22 January 2025

The NS Poem: Hybrid Flowers

A new poem by Hugo Williams

Photo by Anders Bundgaard/Millennium Images

All you had to do
was learn a few lines by heart
and raise one eyebrow at yourself.
Theatrical make-up
would take care of reality.
You could get up late,
do nothing all day,
then wander across town
to where the applause was waiting
with flowers and kisses
and everyone said how great you were
in the scene with the girl.

My actor father raised one eyebrow
and made a farting noise
when I told him I wanted to act.
He said my head was too small,
my neck was too thin,
I lacked personality.
If I was so keen to get on,
why not leave England
for a couple of years
and grow a moustache or something?
I could be a waiter,
or I could teach water-skiing.

So it was that I set off
on a lifetime’s sulk
across Asia by bus
and started to cheer up.
Kubla’s stately pleasure dome
seemed to have fled east
on the hippy trail.
His “miracle of rare device”
was a hot and hungry
game of sardines, packed tight
in little huts on stilts,
or piled in heaps on hillsides.

Rain fell like pantomime rain
in tales of long ago –
“ancestral voices prophesying war”.
In watery terraces
white peacocks ruled the roost
while I paddled about
in the mud of happenstance.
I was learning to do nothing at last,
talking to Americans
in Rest and Recreation bars,
waiting for poems and love-dates
to bring me their hybrid flowers.