Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
Meditations In Time Of Civil War, W.B. Yeats
There are barricades at both ends of the street.
They have been building for a couple of days –
a skip, a burned-out pick-up, rotten timber.
Someone appears at our door at dusk or dawn,
claiming to be from one side or the other,
begging, asking, demanding contributions –
that folding chair, this old garden bench,
Under an April moon the tussocky field
abounds in rabbits. Its hedgerows are sprinkled
with blackthorn blossom creamy in moonlight.
Dark green poplars border the canal
beside the field. Daylight exposes,
behind a hedge, discarded technology:
a wheel-less tractor propped up on breeze blocks.
A troika of Russians on a narrow boat
sings plangently of the motherland.
Sudden rain sweeps across the poplars.
It turns to hail on the rusted tractor;
silences the song; shreds white petals;
For Pat Rogerson
‘To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower…’
AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE, William Blake
From sixteen hundred miles away a friend,
on the southern most edge of Iberia,
with the Maghreb below the horizon,
and all of the South Atlantic beyond,
sends me a photograph of low dunes,
a cobalt sky, and flaxen sands that stretch
almost out of sight – and texts me to say
she imagines the poem I might write there.
Under the plum tree, in the sun, an old man,
reads the last paragraphs of ‘Wuthering Heights’.
‘My walk home was lengthened by a diversion
in the direction of the kirk. When beneath
its walls, I perceived decay had made progress,
even in seven months: many a window
showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates
jutted off here and there, beyond the right line
of the roof, to be gradually worked off
in coming autumn storms.’ From one of the branches
of the tree metal feeders hang with seeds.
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 green security gates
a westerly wind brings the roars of lions
from the zoo nearby.
Once Parliament was in recess – both Houses
of Hypocrisy on their long summer hols –
in the basement of an office block near
King’s Cross (where you catch the Hogwarts Express)
one Saturday morning in July,
three journalists, watched by two technicians
from GCHQ, spent three hours to save
the Government’s face, and The Guardian’s,
by destroying hard drives with drills and grinders,
circuit boards whose data – from the exiled
whistleblower Edward Snowden – was
replicated throughout the Americas.
HOME TIME
TO SEE A WORLD
HOME TIME
UNDER THE PLUM TREE
TO SEE A WORLD