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Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
@stevewh16944270
7:08 AM 1st November 2024
arts

Poem Of The Week: Mexico 70 By Ralph Dartford

 
Mexico 70

There were rumours
of decimalization
at Manor House Junior school.

It was the summer of 1970,
of Esso World Cup coins –
free with a tenner of four star.

My Dad didn’t own a car.

My best friend's name was Zolly.
He had a Rediffusion colour TV.
A yelping dog called Bugsy,
his soft bosomed mum made me shy.

And Rosa taught me to dance
and swallow a pickled herring.
She wore her world in possibilities.
Just like Pele's final pass.


Eso y más – Joan Sebastian


You can smell the future in Ralph Dartford’s refreshingly sincere poem. More than a backward glance to a time that, especially male, baby boomers’ amongst us will recognise, ‘Mexico 70’ is a vision suffused with hope: the hoard of possibilities that the figure of Rosa bears betokens the kind of opportunity that an unknown future might yield, from the ingenuously hopeful perspective of youth.

The inventory of locators – whose presence sets the scene with animated, childlike gusto – places the narrator in the early summer of 1970, just prior to the Mexico World Cup…the one of Moore’s superb tackle, Banks’ save, Pelé's burgeoning magnificence. And in amongst the schoolboy’s excited anticipation – buoyed on a crest of rumour, Rediffusion Colour tellys and Esso cup coins – we find juvenile bashfulness, yelping dogs and car-less dads as the boy whirls off into the temporal distance in a bewildering haze of sensory experience that reeks, above all, of authenticity.

Mexican singer/ songwriter, Joan Sebastian’s, beautiful and plaintive love song, Eso y más, whose presence here is a testament both to Dartford’s aesthetic sense, and to his apprehension of the unbreakable emotional association between certain pieces of music and moments in memory, is a profoundly fitting backdrop to an elegy for a time of innocence.



'Mexico 70' is taken from Ralph Dartford's forthcoming collection House Anthems published by Valley Press (2024), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

More information here.

Ralph Dartford will be appearing at the Todmorden Book Festival on the 15th November and the Louder than Words Festival, Manchester (with Gary Clark) on the 17th November.