Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
I am standing near the loud evangelists
by the medieval sandstone cross that marks
the centre of this erstwhile Roman camp,
Castra Deva, base for two centuries
of the Twentieth, Valeria Victrix –
streets south and west to the Dee, east to forests
and the lush plain, north to sandstone outcrops.
The Presbyterian rhetoric
of Damnation and Sweet Jesus keeps
other spectators away, gives me
a clear view of the midsummer,
pagan parade –
Though they lived for decades no more than a block
from each other in Greenwich Village – one
in Washington Square, the other Patchin Place –
there is no record they ever met,
Hopper the painter, Cummings the poet.
They would have thought that they had nothing
in common – the real, the lyrical.
But, hey, what do geniuses know?
They may have passed each other on some sidewalk,
on Sixth Avenue or Bleecker Street,
or in the subway on 9th,
As we travelled back from a London weekend
in the Quiet Zone on the afternoon express
three very young, head scarved mothers nursed
their newborns and chattered softly all the way.
At Chester they headed for the North Wales train.
Not far from the Great Orme Tramway Station,
Church Walks, Llandudno, and near St Georges,
is a three storey detached house whose ground floor
has been a synagogue for a century
and more. Lubavitch rabbis officiate.
Above the shul,
Our house, the street’s first, was built epochs ago
on Cheshire pastureland. There has been nothing
for history to note here – only births, deaths,
the occasional fire and break-in,
and marriages at the Methodist Church
almost opposite us. Empires collapsed
from within – Austro-Hungarian,
British, French, German, Ottoman, Russian,
and Soviet. Here only the seasons came,
and bed-sits, then gentrification.
Now the St Petersburg Resurrection
A Cappella Choir – founded post-Gorbachev
to sing the liturgy in concert halls –
We flew late, on the year’s busiest Friday,
to Toulouse. As we drove in the hire car
through Haut-Garonne and Midi-Pyrénées
into Gascony, its rolling hills green
with August’s growth, the sun was setting –
the burgeoning fields of sunflowers paused, bats
swooped before the car like twilit angels.
As we topped each rise we could see the glow
fade in the west above the Bay of Biscay.
We arrived in darkness at the pension.
The patronne gave us supper on the terrace –
The timetabled rumble of the Northern Line
between King’s Cross and Euston stations
moves beneath the British Library’s
‘Harry Potter: A History of Magic’.
Aficionados like my granddaughter
are oblivious, focused on the wonder
of ancient texts and modern images,
the alchemy of ink, pigments, alphabets
transformed into art. Between trains there is
the clip-clopping of Centaur’s hooves.
We walk to King’s Cross to see Platform
9¾. People are queuing
to take selfies beneath the sign attached
to the wall next to The Harry Potter shop.
A DEATH IN GASCONY
AT CHESTER CROSS
A NEW YORK TALE
LEVITICUS
A NEW YORK TALE