Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
The war was over. My father was dead.
Judith was eight, I was four. Her father,
who survived the Camps, had come here like a ghost.
She and I played in the bushes at the flats.
Our game was hiding-from-the-Germans.
When it got too cold to play, I went
to the panto at Golders Green Hippodrome.
I cannot remember which story it was:
no doubt, Harlequin, aided by Clown,
seduced Columbine from Pierrot to Pantaloon’s
impotent rage;
‘The Path of Life’, the front covers of ‘The Haywain’ triptych by Hieronymous Bosch, circa 1500
A traveller, who looks permanently
the other way, cannot see the hanging
on a nearby hill and is about to step
on the first, cracked stone of a footbridge.
A journey is the oldest metaphor,
next to God. Christ, enthroned, transforms the lucent
angels, falling, into winged plagues.
And the next metaphor. Hell’s ceaseless,
all accommodating horrors are almost
more than image.
‘The Cure of Folly’ by Hieronymous Bosch, circa 1490
Here is a cure for madness. The patient,
stupid with pain, credulity or
the random gaze of the mad, the distraught, looks
in our direction. He is being trepanned.
The surgeon, having pierced the shaved skull,
looks modestly away. A monk with a jug
of wine or of water and a nun
with a closed book gesture to the consultant
as if to say, “Thus perish all follies”.
The left, centre and right panels of the tryptch, ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’, by Hieronymous Bosch circa 1510
Paradise flocks. Christ is blessing Adam, Eve
and, looking our way, us. We know, we
know – but a dirty trick to make evil
interesting! Lords and ladies teem: nude
armies on sensual manoeuvres.
In the nightmare, penis becomes knife, vulva
a cracked, open egg on tree-like legs –
and a man, elbow on the cut-away edge,
is unmoved.
In the Hall of Mirrors, many decades
ago, an elderly German couple
asked me to take their photo. I thought of
quoting Heinrich Heine, “’Aus meinem Grossen
Schwerzen, Mach ich die Kleinen Lieder’” –
‘Out of my great sorrows Make I little songs’ –
but weltanschauung trumped chutzpah. I took it.
Though the Sun King himself built out of town,
the myth of the metropolis persists.
The city dreams. The world journeys elsewhere
in places too remote for my atlas –
like Belzec,
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OCTOBER 4TH