Three Poems by Graeme Richardson

Oxford Triptych

I

In Holywell Cemetery

Swirling iron, craquelure and rust,
shuddering with slowly crawling cars.
Earth absorbs the poison with the dust;
graves await an amaranthine grass.

Tourists come to look for Kenneth Grahame’s,
noting that it first contained his son.
Elder covers up the single names,
Heberden and Pater overrun.

Study a disaster, love a grief.
Trying to make it better makes it worse.
Restoration left to a naïf
brandishing the bluntest secateurs.

Loving without knowing isn’t love.
Knowing without loving is half-known.
Lovers know they never know enough.
Scholars know they end up here alone.

So, through love or wisdom, we perform
homage to what’s dead as though we must.
Sunset glows against the coming storm:
swirling iron, craquelure and rust.

II

Death of an Aristotelian

The brain was drained of oxygen.
The parsing jaw grew weak.
No spectacles or dentures.
The nose became a beak.

The book-lined room was gloomy,
The conifers leaned in,
neglected thickets needing
their own dose of Warfarin.

Returning from the hospital,
they made his bed downstairs.
And there he lay, surrounded
by his ancestors and heirs.

The house now worth a million,
his children gathered round.
But was he gone? They stroked his hand.
They spoke. He made no sound.

Our foremost commentator
on the Nicomachean Ethics,
he had no time for bloviating
muddle (the Poetics)

and metaphysics bored him.
He always used to say
the only prayer worth knowing
was the prayer said at A.A.

But even for philosophers
a time of no control
is coming, when we’re haunted
by the spectre of the soul.

The chaplain on a rusty bike
came panting up the drive.
The expert in the College
on who was still alive.

But dark was the barometer,
and dark the parquet floor,
and dark the narrow serving-hatch,
and dark the fanlight door.

And just as he opined and dined
through countless Oxford terms,
the Master tipped his head back,
as one that begs for worms.

III

Folly Island Song

(for Harry Judge) 

Hellebores and Cyclamen,
bed-bound, droop and shiver.
Herons wait like highwaymen
for the Thames to stand and deliver.
The bank’s policed by gulls and geese,
but light plays free on the river.

Coaches deride an eight’s technique,
lecturers sit and mark,
bike-brakes on the towpath shriek,
dogs and their drunkards bark.
The tourists must return to their bus
but the river will dance till dark.

Round the city, traffic clogs
ring-road and motorway;
idiot drive-time monologues
tell of the same delay;
But the geese that fly through a darkening sky
know the river was free all day.

The river was free all day.

Graeme Richardson grew up in Nottinghamshire, and now lives and works in Germany. He is an Anglican priest, a former Chaplain and Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and the Sunday Times’ poetry critic. His first full-length book of poems, Dirt Rich, will be published by Carcanet in January 2026.