Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Fifty years ago the garden of what is now
our house was five times its present size –
a garden that had been a field, and a heath.
A builder turned an orchard, borders
and most of a lawn into three modern
terraced houses and eight lock-up garages.
Part of what remained of the lawn was a dump.
Occasionally odd things still turn up –
like bits clinker, rusted iron, and, today,
a small piece of coal, of anthracite,
‘Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty.’
COMPOSED ON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPTEMBER 3, 1802
William Wordsworth
After their slow revolve on the London Eye,
the kingdom’s power nexus spread beneath them –
palaces, churches, offices, parade grounds –
many tourists walk across the bridge.
Today industrial scale ‘Find The Lady’
awaits them: six identical sets of mats,
Not the Michelin two star French restaurant
in the Kentish High Weald, nor the West Coast
jazz saxophonist who sessioned with Brubeck,
but the British woodland wild flower, or weed.
There are two definitions of ‘weed’ –
the official: a wild plant growing
where it is not wanted; and mine: a plant
whose existence is not dependent,
in any way, on the whim of humankind.
Herb Robert – aka Red Robin –
is a wild and elegant geranium,
Bought for the Coronation, our first TV
had a nine inch screen. It stood in a corner
of the front room. My grandmother, who
had outlived two husbands, two World Wars,
and once had tea with Buffalo Bill,
thought that those appearing on ‘the box’
could see those watching, so was discerning
about whom she chose to watch, and when.
She particularly liked ‘What’s My Line?’, an import
from America, in which a panel
of four TV ‘personalities’
For Evie Chapman
She fetches me a mermaid’s purse she has found
among the seaweed where the sand
meets the mound of pebbles the waves have built
and rebuilt over the centuries.
The small black pouch, with tendrils like broken straps
and firm as dried leather, is an empty
egg case, from which a shark or a ray hatched
on the seabed, probably between here
and Ireland. Tides detached and chance brought
this empty womb,
‘…mourning and sorrow shall end,
when I return to Jerusalem…’
Mediaeval Jewish Prayer
‘We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.’
Mahmoud Darwish
On a land mass that is the size of landlocked
Rutland, the smallest county in England,
Gaza, the Earth’s third most populated
polity, has two small rivers and a hill.
Its city, four thousand years ago,
was the site of a Pharaonic fortress.
CELEBRITY
CELEBRITY
THE NETHER PORTAL
THE MERMAID'S PURSE
IN PRAISE OF HERB ROBERT