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.
Via Dolorosa
The light insists
there’s something here
the guidebooks can’t
explain, and then
illuminates
the stones’ idea
that maybe nothing
happened but
their task’s to bear
what ends in prayer
or protest that
the certainty
of suffering
is in the end
all we can share.
Published in Envoy, HappenStance 2013
HappenStance Sampler
Know-All
It’s strange – you think you know it all,
you’ve built a life which most would call
solid, secure; but one fine day
the props will simply fade away,
without a how or why. You’ll fall.
The weightless pleasure will appal,
the lack of safety net enthral –
the loose air’s utter disarray.
Or else, you’ll come up to a wall
too long to walk around, too tall
to scale. Gateless – but in a way
thrillingly blank. Stopped dead, you’ll say:
at last I know nothing at all.
It’s strange. You think you know.
Some Poems of Tom Vaughan
Bath Time
There’s always that moment of choice
when you’re lying in your bath, half-asleep:
should you pull the plug now? Then a voice
whispers, stay a bit longer . . . The deep
water’s warm and your body’s relaxed,
and your mind’s on unwind – it’s as though
pleasure won’t wane, only wax,
forgetting that you also know
it’s normal for tubs to grow colder,
and that if you apply the hot tap
getting out will become that much harder
once you’ve let your resolve further sap.
But awareness of how things must end
doesn’t help with the matter at hand,
and you’re now far too old to pretend
such dilemmas can somehow be banned.
Published Snakeskin 193, Feb 2013
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.
First published in Dream Catcher 33, July 2016
First
Her eyes are full of tears while he
tries to explain why it doesn’t work,
when what he means is he’s plain bored
and that the sex is not enough.
She knows he’s lying – that he wants to be
with someone else, and that in a week
if they should meet, she’d be ignored.
But it was the first time she’d been in love.
What she cannot know as yet is how
the years will pass, and she’ll look back
amazed he meant so much, but still
conscious that self-deceit allowed
a sense of being alive she’s lacked
since the real world moved in for the kill.
Published in Snakeskin 280, January 2021
Kestrel, March 2020
Some days it seems enough to learn
the French names of the birds
I can see from my study window
or when we walk along the beach:
goéland; chevalier; grand cormoran;
bécasseau; tournepierre à collier;
and yesterday a faucon crécerelle
unmoving in the wind which stirred
the trees which mark the line
between our garden and the sand.
That’s why, you said, they say it flies
en Saint-Esprit . . .
We may be alone here for weeks.
If so, I’ll keep a watch
hoping he’ll come again
as though he’d bring a blessing
in his train.
Published in Snakeskin 271, April 2020
Train
Once you’re on the train
nothing to do but relax –
somebody else in charge
and no way back.
You settle with a book
or close your eyes, to sleep
or watch the landscape slip
into the past. You hope
you’ll arrive more or less on time
but rocked in the easy motion
imagine you won’t get off
until that further station
with the sunlit, tight-knit town
which was always your real home
which you’ll feel is where you’re from
which is waiting for you to come
one day, perhaps today
one day, perhaps tomorrow
one day, if not today
one day, if not tomorrow
Published in The Haiku Quarterly 54, November 2020
Afterwards
Afterwards, I’ll shake the hand
of total strangers in the street
as though they were my oldest friend
and as and when that friend I’ll meet
we’ll stroll across Green Park towards
Crown Passage’s Il Vicolo
to dip our bread in olive oil
and drink wine till our faces glow
and talk of this and maybe that
as if we had all day to kill
then we’ll argue who should pay, aware
we’ll agree at last to split the bill
and when we say goodbye, we’ll know
how rare and wonderful it was
to be together, even though
neither will say so. Why? Because
why even hint the day might come
when public or private fresh disaster
prevents we two from sitting there
to share a salad and a pasta?
First published in Snakeskin 276, September 2020. Also published in The Spectator of 10 October 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
A Hint of Heaven
What do people do in heaven?
Are there seven
days a week – and
in that strange land
would you be you, would I be me?
Would we be free
to share unplanned
evenings, demand
a room together? Is it dull –
an endless lull
where bored saints stand,
sinlessly bland?
I stumbled on what’s holy, here,
with you. No prayer
solves the contrast
between that past
and what remains as we grow old.
Were we fool’s gold?
What cannot last
leaves us aghast –
but leaving paradise, which breaks
the heart, yet wakes
each lone outcast
to love’s broadcast.
First published in Originally of Clapham anthology, 2014
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