Alistair Sherwood

I write poems and songs.
These poems live on their own.

ORANGUTANI’ve been saying it wrong, Orangatang,
as if a tail might make it mine.
We met on a school trip to Dublin Zoo;
the keeper said you refused other males—
a reasonable philosophy.I’ve been spelling it wrong, bannanas—
a word collapsing under its own weight.
You had a bunch in your mouth,
skins hanging like yellowed teeth,
each one an open parenthesis.I had the flu; you watched me blow my nose,
that soft white flag of human frailty.
I threw the tissue over the rail
and heckled—uh uh uh,a crude translation of my reflection.Everyone laughed you offstage.You picked it up, blew your nose,
wiped your bottom,
and threw it back—your timing, immaculate.

-----------------------------------------------

ORCHARD OF BELIEF

They say money doesn’t grow on trees.Correct.
It builds itself in factories—
paper petals, coins for roots.They call it the economy,
an invention teaching itself to pass as instinct.No one remembers
who planted it,
or the moment belief thickened into law.There was a rumour it kept a secret orchard of zeros,
just to watch them multiply.I might invest
in lost pens, imaginary friends—
they held value long after value forgot what it meant.

-----------------------------------------------

GIUSEPPE

In Dublin, they still say one and one—
counting before choosing.Warm, thick, crispy, golden, fluffy,
thank you, Giuseppe and Palma Cervi.
You walked from Cork one year in the 1880s.I met the aroma at a school gate in Kilkenny, during a secret snowfall—
ten pence, dust of salt, a drop of vinegar.
A grease-proof bag of golden blocks.I walked with them—to a bookshop, wooden floorboards,
my feet shuffle—stop—I bumped into W. B. Yeats,
“The Song of Wandering Aengus.”The assistant tore a sheet of brown paper, then clipped jute rope
from a wooden spool and tied the two tails like a shoelace.
He remarked on the sign on the door, which stated “No Food.”
A bleak-sounding bell tolled at the Gothic Cathedral; it moved my mood.The family names came from a district of six villages:
Borza, Libero, Aprile, Macari, Romayo.
Uno di questo… Uno di quello…
One of this … One of that…I could never afford both—
and learned to choose.

• “If you’d like the poems to knock on your door, leave an address.”

© Alistair Sherwood, 2026