He was never quick to show emotion,
but filled with unrequited love,
he craves the holograms of strangers,
airbrushed icons from the past.
In the Future
I shall remain unbroken
on this headland by the sea.
I’ll stay strong until this trauma
Is the stuff of history.
And when the tempest passes
and the world is born anew,
I’ll build a small log cabin,
from the jetsam on the beach.
In the future we’ll embrace there,
when your arms aren’t out of reach.
Published on April 14, 2020. © Author.