About the poet
Tom Vaughan is a former British diplomat who has served in the Middle East, Africa, and the US, and whose career has also included experience of conflict zones such as Afghanistan and the Balkans. He continues to work on international affairs.
Tom worked as a journalist before graduating from Exeter University and completing post-graduate studies at Oxford. His novel, No Second Prize, based on his experience in post-colonial Zimbabwe, was published by Andre Deutsch in 1993.
Tom’s poems have been published in several magazines and anthologies. One of his poems, Proposal, first published in Orbis, was included in the BBC series/anthology Essential Poems (to Fall in Love with). Tom is a member of the Original Poets of Clapham Stanza Poetry Group, and four of his poems were included in their 2018 anthology Uncommon.
In the words of Helena Nelson of the HappenStance Press, which published a short selection of his poetry in 2010 and a longer collection – Envoy – in 2013, Tom’s poems demonstrate that ‘elegant formalism and contemporary style can still go hand in hand’.
Envoy
The poems in Envoy reflect Tom’s experience overseas, commenting (often with barbed wit) on people, places and the moral ambiguities of diplomatic life. His deepest concern is with the guilt carried by those whose decisions—however much they may or may not be justified—mean the death and injury of others. But the only certainty for all of us, as he concludes in Via Dolorosa, is that ‘suffering / is in the end / all we can share’.
Although hard copies of Envoy are sold out, you can buy and download an e-copy below.
Appropriate
Appropriate’s a lovely word –
it doesn’t mean a thing.
So useful when we need a text
appropriately thin.
Appropriate measures may be used . . .
appropriate forces sent.
Appropriately you’ll never know
exactly what we meant
when unforeseen – of course – events
raise the question why
inappropriately innocent people
die.
HappenStance Sampler
Crime Scene
I left a window open
all day, but no one came
to steal my laptop, or my books,
my passport, or my name –
nothing has moved, nothing has changed,
the flat looks just the same
as when I walked out this morning –
no tampering with the shame
of my unmade bed, my un-ironed shirts,
the plate-piled kitchen sink,
your farewell letter on my desk,
listing my faults. I think
when I go to work tomorrow
I’ll play a bolder game –
take the front door off its hinges:
fuck the insurance claim.
Some Poems of Tom Vaughan
Kinneret
We sat beside the water’s edge
while evening settled on the lake
each glimpsing how it could inspire
a thirst no drink could ever slake –
no man-made harp could ever catch
the silent music in that peace
which soothed us like a pledge that some
deep harmony would never cease –
but then a voice behind us called
proposing beers, and we turned back
towards the guest house, where we’d dine
and talk, and joke, and kiss, and pack –
and though I still remember all
we felt it meant for me and you,
what’s also lasted through the years
and what registered as just as true
is the vision the next morning when
driving down to Tel Aviv:
young soldiers hitch-hiking; the killing
fields too many had believed
belonged to them – in the fierce sun
the Horns of Hattin, the Golan Heights,
Megiddo . . . How could we connect
such history with the previous night’s
unheralded, unmerited
sense of a sudden offering,
of a one-off, privileged insight
into the carefree heart of things?
We’ve stumbled since, and when I read
the news about the Promised Land
I note that nothing’s solved – but were
we lucky to halt there, hand-in-hand
those few stunned hours, if that’s as close
as human beings can ever be;
when it seemed time paused and blessed us both
beside the Sea of Galilee?
Note
The word Kinneret is derived from the Hebrew word for harp, which the shape of the lake resembles.
Published Snakeskin 289, October 2021
Among Sixth-Formers
St Andrew’s RC Secondary School, Glasgow
They sit there, eager, young and bright,
two wanting to be teachers, one
a doctor, while the fourth describes
his goal to be a journalist.
At their age, I was stoned or pissed –
today I’m just a tie and suit
who in their pert eyes must appear
a bland old bore, whose accent means
he’s (a) English and (b) can’t know
the pressures they’ve defied, but though
it was madness to believe we might
discover a common language or
an interpreter able to translate
with empathetic clarity
me to them and them to me
yet how could I fail to be inspired
by finding hope here, amidst their grey
resentful home estate which wants
its offspring back, whose rules they flout
even by dreaming of breaking out
to solid, legal, long careers,
to marriages which last, to kids
who’ll laugh at them for being so straight,
to lives unlocked from drugs and crime –
to safer ways to serve their time,
the guilt of such a thought being mine.
First published in Snakeskin 247, January 2018
Happiness
It’s easy to forget they’d fought a war:
his father drowned, half-brother bayoneted;
her kilted sibling captured at Dunkirk,
locked up for five long years. But yes they met
in uniform, lost half their friends, before
the normal world re-started when they wed:
mortgage; children; grinding office work –
all I suppose they wanted when they set
out as a couple. We must have been a shock:
busting their rulebook; scornful of sacrifice;
mocking their past and their belief in ‘progress’;
too young, too smashed, too angry to unlock
their silence, or to understand the price
they’d paid for what they’d still call happiness.
Published in Dream Catcher 33, July 2016
Brick by Brick
I took a brick and carried it
to where before there had been air,
and laid it carefully to fill
an emptiness I could repair.
some bricks are made for houses
some bricks are made for walls
but none are made to mark the place
where more than evening falls
That was the first – it’s now among
so many others I can’t be sure
which one it is, and why I built
here, not elsewhere.
some bricks are made for houses
some bricks are made for walls
but none are made to mark the place
which beckons but appals
Though it seems some spaces can’t be filled
however many bricks we pile
upon each other, and however
well we learn to shrug, and smile.
some bricks are made for houses
some bricks are made for walls
but none are made to mark the place
where all our building stalls
Published Poetry Review Salzburg No 37, Summer 2021
Promised Land
The house repainted, pristine white,
the roof repaired, the shutters fixed,
grass freshly cut, hedge trimmed, weeds plucked
no more with planted flowers to mix –
our papers sorted, books arranged
by category on dusted shelves,
the floors clean-swept, such photos kept
as tell the story we’ve approved
in gentle conversations when
over an evening drink or two
we’ve both agreed the past we need
to help us as we start anew –
if time could stop it should stop now
while we sit quietly, hand in hand,
watching as one the setting sun,
knowing we’ve reached the Promised Land.
Published in The Haiku Quarterly 55&56, 2021
Portrait of a Lady
This is my country, right or wrong.
But is this my country’s evensong?
This is my country, losing its clout.
This is my country – on the way out?
This is my country, land of the free –
where we’ve freely decided to be all at sea.
This is my country, where what adds to the churn
is Boris performing another U-turn
over Covid, or Brexit, or Huawei . . . Perhaps
it’s the end of the era of rule by Good Chaps.
This is my country, proud of its past,
This is my country, albeit miscast
for an age in which others are making the rules
most certainly not of our top Public Schools
which gave us high standards, if mostly double.
This is my country, deeply in trouble.
This is my country, in search of a role
to play in the world once we’re back in control –
or is it an outing down Memory Lane
as though we could paint the globe pink once again?
If so, is the trip up a long garden path?
This is my country, good for a laugh . . .
But we’ve had knocks before and we’ve always come through
and we’re best on our own, and isn’t it true
that we didn’t belong in a project to blur
the divisions which make us who we are?
And we’ve always the Yanks! But though Biden’s not Trump
the thought still brings many to earth with a bump
(and must we become Uncle Sam’s chicken dump?).
This is my country – right? Or wrong?
This is my country, going . . . going . . . gone . . .
Published in Morning Star 19 November 2020
A Winter’s Tale
I think it should have been the other way round,
beginning on a high – a swirl of laughs,
chance meetings, marriages. The unexplained sound
of music. Pauses for sunny photographs.
Plus the kind of magic he would have reserved
to sprinkle last page stardust on those who
stand shaken, but emotionally bestirred,
as one, wondering, young, in a world made new.
Till somewhere in Act III the tone would start
to darken, and the poetry become
tortuously thrilling, like a heart
twisted and tempted. The fun
stops. Lovers
are separated, this time for good.
Storms rip ships apart; upright souls drown.
Misunderstandings unleash murder, and
it’s cold and selfish in the dangerous wood
in which the exiles huddle.
The curtain comes down
as the mocking villain reassumes the land.
First published in A Writer’s Forum #148, February 2014
Odysseus
What if the whole epic
has tongue tucked in cheek?
We’ve only his word . . .
Was there really a freak
man-eating Cyclops
with only one eye,
or a nympho Calypso
saying live and let die
or did he just need
a good story to tell
to prevent Penelope
giving him hell?
The guy after all
was known for his cunning
eg his plot
to spring Helen the stunning.
Maybe. But the sirens?
Do they sing for you too?
Or – like him? – do you wish
at least that bit were true?
Published in Lighten Up Online Issue 55, September 2021
Poetry publishers
LINKS
Some of Tom’s poems have been published in the following online publications:
- Snakeskin online poetry magazine A monthly poetry webzine edited by George Simmers.
- Lighten Up Online The quarterly light verse webzine founded by Martin Parker and edited by Jerome Betts.
Get in touch with Tom here