Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Low water now and the motley of crabbers
is crammed towards the end of the pier,
leaving space for a merry metaphor
of our times, Uncle Tacko’s Flea Circus,
with its innuendo and innocence,
its knowingness and charm, its vaudeville
of outrageous unnuanced half-truths,
its charivari of anachronisms.
The Bulkeley Hotel on the front (once
a private mansion of many rooms)
and the stone terrace of late Georgian
town houses in this holiday resort
speak of its erstwhile strategic value.
Along the path beside the forestry road,
through the plantation of pine and larch
planted as saplings to keep the dunes in check,
there is a first sighting of the island
with its mediaeval saint’s ruined chapel,
between the trees and across a sandy beach.
Out of sight is a pebbly strand exposed
except at the highest tides: an impromptu
causeway – for holiday makers now;
once, for lovers to the chapel with its
rumours of martyred blessings;
The harbour breakwater built from limestone blocks
was the longest that the Admiralty
had commissioned. How important Ireland seemed!
On the Country Park lake sown with lilies
an old man sails his battleship. The lake
was a man-made pond that served the brickworks,
built to make the harbour buildings that are dressed
in the limestone quarried from the crags
beside which visitors park their cars.
A grass path leads through heather and gorse
down to low cliffs above the pebble shore.
Beside the first angle in the zigzag steps
that descend steeply to the lighthouse –
where I have stopped to rest lungs and knees
and vow again this will be the last –
unique to this place on our planet
a fleawort is growing, its flowerheads
like miniature sun flowers. A red beaked chough
calls from the heathland above – pyrrhocorax,
pyrrhocorax. I can see Ireland from here –
the hills and mountains south of Dublin –
On the coast road across the straits the blue flash
of an ambulance appears, then disappears
behind a stand of trees and a barn.
The mainland late morning is so pellucid
one might almost count the dry stones in the walls
that mark the fields, climb past the sparse woods
and delineate the cropped moorlands
from the mountain tops. A cannon thud
starts the regatta of red sailed dinghies.
They scud and tack on the silvery straits,
their spinnakers burgeoning vainly.
Yesterday was New Year’s Eve and the fountain
was drained to prevent too much merriment.
So the bronze, nude young ladies disport themselves
in dry, cold air. The equestrian statue
of Maria Theresa, mother
of sixteen, and the last of the Holy
Roman Empresses appears unamused,
though whether by the municipality’s
actions or the girls’ appears unclear.
Last month’s heavy snow remains in small,
sheltered drifts behind occasional trees.
What was an Hungarian aristocrat’s
formal palace garden in the French style
has become –
SOUTH STACK, HOLYHEAD ISLAND
THE PIER, BEAUMARIS
THE RABBI AND THE EMPEROR
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THE PIER, BEAUMARIS