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SIMON:Not all of my poems are written from personal experience, but this one absol0utely is.

SIMON:This is the old harmonium. So what you do is, you pump that. It just makes a really lovely, sort of church-y noise.

SIMON:Even though this poem is called "Harmonium" and on the surface it seems to be about a harmonium, this harmonium, the actual musical instrument becomes an extended metaphor. It's a poem about memories, and remembering my time in the church choir, and the fact that my dad was in the church choir as well. Its relevance is to do with my relationship with my dad.

SIMON:Harmonium. The Farrand Chapelette was gathering dust in the shadowy porch of Marsden Church. It was due to be bundled off to the skip, or was mine for a song if I wanted it. Sunlight through stained glass, which day to day could beatify saints and raise the dead, had aged the harmonium's softwood case, and yellowed the fingernails of its keys. And one of its notes had lost its tone, and holes were worn in both the treadles where the organist's feet, in grey woollen socks, and leather-soled shoes had pedalled and pedalled. But its hummed harmonics still struck a chord, for a hundred years that organ had stood by the choristers’ stalls where father and son, each in their time, had opened their throats and gilded finches like high notes - had streamed out. Through his own blue cloud of tobacco smog, with smoker's fingers and dottled thumbs, he comes to help me cart it away. And we carry it flat, laid on its back. And he, being him, can't help but say, that the next box I'll shoulder through this nave will bear the freight of his own dead weight. And I, being me, then mouth in reply some shallow or sorry phrase or word too starved of breath to make itself heard.

SIMON:One technique that's at work in the poem is that I draw on lots of images of beauty, I suppose. The gilded finches, these golden birds, I invoke the saints. The stain-glass window, the sun coming through… And also there's something comical as well about moments in the poem about the organist pedalling away, and me and my dad must look like two furniture removes there going down in the nave. And I think what I'm doing in the poem is setting up this quite morbid and dark remark that my dad's going to make towards the end of the poem, so I'm just, I'm just doing all that to highlight the contrast.

SIMON:He, being him, can't help but say that the next box I'll shoulder through this nave, will bear the freight of his own dead weight. And I, being me, then mouth in reply some shallow or sorry phrase or word too starved of breath to make itself heard.

SIMON:It's got an elegiac, commemorative feel to it. Which I suppose is odd in some ways because my dad's very much alive and kicking. He's a very larger than life character, my dad. I think, in some ways, my dad in the poem is quite heroic, for being able to say what's on his mind, but he says that as a sort of challenge to me, as well, and I can't respond. You know, I'm very sort of weedy and breathless. I think I used the word "shallow". So in the end, I think it's about me and my inability to say the necessary thing. In fact, my response is the poem.