Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
…though striped in part was not, in fact, a tiger,
or feline in any way, but related
to the kangaroo, so a marsupial,
with a head and muzzle a bit like a bear’s,
and the dimensions of an Alsatian dog.
Somebody named him Benjamin – a joke
probably: the last of Jacob’s sons,
and Israel’s progenitor. Some footage
survives, in black and white, of the animal
in his small, bleak cage in Hobart Zoo.
The newsreel’s pompous and slightly smarmy
voice-over,
A couple of weeks into the Great Lockdown –
robins nesting in the ivy, wild bees
in the eaves, as usual – we were
visited one day by a carrion crow,
its feathers of a blackness beyond
perfection, clinkered armour buffed bright.
It landed, the size of a large cat,
on our modest bird bath beside the lilies
beginning to burgeon. In its beak
was a portion-sized piece of baguette
or ciabatta, which it dropped in the water,
then flew off.
A young girl is reading in a white armchair.
On the crimson tablecloth is a pink rose
in a glass of water. (She has kept the bloom
from when she was weaving flowers – its petals
superfluous to her design). The book
she is reading she first read three years ago,
when she was seven: its themes – of childhood,
and alchemy, and unambiguous frontiers
only beyond which evil thrives – enclose like
the high arms of her chair, though she is tall,
‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate’. THE COMMON GOOD, Noam Chomsky
A dormouse, leaping into a boiling cauldron,
leaps out, protesting. Some others, resting,
with breathing apparatus, trustingly
at the bottom of a pot of water
arctic-cold,
On the south west coast of the peninsula,
among Mount Sinai’s arid sandstone foothills,
beneath the stoops of falcons and the gyres
of eagles, where quail and grouse migrate,
and ibex graze on sparse thorn bushes,
where Moses might have berated the Twelve Tribes,
near the temple ruins of Hathor, goddess
of fertility and a golden calf,
are the rubbled remains of turquoise mines.
The Pharaohs prized the stones bluer than skies.
Canaanite prisoners of war worked the seams –
“Did you not hear me ask Sir Thomas about the slave trade last night?…There was such a dead silence.”
MANSFIELD PARK, Jane Austen
It is fitting in certain English novels
that there should be significant absences
in Bath or London, journeys of consequence
to the colonies, and banishments
to darkest Dorset or a coastal town.
It is appropriate too that there should be
rain of whatever kind falling frequently,
forcing protagonists and antagonists
to be housebound, introspective,
Enslaved in the Gambia or Senegal,
scholars surmise, she survived the nauseous
and violent bottom line of the
Triangular Trade to be bought aged eight
as a maid for his wife by John Wheatley,
merchant and tailor of British-ruled Boston,
a known progressive in education.
She was christened ‘Phillis’ after the slave ship
that took her childhood. She was prodigious,
and was removed from domestic duties.
Tutored by his daughter, at twelve she knew
Latin,
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter – tale
of adultery and obsession –
was published in 1850. In the year
the Crimean War began, he became
the U.S. Consul in Liverpool,
a post gifted by his friend the President.
He did not like the job despite the fees
from the cargoes of cotton and molasses
hoisted ashore. Whether in a Hansom cab
home to his family in lodgings in the town,
on the steam ferry to the rented villa
in the gated park on the Wirral,
‘…sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments…’ TWEET, President Trump
In a letter to the New York Times three years
before the war, General Robert E. Lee
described slavery per se as ‘a moral
and political evil’ and, in the States,
‘a greater evil to the white man’
than the black. In 1857 Lee
had been his father-in-law’s executor.
George Custis had manumitted his slaves
on his death bed there and then but ‘no white man
was in the room’.
‘And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.’ DEUTERONOMY 12.3
‘Black deaths do not have a good press, especially when they occur in the custody of our custodians. The media leads the public to believe that our guardians can do no wrong. Racism leads them to believe that blacks can do no right. The silence of the custodial system is compounded by the silences of racism.’ DEADLY SILENCE: BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY,
FOUR SCREEN PLAYS
THE GUN EMPLACEMENT
THE GUN EMPLACEMENT
D-DAY CELEBRATIONS
THE RÜSSELSHEIM MURDERS