4.15pm
by David Cain
A gentleman began to shout into the back garden
It wasn’t in the days when we had mobile phones.
He asked us if we could telephone his mum and let her know
that he was okay.
He was very pale, very upset.
I said, ‘Of course you can, of course you can’
After that, there was a succession of people with phone numbers,
which we rang.
From Truth Street. Reproduced with kind permission of Smokestack Books.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2019
Truth Street
David Cain
About David Cain
David Cain (b. 1972, Luton) found his interests in poetry, social history and sporting history being drawn together, when a poem of his about the agony of watching Luton Town lose at Wembley was read on national radio, and he was invited by the club to contribute a regular poem to the match-day programme. His debut collection, Truth Street, explores a darker part of the same territory; published to mark the 30th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, it is a collage of eyewitness statements from the second inquest in 2014.
‘There was a real humanity and indeed beauty in those words’, writes Cain, who modelled his process on Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust. ‘I wanted to try and rescue those lines from all the fragile jargon, and also the headline news verdicts.’ Truth Street was first performed in its entirety at the Utter Lutonia festival, in 2017.
