Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
‘He beheld the city, and wept over it.’ Luke 19.41
We went up Mount Vesuvius by bus,
and stood on the rim of the crater
watching gases emerge from fissures.
We bought two bottles – a red and a white –
of the local wine, Lachryma Christi,
for a fellow atheist from the gift shop.
As we walked back down the fertile slopes – the sea
before us, hazy, tranquil – we heard
a cuckoo. All of Campania seemed stilled –
All seemed particularly dystopian
as I walked out one morning down the high street,
towards MacDonald’s and KFC,
Café Nero, Costa and Starbucks,
boarded-up shops and charity shops,
and two young men selling the Big Issue.
Maybe it was the noise: the traffic’s grind,
an elderly busker’s cacophonous chords,
the fire engine howling – outside the KFC!
I approached the forming crowd, and overheard,
from customers smelling of smoke, rumours:
that one of the Kentucky Colonel’s
deep fat fryers had exploded into flame,
The heavy shower drilled on the frosted glass.
We sheltered under one of the high street’s
open arcades with sloping glazed-roofs –
a Victorian refinement to the resort:
shopping sheltered from seaside weathers.
We were, by chance, in front of Poundland:
one window displayed Pepsi Max, the other
Cadbury’s Highlights, both cut-price sugar.
The Bank Holiday crowd sheltering with us
seemed disproportionately stricken, impaired,
overwhelmingly loud or utterly
silent, with austerity’s complexion.
As the rain began to clear a man,
After dark, down the steep lanes of the Great Orme –
a two mile long limestone promontory,
named by Norsemen for a dragon’s head –
past the synagogue and the funicular,
avoiding the temptations of the Pier,
into the lamp-lit, locked-down thoroughfare,
came the Kashmiri billy goats, white as snow,
as clouds, as sea spume. Runaways or outcasts
from a flock imported for their wool,
occasional mascots for the Royal Welsh,
those noisome foragers with their prophets’ beards
and trophy horns capered to the churchyard
and its privet hedges,
Via Del Corso, Rome, March 2020.
The boutiques had been closed by decree, even
Calvin Klein Underwear and Brooks Brothers.
The only pedestrians were the Pope,
in his white robes, and his bodyguard,
in bulging suits – on a pilgrimage
to the ancient church of San Marcello
set back from the street. Beneath a crucifix,
used to assuage a 15th century plague,
Pope Francis prayed to God to stop the virus.
The street, in Roman times, was Via Lata –
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
Meditations In Time Of Civil War, W.B. Yeats
There are barricades at both ends of the street.
They have been building for a couple of days –
a skip, a burned-out pick-up, rotten timber.
Someone appears at our door at dusk or dawn,
claiming to be from one side or the other,
begging, asking, demanding contributions –
that folding chair, this old garden bench,
Under an April moon the tussocky field
abounds in rabbits. Its hedgerows are sprinkled
with blackthorn blossom creamy in moonlight.
Dark green poplars border the canal
beside the field. Daylight exposes,
behind a hedge, discarded technology:
a wheel-less tractor propped up on breeze blocks.
A troika of Russians on a narrow boat
sings plangently of the motherland.
Sudden rain sweeps across the poplars.
It turns to hail on the rusted tractor;
silences the song; shreds white petals;
For Pat Rogerson
‘To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower…’
AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE, William Blake
From sixteen hundred miles away a friend,
on the southern most edge of Iberia,
with the Maghreb below the horizon,
and all of the South Atlantic beyond,
sends me a photograph of low dunes,
a cobalt sky, and flaxen sands that stretch
almost out of sight – and texts me to say
she imagines the poem I might write there.
Under the plum tree, in the sun, an old man,
reads the last paragraphs of ‘Wuthering Heights’.
‘My walk home was lengthened by a diversion
in the direction of the kirk. When beneath
its walls, I perceived decay had made progress,
even in seven months: many a window
showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates
jutted off here and there, beyond the right line
of the roof, to be gradually worked off
in coming autumn storms.’ From one of the branches
of the tree metal feeders hang with seeds.
The ditches along Duttons Lane have been full
much of March – because February-fill-dyke
was mostly dry, almost Spring for days.
The glinting water is dark as black tea,
brown as bitter beer. Along Acres Lane
the hawthorn hedgerows are beginning to green.
We park as near the school as we can.
The leafy lane is overflowing with song.
As we walk through the green security gates
a westerly wind brings the roars of lions
from the zoo nearby.
DRIVING INTO THE DARK
DRIVING INTO THE DARK
WHAT THE HEART REMEMBERS
CIRCUS
THE CLARINET