Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Today, entering the house from the garden,
I turned, involuntarily, to look back,
but saw nothing more than what is always there,
small rooms of eclectic evergreens – olive,
camellia, rhododendron, bay –
and, for some reason, I thought of my father
dead for almost as long as I have lived.
I have shuffled what I know of him
like a pack of cards in a game of patience
for a lifetime – would he approve, be proud,
that twenty six year old secular Jew
from North West London,
A flock of goosanders fishes in the Straits,
as ubiquitous oyster catchers whistle
on the shore. In the early evening
the air about our balcony throngs
with birds – swallows whispering, swifts screeching,
two ring-necked doves cooing in the clematis,
and a small flock of sparrows chattering
below – as the last sun shades the mountains
opposite. By night three fishermen
make their profaning way along the pier
with swaying torches. The seeming darkness
above the peaks is thronged with unnamed stars
we cannot see,
In what is now the back garden of a house –
a between-the-wars semi – in Mold, a town
in North East Wales, a gang of labourers,
one hundred and seventy years ago,
hired to demolish a burial mound –
known as Bryn yr Ellyllon, Goblin’s Hill –
uncovered what seemed to be small sheets of brass
on a small, fragmentary skeleton.
Cleaned, fitted together, a local scholar
declared them a Bronze Age cape of gold,
perhaps made to fit a royal child.
The plaque has been placed high onto the front wall
of a terraced house in the street next to ours –
and is, in effect, a terracotta tile,
roughly a foot-and-a half by a foot,
with a raised border, and lettering
and numerals probably executed
by a gravestone mason, who maybe lived there.
The date inscribed is 1872 –
the words, first in English and then in Welsh,
‘Blessed are the meek. Matthew V.v’.
When the railways came in the 1850s
bringing the London-Holyhead line,
Wild bees have occupied the swifts’ nesting box
sparrows colonised last spring and summer.
The sun casts fleeting, waltzing shadows
on the white walls of the house – males and queens
at their love-making. A carrion crow
with a chunk of bread in its machined beak
alights on the rim of the bird bath
as if from some dark play. It dunks the bread.
Over in the west the sky is ivory
through a break in the clouds. A box, and a bath,
Fifty years ago the garden of what is now
our house was five times its present size –
a garden that had been a field, and a heath.
A builder turned an orchard, borders
and most of a lawn into three modern
terraced houses and eight lock-up garages.
Part of what remained of the lawn was a dump.
Occasionally odd things still turn up –
like bits clinker, rusted iron, and, today,
a small piece of coal, of anthracite,
A SORT OF KADDISH
A SORT OF KADDISH
THE MOLD CAPE
A SORT OF KADDISH
FROM A BALCONY