Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
And suddenly there, through the high sash window,
is a rainbow – lit by the westward sun –
from behind the church and over the park’s
leafless, lichened trees to the gated, faith school.
This is the season of illusion and sleight
of hand; the season of the braying bluster
of blinkered donkeys spooked by mayhem
in a cathedral city; the season
of the wet slap of the laundering of money
on the banks of the gun metal Thames;
The simple memorial of slate and part
of a propeller was relocated
from the mountainous North Stack, where the plane crashed,
a mile to sea level in the Holyhead
Breakwater Country Park. The US
B24 Liberator bomber
was based at Valley ten miles away.
Returning from a radar jamming raid
over Northern France in very bad weather
the B24 overflew and, making
a re-approaching circuit, ran out of fuel.
Believing the aircraft was over land
the pilot ordered the eight non-commissioned
crew members to bail out.
Our felucca tacked across the river Nile
to Aswan from Kitchener’s Island –
with its well watered botanical gardens
and its straight boulevards of tall palm trees –
gifted to Lord Kitchener of Khartoum,
pre Great War, as Egypt’s Consul-General.
As we approached the east bank, out of nowhere
it seemed, a boy appeared along side us
in a small zinc bath paddling with his hands
and singing, “‘Michael, row the boat ashore!
Hallelujah!’” – the old slave song learned then turned,
In more civilised days we might have appeared
on Wilfred Pickles’ radio show
‘Have A Go!’ and when he asked our age
and we told him he would say, ‘Seventy five,
ladies and gentlemen!’ and they would applaud,
and, before he asked ‘What’s on the table, Mable?’
and instructed ‘Give them the money, Barney!’,
he would ask how long we had been married –
more applause – and then he would ask us,
in his warm, BBC Yorkshire voice,
for the secret of our years of wedded bliss.
for Glyn Smith
When the meticulously landscaped gardens
were left to hazard, during the estate’s
long, reclusive neglect, some of the trees
in the two avenues either side
of the wide ornamental canal – whose
perspective frames the classical proportions
of the house – began to grow together
like errant, statuesque teeth. A couple
have been extracted to save the rest.
… Limes are almost indestructible – felled trunks
will sprout.
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 –
NOW WE ARE SEVENTY FIVE
NOW WE ARE SEVENTY FIVE
A TOKEN OF A COVENANT: MARCH 16TH 2018
THE OLD LIME TREES AT ERDDIG
NOW WE ARE SEVENTY FIVE