David Conrad Foggin (1971 – 1992)
‘ Uz can be loving, as well as funny‘ wrote Tony Harrison, in one of those poems that seemed to speak to, and for, me, and so many Grammar School boys of my generation. We say ‘uz’. And we say ‘our’, too. Our kid, our lass. And our David. I was urged to buy and read Carrie Etter’s ‘Imagined sons‘, and I am still haunted her visions of what may have become of her son. Two of my five children were adopted, and our David was one of them. Against all the rules, we met his birth mother, who would have been no more than eighteen. She wanted a say in who would adopt him, and a wise social worker thought she had that right. That young girl trusted him to to a couple not that much older than her. She will be sixty, now. Carrie Etter’s prose poems have made me think long and hard about her, and how she must have dreamed so many possible futures for him
David died in a fall from the top floor of a high-rise block of flats, only a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday. June 29th. It’s his birthday today. When he was nine or ten years old, he drew endlessly; meticulous battle scenes, some times on rolls of lining paper, so they stretched out like eclectic Bayeaux tapestries. I wrote a poem about them, years ago, and keep revisiting it, and rewriting it. Here it is.
Our David’s Pictures
In tracing the anatomy of war
our david’s concentration’s absolute.
He kneels in peace, head bowed. An acolyte.
His pictures conjure tiny armies on the floor.
All history’s invited to this fight:
Martello tower, pele, and launching pad,
heaps of Roman, Norman, Saxon, Panzer dead.
Drawn up, his minute cohorts. Black and white.
Each man’s accoutred – breastplate, chainmail, greaves.
Crusaders squint down Gatling sights,
or brandish spears with blades as big as axes,
and quivers jammed with arrows, bunched in sheaves.
Every shield’s a wicked chevron
or a bossed and studded disc;
the sky is bristling with a stiff cheval de frise
of arrows and everyman’s vulnerable, at risk.
There’s Agincourts of arrows, flight on flight.
The sky’s cross-hatched, and somedays almost black.
The sun’s crossed out. Eclipsed. Our David’s arrows –
they fly miles, out of day and into night,
they shift the whole perspective. What is it
he celebrates? Pattern? Power?
The living or the dead. I’ll never know,
his last bow drawn, and loosed, an age ago.
At the same time as ‘Imagined sons’ started its work on me, I was re-reading a lot of retellings of myth, and two in particular would not (and will not) leave me alone. The stories of Daedalus and Icarus, and of Hephaestus, the lame god hurled from Olympus by his mother. They are both stories of terrible falls from the skies. This second poem felt to me like a prayer for atonement. Whatever it is, it’s for our David, on his birthday.
Daedalus
pinioned in a parchment sky,
his mind a kitestring ravel,
he stares at distressing
white comet-tails of feathers,
down at his dwindling son.
He knows so much.
The structure of a bird’s wing.
The melting point of wax.
He can navigate
the fibonacci spirals of a conch
with thread, an ant, and honey.
He understands everything
about the body’s hinges, levers,
fulcrums; the way it works.
he has traced the ridges
of a human brain, the whorls
of fingertips, and dreamed
of labyrinths.
He can calculate velocities,
knows how a falcon slices
through blue spaces
and why a boy can not, and how
the lucid air turns loud and brutal
and why the the cross-hatched sea
becomes a butcher’s block.
He is learning
it’s the sleep of the heart
breeds monsters.
He could mend a broken clock.
Totally bowled over by one of my grandsons posting this on his Facebook page:
Such a beautiful piece of writing by my granddad to celebrate my Uncle David’s life before death who I was then named after. Loved as a brother to my father, a son to my grandparents and an uncle to me and will always be in his families hearts.
This David is a rugby league professional with Superleague Academy team. Uz can be loving as well as hard and fast.
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Go our David!
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lovely to see you, Jools. Keep coming back xxxx
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he’s a lucky grandson to have you in his life- and it sounds like he knows it x
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John this is such a beautiful post. Re read it again today after Carrie Etter put a link to it on Facebook. Beautiful drawing as well. Sending you another hug
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Carrie Etter read it? I’m walking on water. Or air. Thanks so much for telling me, Kim
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I came here from a link on Carrie Etter’s facebook. I heard her read from Imagined Sons on Friday and it was incredibly moving. I found your poem equally so. I feel privileged to have had this glimpse of your artistic son. Thank you, your poem is very, very good.
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Ruth, you are very kind…I’m moved by people’s responses. And blown away to find that Carrie Etter read my post and shared it Thank you!
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Oh this is such a lovely post… xxx
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Hi on wordpress John. I dont know what to do to follow you! surely there must be something to press! Or am I already following you!I hope I am!
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hiya, Maria…good to hear from you! If you’re asking for advice about social media systems and links I am bound to disappoint. But isn’t there a button at the bottom of each post (or buttons, even) that let you share/follow/like/despise/whatever? In any case, welcome xxx Fogs
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here’s another way of replying, I’ve just found. Ah, what tangled webs!
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Maria…..the ‘follow’ button is at the top f the page I the black toolbar above the picture of the book spines
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