Three poems from "The Sugar Mile".(Poems)

This man--me--walks into a pub on Broadway in the golden early September of 2001, opens his notebook on the bar, and starts trying to write a poem. My work is interrupted by an old man called Joey Stone, who laughs to see me crossing out words. He tells me he is there to mark a significant date. It is sixty-one years to the day since "Black Saturday," the first mass daylight bombing of London, the onset of what became known as the Blitz. Joey had noticed I was British, and thought I'd know this stuff. But I don't, and I say no more for the rest of The Sugar Mile. It is a book of other voices.

Joey settles into his chair by the window, and, as the beer and the sunny afternoon begin to send him towards sleep, memories come. Over the course of the weekend, as he wakes or dozes, as the barman Raul clears up around him, chatting about the English, or girls, or the glories of New York, and as this man--me--sits silently at the bar, Joey relives those terrible three days, which will culminate in the worst incident of civilian loss of life suffered by the British in the war.

Joey was fifteen and ...