James Womack

love poem

on the radio they are talking about a tapestry
a silk tapestry I don’t know and have never seen
they talk through it slowly almost thread by thread
i am stood in the kitchen with the radio on
my hands doing work i have often done before

the tapestry shows a frozen war i cannot see
a war we think happened for the sake of culture
for the stories that come the poems and tapestries
warped magnificence of war where blood is noble
and no death is tragic rather cause for resonant song

i have never seen it and already i suspect this tapestry
i have made myself a good twenty-first century man
a man who will winnow judge things unseeingly
who knows you’re all guilty and sees guilt everywhere
it is fast and exciting to break things

and see what remains the artefacts of the past worthless
via my own incorrigible and unarguable sensibility
in this kitchen by the radio i am little less than god
i don’t know how far I could go with this
i grip the boning knife and listen to the radio

in another room there is music you play the guitar
your new guitar with its special mellow strings
riffs and chords you are just beginning to learn
but a note a second a third the first repeated
the whole pattern repeated and repeated

as you get it right then get it right again
the radio moves over the tapestry even slower
and the guitar repeats its art to itself
the guitar repeats the tapestry ends the knife
steady in my hand steadies in my hand

James Womack was born in Cambridge in 1979. He still lives there, although he tried to live in Spain for a decade and Russia for a couple of years. He has published four collections of poetry, all with Carcanet, most recently Why Are You Shouting? (2024). He is also a translator from Russian and Spanish.