Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
i.m. Liz Stafford
In the crematorium I try to sit,
if I can, where I can see the lawn
sloping up towards the landscaped copse,
and, today, blue sky. I assume the dead,
even if you could, would not begrudge
this longing to be elsewhere, to be free.
You have prepared for your death: choosing
the readings, and the hymns any pragmatic
atheist might know, briefing the eulogist
with selected work and leisure anecdotes.
The Afon Alun rises from hidden springs
on the peaty Llandegla moors, and courses
through ruined mill races to this valley
of ash woodland and wych elm, hazel, oak,
of vast limestone cliffs, of redundant lead mines –
a place named for a dispute between two landlords.
Here the river waltzes, tripping over stones,
and its tawny shallows ripple and gurgle.
***
My mother and her two sisters, often
at loggerheads, rhapsodized about this place.
I raise the blind of the small dormer window.
A night of rain has filled the cast iron gutter.
A jackdaw is perched on the rim sipping.
Suddenly the bird lifts off to join
a clattering of jackdaws mobbing
a buzzard. We are two hundred feet
above the littoral – once under sea
but now mostly pastoral land,
the fields a dull gold in the autumn dawn.
The shore is a mile away – but opening
the window brings the waves’
In the gardens of the Premier’s palace
with its white Baroque facade there are
children’s swings and a red roundabout.
The linden trees the old Archduke planted
though leafless are evergreen with outbursts,
festoons of mistletoe, their berries
opalescent in the gentle wintry light.
A dozen or so mistle thrushes graze
amongst the leaf mould and peck in the branches –
but one, perched at the top of a tree, sings
its trilling, boundless, woodwind airs as if all
of the provinces were quiet and listening.
His new apartment was in a converted
eighteenth century farmhouse stranded
in a nineteenth century coastal town that,
as is the way of things by the accident
of geography, had become a prosperous port
and then declined. The back way in was along
a sloping path through an unkempt garden
then down narrow steep slate steps – slippery
that day with leaf mould. In the twilight,
two Waitrose bags-for-life in each hand,
he slipped, falling neatly on his backpack.
However,
Although elsewhere they must compete with tall men
from Senegal selling faux Gucchi bags
and middle aged Roma women hunched like
supplicants as they beg with their cardboard cups,
short, slight Bangladeshi men of all ages
have cornered the market, on the always
crowded bridge, with selfie sticks, lovers’ locks
that illegally litter the rails, and a cache
of small umbrellas for wet, cruising tourists.
South is the church of La Salute with its
whorls, bell towers,
THE ROPE SWING
THE ROPE SWING
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