for my daughter, Catherine

So this, Kate, is History,

concatenating days ending in sleep,

me on the Eve of an Election squaring up

to trickish possibilities? Tonight

a scrounged lift back

from a reading hostile to poetry

belted in beside some Mrs-Woman

gabbing on about bars and coffee shops

shooting up in Liverpool as if

the city's resurrecting just for her.

She doesn't understand my sense

of a diaspora. It's generation-gap to her,

old-fogy ruefulness. Ghost

in my own place, a passenger.

And so the Big Day itself, its decisions,

and the nation drifting to the polls, found me

going on about Chekhov's Vanya,

ennui, fin-de-siècle tackiness.

Two o'clock.

My students wanted to be outside,

sprawled on grass in the out-of-season

unruly sun.

Two o'clock. Someone we loved, Kate,

ten miles from here, was letting go of life,

starting her slide into the tidy-up

of history, uttering her terminal

gargling gasp.

I was gob-smacked that night

watching the pompous po-faced

Tories fall,

thinking of what I'd told the class

about hubris and retribution

when we started weeks ago with Sophocles

and I'd quoted Tragedy requires

the intolerable burden of God's presence.

That night God was handy, Kate,

bringing low.

A week later and the weather changed.

We drove to the crematorium

to greet the bewildered remnants of our kin

with their apologies and ironies.

The world at large was spouting hope,

propounding a new tone,

talked of dumping the old,

of making new.

Our clobbered city is inured to it –

dockings, sailings,

concatenating days that end in sleep,

curtains pulled to, as they were today,

when we said goodbye

to eighty years’ godforsaken timidity

and gas jets rasped and flared.