Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
We met on the first working day of the week;
married, five years later, on a Saturday;
and sailed for Ireland on the Sunday.
This Monday marks fifty two years of mostly
wedded bliss; occasional toilsome woe;
loving; giving; hard work; grace – a pack of cards
without, for the most part, the jangling jokers.
Out of the grassy plains, along the Silk Road
from Samarkand, came the colours of
anarchy, of power and passion; came
the four corners of the world,
As goldfinches begin to sing and sparrows
chirp in polyphony, and swallows,
martins, swifts hunt with grace, the palette
of attenuated gold, amber, rose
is layered along the sea’s horizon
and the sun becomes a perfect disk
in the filtering, vermilion haze.
Anonymous con trails criss-cross the compass.
A lone swimmer crawls across the bay.
The evening star, sudden as a lamp, glints
in the afterglow. A wispy rain cloud forms
and drifts away like smoke.
Five men, in orangey yellow overalls,
using long handled rollers are painting
the paddling pool – which is the size of four
tennis courts – that blue which only colour charts
show or astronauts will see. Beyond
is the limestone headland with rock-roses
amongst the scrub and fulmars nesting.
Far out to sea is a gathering,
stately and serried, of white, wind turbines.
I think of David Hockney’s iconic pools,
and of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’ –
hybrids of sculpture and paint –
Paris, 1920
The treaty was signed in the Exhibition Room,
overseen by Marie Antoinette’s
dinner service. Like porcelain owls’ eyes,
they were witnesses of the delegates’ harsh
geometry, the fretwork jigsaw of desk
wallahs – Ottoman Mesopotamia
become modern Syria and Iraq.
Gertrude Bell was one of the delegates:
daughter of a philanthropic iron master;
Oxford graduate like T.E. Lawrence;
cartographer, mountaineer, linguist;
archaeologist, administrator,
public servant;
Dreamily among the leaves, uneasily,
in my age, up a shining ladder
I am plucking plums – discarding those
rotten, prune-like encrusted with sugar,
or pecked at by passing tits and dunnocks.
I pass the whole, ripe ones down carefully
to my granddaughter, who holds her bowl
high as she can. You look on, pleased for us both
and concerned. Later you will place the blushed plums
in a wide shallow dish of the deepest red
adorned with foliage –
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;
HESPERIDES
OF PLUMS AND FIGS
STUDIES IN BLUE: PADDLING POOL, LLANDUDNO
STUDIES IN BLUE: PADDLING POOL, LLANDUDNO
GERTRUDE BELL AND THE TREATY OF SÈVRES