Workhouse
Paul McGrane

I earn a little money but mainly
I’m paid in blisters and a broken back
and there’s nothing I can do about it.
They needed a way to plug every hole
in the wooden ships of the Royal Fleet
without it costing an arm and a leg
and guess who they found to trick out that thread
from old bits of rope as fat as a noose?
To ask for more would be a big mistake
and my rations could be cut for a week.
What I choose to say is nothing at all.

I’m allowed in the garden, now and then,
where today the sky is coated in tar
and rain slicks through a crack in the gutter.
I suck in lung-smoke as a medicine.
A blackbird has been picking on a worm.
His life must be repetition like mine,
from birdsong on the kitchen roof at dawn
to roosting in the apple tree at dusk,
but one thing he has I may never have
and I want to pull at every feather,
remove his possibility of flight.

Oakum: used in shipbuilding for packing the joints of timbers… recycled from old tarry ropes which were painstakingly unravelled… a common occupation in workhouses (Wikipedia)

Paul McGrane works as membership manager at the Poetry Society, and helped found Forest Poets in Walthamstow. McGrane’s poems have been published in Aesthetica, The Delinquent, and South Bank Poetry as well as in the anthologies city lighthouse (published by tall-lightouse), Split Screen (Red Squirrel Press), The Robin Hood book (Caparison) Octopus (Templar) and Penguin’s The Poetry of Sex.

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