A Poem by Christopher Reid

Wonders

Unlikely that the Purser’s morning bulletin
broadcast by tannoy to every corner of the boat,
concerned as it was above all with facts and statistics –
the number of knots travelled the day before
and the name of the passenger who had guessed it most closely –
marked the moment when our own course intersected
with that of Moses and his fleeing Israelites.

The boat itself was a world of sufficient wonders:
heaps to eat at every meal; cocktails for children,
non-alcoholic but huge and bewitchingly lurid;
a band in the lounge every night, and my junior self
unembarrassed to be learning the cha-cha-chá from my mother;
a fancy dress parade promised; and the days in between
brimful of swimming, deck quoits and table tennis.

Actual magic, visible and palpable,
happened at Port Said when a bum boat bobbed alongside
and the Gully Gully Man himself was winched aboard.
Juggling. By-play with playing cards. A baby chick that vanished,
before reappearing out of some shrill girl’s left ear.
And my own tight fist tapped once and opening slowly
to reveal a small wooden ball I knew could not be there.

Christopher Reid’s most recent collections of his poetry are The Curiosities (2015), Old Toffer’s Book of Consequential Dogs (2018) and The Late Sun (2020), all published by Faber. Later this year, Everyman will publish his anthology Poems of London. He is currently at work on an edition of Seamus Heaney’s correspondence, expected to appear from Faber in 2023.