Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
For Steve Crewe
A journalist friend of mine in Jakarta
sends me articles online, which, in turn,
I share on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter,
making me seem, after Francis Bacon –
who was purported to have read every
book ever written – the most erudite man
in Europe: an article, for example,
explaining that Plato was right when he claimed
the world is made of cubes, or another
about cougars in Yellowstone Park
occasionally dying from the plague.
The ditches along Duttons Lane have been full
much of March – because February-fill-dyke
was mostly dry, almost Spring for days.
The glinting water is dark as black tea,
brown as bitter beer. Along Acres Lane
the hawthorn hedgerows are beginning to green.
We park as near the school as we can.
The leafy lane is overflowing with song.
As we walk through the security gates
to join the others waiting – a social mix,
and mainly white –
Where the primary school and the houses end
are hawthorn hedges and occasional oaks
on either side of the lane. From the school gates
the leafless trees are an arching, tangled
fretwork – closer each twig is proud, discrete,
vital, sentient. A sudden gust of wind,
or a lightning blow, in one oak tree’s
early growth snapped off a branch, and left an arm
with a claw like a beak. Shut behind the gates
the gradground children have no chance at all
to imagine the stub of a branch a bird,
The English education system is made
to inculcate compliance – through failure –
with the nation’s stereotyping.
It remains still a work in progress.
For nearly seventy years most learners,
unless they passed an exam at eleven,
would stay in the same council school from four
to twelve, then thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
When I was seven I attended one
of the last such schools, at the end of our road.
There were two entrances with GIRLS & INFANTS
and BOYS carved in the sandstone lintels,
for Elise Oliver
If, when I grow even older than I am
now and were, perhaps, too old to make poems,
I would become a sower of wildflowers.
Each year, I would begin with the Narrows,
an ancient path where our street ends –
where children are walked to school, commuters
walk to work, and revellers sway home
caterwauling. Each spring and summer
in the unkempt verges there would be the sight
and scent of Bird’s-foot Trefoil,
Coming soon: the first post in this new section of the website – OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS – will appear towards the end of April 2021. The idea for the new section was inspired by A. P. Wavell’s OTHER MEN’S FLOWERS [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/oct/01/featuresreviews.guardianreview5].
ECO-WARRIOR
THE BROKEN BRANCH
A CHORUS OF ZITHERS
HOME TIME
IN PRAISE OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB