About Anne Berkeley:

Anne Berkeley lives near Cambridge UK in a village where there is a butcher, baker, candlestick seller, cobbler, greengrocer, itinerant fishmonger, two cafés, two bookies, three hairdressers, four beauty salons, five Asian restaurants and an independent bookshop. She is a member of the poetry group Joy of Six, and assists Frank Dullaghan at Seam magazine. She won 1st prize in the Blackwells/TLS Competition (2000) and 3rd prize in the 2004 Arvon competition. She was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2004. Her pamphlet The buoyancy aid and other poems was published by Flarestack. A selection of her work appeared in Oxford Poets 2002 (Carcanet). She edited Rebecca Elson's posthumous collection of poetry A Responsibility to Awe (Carcanet, 2001). Her collection The Men from Praga is due from Salt Publishing in autumn 2008.

Quelle: poetry p f

Brian in the All-Night Café

He's on his second cup, and does it again:
tears carefully apart with both hands,
little finger flicking the shooshing cascade.
He stares as if his whole life centred
on this ritual of sugaring,
stirs it into circles that draw him down and down.

While he's drinking his coffee, he will think
of his wife's habit of clearing her throat before speaking,
that little huh-huh he wants to stop,
but it's been too long now – he's hardly aware
of when it started, it was suddenly always there
announcing the least mention of dinner, of rain.

He has another packet of sugar, turning and tapping it,
forefinger and thumb turning and tapping.

And it's been so long, he can hardly
mention it now, and even if he did,
she wouldn't be able to stop, so
why make two of them unhappy?

Turning and tapping the unopened
sachet of brown sugar on the yellow formica.

But perhaps he should say something now
so she knows to get out of his way
one day when it will become
unbearable, as it nearly has. And he reaches
for the slopped cup's thick white handle.

first published in Smiths Knoll no. 25, 2001