by Patricia Ace

The Best Day of Your Life
          4th August 1962

You envied the girls who’d had to get married:
their hasty ceremonies, their intimate meals
in discreet hotels for a dozen guests or less —

but your mother had other ideas. She booked
the Beach Camp Club for one hundred plus
for a Saturday in August, hurricane season.

A dress was ordered from the Indian seamstress
in Port of Spain; French lace, ivory slipper satin,
with bugle beads and seed pearls, hand–sewn.

She took the bus to San Fernando and cajoled
the Chinese gardener into giving up his finest
Cattleya orchid for your bouquet, only the best

would do, and sent your father into the bush
in search of palms and ferns to adorn the room.
Then she set about choosing the wedding gifts.

On the day the dining table groaned with booty:
Egyptian cotton, silver plate, stainless steel,
a sewing box, fondue set, lava lamp, pine clock

while you looked on, feeling queasy, knowing
nothing of laundry or housework or cooking
or of what it took to please a man,

sipping from a brand new champagne coup,
its crystal rim fine as a fingernail, delicate,
precious, but far too fragile for daily use.

by Niall Campbell

One night I was sitting by my inner life
and it was such a little fire
and, here and here, the snow was coming down.
Doesn’t snowfall make everything so quiet ?

So white, the soft drift packed along the wilds.
And maybe I wasn’t a young man then,
careful and careful — I stepped into the fire
as I stepped onto the snow, and turned for home.

by Niall Campbell

The night he cried himself into our bed,
I couldn’t find the clear road back to sleep
so went for water — filling the glass twice,
and felt that midnight thrill of being alive;

a clock ticked in the hall then in the bedroom —
and tick, there he was, and tick, there his mother;
and seeing them, I thought about the moth
flown back to lie beside its chrysalis,

both — dreaming and remembering the field
one housed and one flew in: its perfect night:
windless, but with a thousand tailwinds rising;
starless, but with a thousand points of light.

by Miriam Gamble

Later he will dress for dinner, though for now
he is embarrassed that the only thing he has to offer is the Lucozade
we brought, though by now he has forgotten that we brought it
if in fact he ever realised that we had. In his hands,
it’s a bottle of inferior stuff he’s somehow in possession of —
though God knows what, he mulls, compelled him to avail of it
or compelled the hired help to set it out. We sit
on with him into the cocktail hour, drinking the inferior red
out of crystal glasses; this is the time
for Gin and Tonics, always was, and again he laments of the butler’s taste.
You cannot get, he says to us, the staff these days;
even when you are offering good money
there is nothing there but riff raff to be bought.
Crisp, starchy, the dress shirt he will wear to dinner
when he goes with the other men to the club
to talk about the war and the next good outing to be
ghosts the chair; beneath it are his spats. There’s a gramophone
singing in the corner, and if you listen closely you can hear
the planes already rising heavily from German runways
even though there are many hours until night.