Tamsin Hopkins

if you’re being followed

choose who you want behind you, the person to tell you: you were followed, your footsteps dogged, you’re dead, you’ve been dead for some time and you’re just fine the dead way you are. Choose the person who tells you how it happened, who was there and what they said, and says let it go now. Someone you can tell about the mistakes you’ll leave, your mess of papers, the bills, the files, the easy photos and the difficult photos, the journals with all the bad things you wrote in the days when you were seriously down. This is the friend you can call on anytime without a word of explanation, the one you call after years of no contact and tell her This Is What’s Going On. She already knows what you need, maybe she’s been expecting your call. You say, Do You Remember and she does, every second of it, so she knows why you can’t ask or won’t ask anybody else, why it has to be her, even if you never spent a Christmas together or went on holiday or shared a room or even if you have done all these things together. Choose the friend who knows it could be the other way round and you wouldn’t hesitate, you’d be clacking down your wooden stairs and out your door, no questions asked. And when you are trying to take yourself out of the world and they all lay hands on you and call you theirs, this person will take her hands away and let you go. She will tend all the things you love and knows she has already been thanked and loved and needs no more. She loves you naturally. She knows you have been mid-air for some time.

An Apology of Hair for my Unborn Grandchildren

You cannot be allowed to come through, little ones. Find some other

dimension. It will be best if you do not exist.

In this time of warnings I have cut my hair for you, sectioned it into braids

dyed many colours, attached them to a central cord like keys around a loop.

Crimson to gold, green, brown – fawn to chocolate.

One of you will wear this round her neck. Feel my thoughts. Use etiolated fingers

to analyse twine and spin. Search out shapes,

see how the coloured strands tell the story of loam and forest becoming desert, mossy

loops bleached to straw-tufted ends.

Indigo-sage shows boreholes people dug in their own gardens, as if people

owned water. Dried up rivers, sewage in silt, Coke cans and condoms.

Charcoal grey speaks of business flights, the holidays taken

in wild places to see ice, reefs, coloured fish before they left us.

Cream snagged with gold, knotted red – these are the hedonistic beaches.

Twist my hair, touch the spliced song of your forebears. See us hoarding

trivia, investing in extinction. Stocks of blue-fin tuna frozen in bank vaults.

Here are your grandfather and me, who at forty-six, buy our first bio-degradable toothbrushes. The nappies we send to landfill. Plastic is your inheritance.

Little fingers and toes – stay away. Do not be born. You can be gunslingers, or zombies.

No middle ground. You will make bombs out of household items to defend those you love.

If you have a home, you will keep guns in the house, under your pillow – if you have pillows. You will abhor what you eat. Water may sustain, but the chemicals will erode you slowly.

I would like to braid my hopes and my love into this message, but for you

I must have none. I don’t want you. I don’t want you in this world. I am the gurning.

I made the madness. I am the desperation, the hunger coming over the wall.

Grandfathers in Helium

It’s Spring. I decide to write a sad play called Grandfathers in Helium,

about all four of my grandfathers. Because relatives tie you down.

Because give them an eighth of a chance and they’ll define you

– wellsprings of guilt not content as the source of nose, eyes, chin,

roots to your buds and leaves.

They are like last year’s fireworks, flashes on the inner eyelid, still firing.

I didn’t know them. They don’t know me.

This is normal in playwriting.

There were three good men on one side a ‘Right Old B*’ on the other.

Nobody died in any wars our family was hated for that.

The Old B* seduced half the street

turning widows and neighbours into something else,

a different kind of family the street became a new hell for some.

The first granny buried her confusion of men and looked for no more.

She’d had enough singing in Welsh, cooking and swearing in Italian.

Two were probably English as mutton. North and South.

One was Jewish, one Catholic, one a Methodist – (not the Welshman.)

Some of this may only be quarter truth.

One, a Major in the army, came back as something else.

The second was a famous wearer of greatcoats, and red felt hats.

Number three played his violin in the loft.

The last, a silent man, always gave clocks.

Everywhere there were clocks.

*

Spring, in a park: Two small ladies wear woollen coats, hats & gloves,

each with a snap-clasp handbag; they admire the vulnerable geraniums.

These are the anchors. The old ladies, not the geraniums.

A girl has bright balloons. Neon bubble-gum, with curlicue candy strings.

She holds each down for a time, draws faces with a marker pen – one goatee,

a moustache, a smile and a hat. Rosie cheeks and mismatched eyes.

Up they pop, bobbing and glinting, drunk on sun.

She shares the balloons fairly, not paying attention to who gets whom.

Here you are, she says. A quarter of the grandfathers. One to hold in each hand.

Directions

Nine Plays in Seven Acts

I

To combat the increasing callousness of mankind, J Peachum, a man of business has opened a shop

where the poorest of the poor can acquire an exterior, that will touch the hardest of hearts

Through the partitioning wall at the right we hear a prosecutor’s voice

Swathed in white sheets, a shroud covers the face

A small, tumble-down chapel long abandoned

Dark poplar trees loom on one side

Beyond them the cherry orchard begins

The sky that shows around the dime white building is a peculiarly tender blue-almost turquoise, which gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay, you can almost feel the warm breath of the brown river

II

A warm day in early August 1936, outside the village of Ballybeg, County Donegal

There is a sycamore tree off right. One of its branches reaches over part of the house.

Upstage centre is a garden seat. The (unseen) boy has been making two kites and pieces of wood,

Paper, cord etc are lying on the ground close to the garden seat. One kite is almost complete

III

1 Enter Roderigo and Iago

2 Enter Montano, Governor of Cyprus,

3 Enter Cassio with two others

4 Enter Iago and Othello

5(2) Enter Othello with a light, and Desdemona in her bed asleep

IV

The Poker Night:

The kitchen suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw colours of childhood’s spectrum

Over the yellow linoleum of the kitchen table hangs an electric bulb with a vivid

green glass shade

The poker players wear coloured shirts, solid blues, a purple, a red-and-white check, a light green ̶ they are men at the peak of their physical manhood, coarse and direct,

powerful as the primary colours

There are vivid slices of watermelon on the table, whiskey bottles and glasses

FUN AND GAMES: Set in darkness. Crash against the front door. MARTHA’s laughter heard. Front door opens, lights are switched on.

MARTHA enters, followed by GEORGE.

V

● A country road.

● A tree.

● Evening

VI

Mac the Knife takes leave of his wife

and flees from his father-in-law

to the heaths of Highgate.

VII

There is a feeling of emptiness.

That night Peachum prepares his campaign. He plans to disrupt the Coronation by a demonstration of human misery. The beggars paint little signs with inscriptions such as I gave my eye for my king

The view through the big windows is fading gradually into a still-golden dusk.

Two finished kites – their artwork still unseen – lean against the garden seat.

Notes and Accreditations

I am grateful to the editors and judges of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared:

‘if you’re being followed’ won the Aesthetica Award for Poetry in 2020 and was first published in the Aesthetica competition anthology.

This poem employs intertextuality and incorporates some phrases from ‘Chosen Family’ by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

‘An Apology of Hair for my Unborn Grandchildren’ was first published in Magma (The Anthropocene Issue)

‘Grandfathers in Helium’ was longlisted for the National Poetry Prize and first published by The London Magazine

‘Directions’ is a collage taken from nine famous plays: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Dancing in Lughnasa, Othello, The Threepenny Opera, The Crucible, The Cherry Orchard, Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, Waiting for Godot.

‘Directions’ was published in Best New English and Irish Writers 2019-21 (Eyewear)