JOHN GRANT: Stare at the monster: remark

John Grant is a valued member of our New Malden Writers’ Group. His poems are clear in their ideas and accomplished in form. They do what they say on the tin! We always start with a poem by John and end with a poem by John because they put the New Malden Writers in the right mood to be happily creative. John’s poems are rich in imagery and movement and full of emotions that we can all recognise. Often they are about nature, or family or the process of ageing (John is 85). Sometimes his poems make us laugh, and often they move us. This poem did both those things.

Phil Hall

Stare at the monster: remark

Stare at the monster: remark
How difficult it is to define just what
Amounts to monstrosity in that
Very ordinary appearance. Neither thin nor fat.

From Famous Poet by Ted Hughes

She’s been screaming for some time,
her hand wrapped in my hippy hair
and pulling hard while she pushes.
Slowly the crown of a head appears
followed by a whole new being. A girl
and in my heart is struck a spark
of love that will never die despite
the fact she looks so strange, squashed
face, toothless mouth. Her hair is dark.
I stare at the monster: remark

how strangely beautiful she looks
how beautifully strange.
Yet in no time at all comes change.
I turn my back and she has grown
I speak and suddenly she replies.
One day her face is covered in snot
the next there is woman’s war-paint
smudged across her looks: eye shadow
and lipstick, from a bag my wife forgot.
How difficult it is to define just what

I feel and fear for her and her future.
It turns out she is bright, pretty, popular.
Does well at primary, gets into a grammar,
Os and As were not much of a problem.
Problem was she curved and matured.
A lovely young woman she began to attract,
a father thinks, the wrong kind of attention.
Arty farty types, painters, a poet, an acrobat.
What amounts to monstrosity in that

is the feeling that I cannot let go,
trust her to make sensible decisions.
Though she has more brains than me,
she will make mistakes she is only human.
I made many, and I still make them.
But I guess it’s an absolute fact
in the end she will find the right man
he will be, intelligent, humorous, kind,
have a good job and be nice to her cat,
of very ordinary appearance. Neither thin nor fat.

— John Grant, March 2018