These poems were specially commissioned by PAL for the participants at the EPSRC Sandpit on Scientific Uncertainty and Decision Making for Regulatory and Risk Assessment Purposes, January 2006. (For copyright reasons, we cannot include the poem commissioned from Wendy Cope).

WATER FOR TEA               Lavinia Greenlaw

The question must be travelled fully
like the missing storeys of the Unfinished Palace,
a century of incompletion and its reputation made.
The air above its low roof scintillates like empty paper or glass. 

How to wait with good heart?
No one can speak of it. Tonight, all talk is of the moon,
so proximate, so described,  shadows foliate its surface.
It is a press of leaves, an unearthed green

to be reconstituted, as light is from destination.
The question must be travelled fully. It is ten years since,
on the Tokyo metro, my train stopped for a minute
at Water for Tea Station.  A warrior rested at the spring.

I remember only the bowl, geranium, and the moon,
a disc of satsuma powder paint. As to the water,
the weather or what he said, I am certain of nothing.
To this day, I drink tea with him.

SURVEILLANCE                 Jackie Kay

Maybe you are watching me but then maybe
I am not who I say I am.
And when I leave my house and shut the door
And head for the station
I know my minutes are being taken
Frame by frame, shot by shot.
You have the technology to see me 24/7
And yet not see me at all.
Looking backwards I am all blurred, uncertain
of the future; the past is the hazy moment captured.
Play me back slowly and tell me who
I am supposed to be.

 

CAST IRON                   Dennis O’Driscoll

Even death can be deflected from its intended course, its sentence commuted to
life, if you are just a mite more choosy about how you regulate your fate.

Here, for instance, is a forward-looking man I knew: readying his breakfast -
oatmeal mixed with fruit - the night before, positioning himself efficiently for a quick
get-away to work.

He assumes morning will come, as surely as day will follow this night sprinkled with
stars like a pinch of sesame on porridge oats. And he has good grounds to believe
that the world will continue bearing fruit - melon, grape, nectarine, kiwi, tangerine -
for future breakfasts, that cash to barter for it will flow. 

This man - who takes his punctuality to heart - must dawdle a little, though, this
morning; arrive late if he is to hold on to his job, if he is to escape the impact with
the opening car door that (in real life, real chronology) will dislodge him from bicycle
to street.

All it would have necessitated to cancel this unscheduled meeting between car and
bike was for our cyclist to make more time, more coffee. To be delayed by the need
to mop his small daughter’s spillage from the kitchen floor. To be more patient with
her pre-school interrogation. To wait until the car - whose sound he wouldn’t even
register - had sped past his cast iron gates, sloped safely to a standstill near the
bank.

But the clock too has moved on. And the driver - quickly re-calibrating his day,
cancelling urgent plans - is already inspecting the consequences of his split-second
whim to return to double-check the hand brake.

No animus existed between cyclist and driver. No magnetic attraction drew the
approaching bike to the encroaching door. Nothing about this entanglement was
destined.

Allow for a different outcome, therefore. Tweak the details. A few simple
precautions are all it would require to assure the cyclist of a more routine day. Let
him adopt the daughter option, say, adjust the pace to accommodate her line of
questioning. Let her persistence be his one saving grace. 

THE CIRCLE         Don Paterson

My boy takes up his blue paintbrush
to trace the outline of a dish  
but just before the loop’s complete    
his hand shakes and he smudges it.

The shake’s as old as he is, all
- the mercy - his brain can recall
of that half-hour of slow mayhem
we couldn’t get the air to him;

and though today he has the earth
for breathing-space, the sky for breath,
the whole damn troposphere won’t cure
the flutter in his signature.
 
But honey, nothing’s what we meant;
the dream is taxed. We all resent
the quarter bled off by the dark
between the bowstring and the mark,

and trust to Krishna or to fate  
to keep our arrows halfway straight.
But the target draws us too: our will
and nature’s are identical -

we are the words it speaks, and not
some book it wrote and then forgot,
its fourteen-billion-year-old song’s
inscribed in all our right and wrong -

so even when you rage and moan
and bring your fist down like a stone
on paper, paint-box, brush and plate,
you cannot help but broadcast it:

behold the little avatar
of your muddy water-jar
beating with the perfect ring  
singing under everything.

 

UNCERTAINTY IS NOT A GOOD DOG       Jo Shapcott

Uncertainty is not a good dog.
She eats bracken and sheep shit,
drops her litters in foxholes
and rolls in all the variables,

wriggling on her back, until
she reeks of them,
until their scents are her scents.
She takes sudden, windy routes

through hummocks, cairns and ditches
so you can’t spot where she is
and acknowledge her velocity
at the same time. She’s fidgety,

but still careful to snuffle
through all the mud on the trail.
She can’t see in the dark
but bumps her snout

on the overhang lapping
the path. Daylight’s no better:
she has to screw her eyes
tight against the glare

and, panting, just risk it, following
her nose across the landscape
her tongue brighter than probability,
brighter than heather, winberry and scree.