Poems

Kikajon

Come not to me for calm or cosset
    Nor from the busy look for ease
Labour we have, but no profit
    And no such bud of no such trees
       As Jesse grew
       Or Jonah knew
    To grow but once abundant leaves.
What shade we have must be our own,
Will not be lent, derived or sown.

We dare not hope for shelter grown
    Up once at night to baulk our heads
From the fresh storm that has come down
    But withers, now, at dawny tread.
       Our bulk is come
       From us alone
    And strength not ours will soon be shed:
Our pleasures and our virtues must
Be just our own, and must be just.

The night is long and dawn breaks late
    The dew weighs heavy and we come
Only with strain to reach the gate
    From which we thought we had begun.
       Garnets and gold
       Are ours to hold
    And if, at length, we find a home
All the jewelled world shall mirrored gleam
In coffered shade, from beam to beam.


Kikajon (or kikayon) is the name of the tree that springs up to shade Jonah in the book of Jonah, Chapter Four. The word appears only here in the Hebrew Bible and it is not certain to which type of tree it refers.

The form of this poem (though not its subject) is borrowed from Aurelian Townshend, ‘Come not to me for scarves or plumes’.


After Epiphany

How the snow changes on the way to school
and then as I go on to work this morning
the seventh of January 2026.
More snow, they say, than there has been
in Paris for nearly thirty years. The boys –
my younger two, ten and three – carouse
sliding and shouting on the Boulevard
Saint Michel, right outside our house.
My middle son is always warm to beauty
and keeps telling me he can’t believe
how beautiful the snow is, the light
upon it, and the crystals glittering
everywhere on the surface, all the white
and how it is continuing to fall.
Thickly it falls as we leave the flat –
soft and thick for the first 100 yards,
but then we turn the corner into the rue
de l’Abbé de l’Épée (a funny name) and find
we’re facing full into the wind, the snow
flat into our faces, hoods
and down our necks. The road is narrow and
congested at the best of times first thing,
works on one side block the pavement,
and the other makes a kind of narrow rat-run
between schools in both directions.
I hold my youngest’s hand and we pick on
in single file, passing one lame lady slower
even than us, ‘c’est difficile, non?’
I worry that she’ll fall, and then we’re past
and turn again left against the church,
Saint Jacques, the road broadens out, we join
the course of many stumbling to school
and the odd slow car crunching through
the unsalted roads with headlights and care.
After I’ve dropped the youngest at maternelle –
back down the stairs from the fourth floor, hood
back up again and gloves back on, I’m at
the junction between St Jacques and Gay Lussac
the snow still falling and almost no traffic –
when the streetlights all suddenly go out,
they must be on a timer I suppose,
and the dim blue light of dawn has lost
all at once its yellow overcast. It feels
colder again and I pick my way on
down rue Saint Jacques because if I go this way
I pass a bakery on my way to work. Inside,
they’re displaying proudly a new sign
saying they make the fourth best galette amande
of Paris in 2026. For epiphany –
yesterday, that is – the French eat a pastry
filled with a kind of almond custard and
somewhere inside a fève, a once-was bean,
now a small china figure, ours this year
a kneeling donkey which I’ve put
safe in the kitchen drawer to keep and add
next December to the crib passed on
from my disreputable father-in-law,
who had been christened but as one of his
many sets of in-laws once remarked,
‘Only Jews keep their certificates
of baptism.’ The youngest child
goes under the table and allots the slices,
a bit like Passover: Why is this night
different from all other nights? The kings of course
were Persian, probably. Wise men.
Our youngest is only three, so while
he’s under the table dictating who gets what
we fiddle the game, naturally, to ensure
that the china creature is in his slice.
That means he gets to wear the crown
and be the king. Outside the bakery –
equipped now with a brioche for my breakfast –
the snow’s still coming down, around
and down and on the Panthéon
stately and silent in the cold. It is
not even the most beautiful such building
that I walk past most days: that is
the Val de Grâce, the unfrequented
square before the vale of grace.