(Born With) All The Happiness You Will Ever Need
After Sam Riviere
an early Beatles’ lyric on a Sunday afternoon
that’s yellow as an egg-yolk
bright as a blackbird’s eye
and through the window Hillman Minxes
and the two-tone Austin Thirteen Hundreds
dropping out of sight
in line across the humpback bridge
become a fairground ride
beside the saltsprayed peeling whelk-stall
where the Portobello teddy boys displaced
are leaning and avoided and buffoon
and leer and keep checking their reflections
in each others’ plastic sunglasses
as though in search of something unidentified
with nervousness and anger and
with telstar and the waltzer
screaming hi-ho silver lining
as the two of you delirious with a dedication
you’ll recall when you’ve forgotten
all the words to all the songs
undress each other in the half-light
About this poem
This poem was chosen by Aoife Lyall as part of the Scottish Poetry Library’s ‘Champions’ project, a guest curatorship programme to help extend our national reach.
Lyall says, ‘Stephen’s poem is one of energy and dynamism and exuberance: it captures a moment full of vitality and is unafraid to recognise both the joy and sadness such personal revelations offer.’
Keeler says, ‘I nurture a sort of theory (too grand a term, really) that we are born with everything we’re ever going to need, and maybe everything we’re ever going to have. Happiness is there to be recognised or ignored or squandered or abused… and I’m not sure that we have much say in what happens to it.’
