Arts: Thursday Poem

UNCLE AUBREY

Uncle Aubrey is dying. On the line

pummelled by sheet-steel winds

night-clothes bluster and bulge.

Talk to him, cheer him up, says Olwyn

so I tell him I have played on the moor

and seen hawks plucking at mice.

Hands pared to bone, he rubs knuckles

and remembers dead cousins

dead drunk at Christmas.

His head is too heavy for his neck

and his eyes yellow with sickness

too clotted to take me in.

He is dying in Welsh. It is part of me

singing somewhere in my blood

voices of sickness and rain.

Our poems today and tomorrow come from `The Piano on Fire' (pounds 6.99), the winning entries from the 1998 poetry competition in `The New Writer' magazine (PO Box 60, Cranbrook TN17 2ZR)