From Earth Records

The renga masters felt it best to meet
and link their verses where Japan’s dramatic.
Lakesides were great, a mountain top was neat;
here, thoughts and words could be their most emphatic.
The guest kicks off: An April morning / Dew
on grass in no man’s land / Two snails hard at it.
The host’s backpass: Look, this cheeky blue
tit / flies back to its bush. Important that it
can move the whole thing on, like crude oil through
a pipe, en route to a reaction, form –
in the high tanks — the polymers for glue,
synthetic compounds which might keep us warm.
Who writes beside those streams on which depends
the ink inside our printers and our pens?

*

Have you been out to see the new oasis,
the digging down, the raising of the awning?
It won’t be long until the drivers’ faces
relax, now they can fix the flashing warning.
The caravans will buy provisions here
before their onward journey to the coasts,
lost travellers stagger in for cigs and beer
at night, rolling their eyes like desert ghosts,
tightening their hands around their notional coins.
The cashback option — can they still select it?
How long can they redeem their bonus points?
Will all cards continue to be accepted?
Saharan winds return, transfecting sand
onto the sign that names and shapes the brand.

*

The limits change but they remain the limits.
No unofficial gigs, please, in the park.
No pop song intro should ever last for four minutes.
Come down from that hill before it gets dark.
Remember languages are polished stones
so don’t scratch them with Americanisms
or hard words. No one needs any more poems
about poetry, the slow art of prisms.
And all my self-directed tasks today
as part of my remunerated slog
fulfil me in some limitless way:
the best machines grease their own cogs.
Language or lifestyle: to strengthen your case,
talk till the way you talk becomes the base.

*

11A: my name in Vietnamese
among the staff at Bistro Vietnam
at least. Top food. The sparrow squad agrees,
hopping round the dish I taste gram by gram.
I’m tofu and mixed veg in peanut sauce
and have been for ten years. Each time I know
my order’s through — this is my only course —
when out of the hot kitchen, Phu waves hello.
In that decade he’s not been back. Located
means profit and loss. Change lies in the known:
they swapped the plates from round to elongated;
before the mobile, had a useful phone.
Elsewhere I’ve tried, the dish has been the same
or better, but I eat without a name.

*

The greatest dish that's been invented since
we crouched in the cave with our hominid group
and by trial or fluke learnt to rub two flints,
whenever that was, is the noodle soup.
We roll and stretch those two great serial feeders,
rice and wheat, into carbohydrate strands.
The stock recycles what the previous eaters
left of the dead. Whatever comes to hand
is mineral or calorie, sauce or spice,
a crop to reap in both summer and winter.
The concept crosses continents, the price
goes local. Breakfast at dawn, midnight dinner,
or inside the walls of a bare-bulbed hut,
it fills bellies while bright restaurants are shut.

*

The Vegetable Special at Shalimar
is part of food security: paneer,
broccoli, cauliflower. From fields afar
the rice arrives, to flood with British beer.
Above the table hang the woven hoops
of a lampshade whose shape is large and dark
against the wall. There, village etching loops
a yoke round cattle ploughing silver marks
on black earth; at the back, the crop of cotton
ripens, what farmers grew to pay for grain.
This story that the culture has forgotten
is drought awaiting the return of rain.
Down to the coasts, the wheels follow rails
for exporting wheat while a monsoon fails.