Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Beneath the rows of limes edging to yellow,
the air, tangible with precipitation,
appears almost emerald, a sea green.
In the border beside the high wall, which marks
the tended gardens from the unkempt woods,
there are blooms still. A bee gathers nectar –
and the black, turned earth ripples slowly
as a mole forages in the underworld.
***
Beyond ruined Troy, and north of Paradise
abandoned, from where our words began,
The fox came to his patio his first night
at the absurdly named Augustus Gardens.
The beginnings of emphysema –
slight punishment for nearly sixty years
of cigarettes – had forced the exchange
of a fifth floor city centre apartment,
with a view of the quays, for a ground floor
suburban residential home ensuite,
and the abandonment of decades of vice
with Passing Cloud, Lucky Strike and Gitanes.
He had been weary but sleepless;
‘…a very stable genius…’
DONALD J. TRUMP, Tweet 6.1.18.
One of the prints hanging in my grandmother’s
bedroom was Waterhouse’s ‘Echo
and Narcissus’. In a bosky, rather
English landscape, Narcissus and Echo –
before he became a flower and she a sound –
lie and sit respectively: she entranced with him,
and he with himself in the slow brook.
As a boy I thought it a picture
of a good looking chap and a pretty girl
with water and lilies,
I watched the TV parade of affluent
(and mostly public school) chancers, liars,
fantasists, hypocrites, law-breakers
vie to top each other’s warmed-up clichés
and self-serving platitudes. The social
and economic future dystopia most
seemed to desire would, they assured us,
bring out the British best in all of us,
just like the Blitz. I thought of bomb-razed
building lots in major cities still empty –
and a tale a cabby told me years ago,
taxiing me from the railway station.
Though we are not quite half way through November
four poppies are blooming in the front garden.
Papaver orientale: voluptuous,
shell-pink; stamens a dark heliotrope;
a cultivar by Cedric Morris, artist
and plantsman, who searched Suffolk’s hedgerows and fields
for common poppies with softer colours –
that simple weed the usual scoundrels
have made a shibboleth of belonging.
A night of wind and rain has downed all but one
in the narrow border, where sedum,
This October’s high water has almost reached
the top of the sea wall, its lapping
silenced by two oafish nabobs on jet skis –
iconoclasts shattering the seascape
of the Straits. Rain clouds along the mainland
are lifting, greyness lightening, slowly
becoming white – revealing early Autumn’s
gradual alchemy. Two porpoises
surface briefly out in the deepest channel,
swimming, in the remnants of the Gulf Stream,
from Cardigan Bay to Liverpool Bay.
As the tide drains northwards over Lavan Sands
from the unexpected south a cold breeze blows.
POPPIES
APPLES AT ERDDIG: A GLIMPSE OF AVALON
ORGANISED CRIMES
APPLES AT ERDDIG: A GLIMPSE OF AVALON
OCTOBER 4TH