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’.
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.
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.
Jerusalem
Despite its aplomb,
a nuclear bomb.
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
Some Poems of Tom Vaughan
Glance
I met her eyes
and in that glance
a lifeline passed
it seemed a chance
step in advance
which could not last
though now I know
it was the first
tread in our dance
and in that trance
a lifetime passed
as in a glance
Published Dream Catcher 44, January 2022
Misquoting Auden
We must care for one another, or we die.
Easy to say. Harder to live. Here’s why –
some folk like power-play, thrive on contention
others resent being helped, as condescension
while most of those who claim they love mankind
to individual wants and needs are blind
and death will happen anyway – the fact
is it will always be a solo act.
Published in Snakeskin 298, August 2022
Forget-Me-Not
For my mother and all victims of Alzheimer’s
I’m like a book I know I’ve read
but stare at on the shelf in vain
oblivious how the intrigue ends
I gaze into the eyes of friends
but can’t recall my role or claim
the sagas our shared past once penned
the silence deep inside my head
is spreading like a slow inkstain
my story should be there instead
to fill the book I’m sure I’ve read
but from re-opening refrain
for fear I would not find my name
the only place I’m me again
as darkness stretches out its reign
to any chapters which remain
is in your love
and in your pain
Published in Snakeskin 287, August 2021
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
Yes Minister
We’d set it up for you to talk
to the woman who spoke English, who’d
opened a secret school for girls –
as featured on the Taliban’s
list of Allah’s also-rans.
She thanked you for Great Britain’s part
in ending such a tyranny
and then described in moving terms
her undercover past, the fear
now tempered, since the West was there.
Don’t leave us this time – her final plea.
We won’t, you said. We’ll see it through.
She smiled, and you moved on, to charm
a minister or a general.
I didn’t think that I’d recall
that brief encounter ten years on
when you were plugging your memoirs
to a strategy forum in Whitehall.
Afghanistan, I heard you say,
would have to find an Afghan way.
I asked you whether you remembered
that trip; her words; your words; her smile.
You shrugged, and said in politics
sometimes it wasn’t possible
to finish all you’d hoped to do.
Well yes, it’s true each body bag
is a weight we carry, you and I,
and bled votes for those who’d stay the course.
But what should I say, were I to meet
her once again, on that Kabul street?
First published in Snakeskin 248, February 2018
Awake
At our age, it’s more funerals than weddings –
both equally good for catching up on gossip
although now more usually about whose suffering
from what than who’s sleeping with whom – whose hip
joint is ceramic, or whose by-passed heart
pumps as well as the one they were gifted at the start.
Then the big C-word – the weird one-upmanship
of comparing which particular body part
is caught in that disease’s pincer grip,
and calculating the chances of survival.
We note when memory begins to slip –
a first sign of Alzheimer’s? The removal
chapter by chapter of the storied self,
a death before a second death, by stealth.
Yet there’s always the occasional daredevil
boozing and smoking, and still in robust health . . .
But courage should mean a brutally frank appraisal:
life’s just an actuarial calculation
and there’s only one direction for our travel –
towards, surely, complete annihilation.
It’s strange that such farewells are called a wake
when friends go out forever, and daybreak
won’t bring them back, or herald their salvation,
or comfort those who loved them, for whose sake
we offer words we all pretend can ease the ache.
First published in The Spectator 1 April 2017
Also published in uncommon, an anthology by Clapham Original Poets, 2018
Desert Island Discs
I must be past my sell-by date:
I’m fifty, frazzled, overweight.
My mother glares at me to show
she’s not to blame; my wife groans no
on those infrequent nights when I
clumsily lonely, reach out and try
to make/wake love. Asleep, I snore.
My kids think I’m a dinosaur ‒
if up to them, I’m not an App
they’d download. Just a bank to tap . . .
I’m running out of things to say
to friends, except pub chatter – they
wear the same puzzled, sober frown
however many pints they down.
We watch the football on the box,
the stars who earn more than Fort Knox ‒
my job’s a grind, my boss a jerk,
my pay’s a joke, I’ll have to work
until I’m seventy at least:
my pension pot has lost its yeast.
Is this what life is all about,
the rules the multitude can’t flout? –
frustration, failure, stuck ruts, time
speeding up as we decline,
the bitterness we try to hide,
the sense of plenitude denied,
our bodies failing part-by-part,
but in the ageing, aching heart
the troubled yearning to be free,
to say my prison walls aren’t me . . .
The souls on Desert Island Discs
seem to have bypassed all such risks
when they complacently review
their trek to join the Happy Few
chosen to choose the tunes they’d take
to their solo isle . . .
Unless it’s a fake –
what if always and everywhere, everyone’s
a castaway, and oceans
separate us from each other, full
of animal eating animal?
Dear God, if you exist, please teach
me patience on my private beach
where yes, I’ve got your Bible to
ponder eternity’s point of view,
but also Shakespeare, confirming how
the hand-picked favourites you endow
with stardom live more fully than
those in the ranks who also ran –
even when his heroes’ fates are tragic
their pain, and poetry, are magic.
Above all, I’d appreciate
as daily I deteriorate
sight of a sail, far out at sea
but on its way to rescue me . . .
Published Snakeskin 286, July 2021
All at Sea
What does a German Bight
in Sole or the Irish Sea?
Fitzroy’s lips are sealed
while Viking helms to lee.
No word from the absent Wight –
has he slipped away to Shannon?
Do they sound the depths in common?
Are they also trying to fathom
what does a German Bight
while the first or the final light
illuminates his squadron?
Take me to the Hebrides
past Rockall, east of Bailey
where I shall glimpse the far Fair Isle
and sheltered there, or maybe
in Fisher, Forth or Fastnet
I’ll meet someone who’ll say
what does a German Bight
to ease his appetite
in Malin or Biscay.
Southeast veering southwest
four or five and maybe six
sad and/or happy endings
could complicate the mix.
Be moderate and good
but if you cannot, tack
to where cyclonic Humber
paints the grey sky black
and ponder these two questions
as you gaze on that bleak sight –
is Dogger in the secret?
What does a German Bight?
Published HQ 58, March 2022