Duncan Forbes’ poems have been published by Faber, Secker and Enitharmon, who brought out a Selected Poems, Lifelines, in 2009. It was drawn from five previous collections. Awards and prizes include a Gregory Award, TLS/Blackwells Prize, two Stephen Spender Times Translation Prizes and a Hawthornden Fellowship. A painter as well as a poet, he read English at Oxford and has taught for many years. Now retired, he lives in Gloucestershire. His latest collection is Human Time (2020). See www.duncanforbes.com
A Better Berry
“Doubtless God could have made a better berry,
but doubtless God never did.”
Dr Boteler quoted by Izaak Walton
Reach down between the green serrated groves
And feel for berries’ ripened crimson selves
Wearing their seeds like buttons on a sofa,
Twiddle the six-point star of Bethlehem
Between your pink forefinger and your thumb
To reinvent the wheel with leaf and stem,
Then with some Amaretto – just a splash –
Taste at its best, sun-ripened and picked fresh,
The veiny brainwork of the sweetened flesh
With caster sugar crystals by the spoonful
And cream poured in a languid waterfall
Onto the waiting strawberries in a bowl,
Then savour both the shape in the saliva
And that infallible midsummer flavour
As if you were in love and it your lover,
Moving the proof from lips to uvula
And swallow, swallow till the fever’s over,
As if in heaven and an unbeliever.
Duncan Forbes
Cellar Dweller by Duncan Forbes
