Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Once Parliament was in recess – both Houses
of Hypocrisy on their long summer hols –
in the basement of an office block near
King’s Cross (where you catch the Hogwarts Express)
one Saturday morning in July,
three journalists, watched by two technicians
from GCHQ, spent three hours to save
the Government’s face, and The Guardian’s,
by destroying hard drives with drills and grinders,
circuit boards whose data – from the exiled
whistleblower Edward Snowden – was
replicated throughout the Americas.
The summer LA hosted the Olympics –
the year the UK miner’s strike began,
and comrades became enemies, and things sure
fell irredeemably apart – we went
on a four day tour of mostly ancient Greece:
Corinth Canal; the amphitheatre
at Epidaurus; Nafplio’s converted
mosque; the Lion Gate at Mycenae;
Olympia’s temples; Delphi’s omphalos.
Swallows had made their mud nests in the eaves
of the three concrete hotels we stayed at,
the birds’ tender flights twittering omens
for travellers who were,
From the west front of this Restoration house –
built a century before the demand
for coal brought, in hearing of the brocaded
drawing room, the daily clank and hiss
of the pit head winding gear and the pumps
keeping the seams dry, and, in direct
line of sight of the spacious steps, the slagheap’s
incremental growth on land previously
considered worthless so not purchased –
was a view, across the shallow valley
and extensive pasture land, of benign hills.
for Ashen Venema
Walking back to the house from the composter
one late afternoon in early autumn
I looked up, and stopped. There was a roseate,
mackerel sky moving from North East Wales
over the Cheshire Plain towards the Pennines,
and drifting above me. Whatever weather
it presaged, it was ordinarily
lovely, a mundane epiphany.
At the kitchen door I turned and there
was a raven on the paving where I had been,
The front page of Brexit Day’s Forgers’ Gazette
was a photo of the White Cliffs of Dover
with ‘A NEW DAWN FOR BRITAIN’ superimposed
on the blue sky above – and the sun, by chance,
highlighting the erosion of the chalk,
ephemeral and flaky as metaphor.
***
After the war, when things were in short supply,
and we had drawing, occasionally,
I drew a layered landscape with wax crayons:
blue sky with bird and cloud,
On one of the corners of St Stephen’s square
is a café, the California
Coffee Company, with cheery slogans,
in English, extolling the benefits
of the bean. A window seat gives a view,
across the square, of the west entrance
to the basilica of Szent Istvan,
its portico embossed in gold with
‘Ego Sum Veritas et Vita’.
Our backs to the basilica we walk
down Zyrini Street towards the Danube,
Buda rising high on its western slopes.
There is a young woman with a wooden hoop
almost as big as herself – and a small dog
not much bigger than her head – who performs
circus tricks, where Terez Boulevard meets
Andrassy Avenue – named for an Empress
and a Count before old Europe fell apart.
As the three lanes idle at red and the dog
waits on the kerb the girl and the hoop
become an astrolabe, a gyroscope
within the interstices of traffic lights.
When she stills and bows to the varied windscreens
the dog leaps to her shoulder and together –
With her new camera, a Christmas present,
and with the intuitive surety,
at not quite nine, of how to make a picture,
she makes a sunlit panorama of Pest
from the Fisherman’s Bastion in Buda –
a Magyar edifice of walls and towers
built in the nineteen hundreds to celebrate
the permanence of the Habsburg Empire.
In a wall’s shadow she shows me the screen,
and what she has angled by chance. I note
the parliament building, the Great Synagogue,
Formerly Buda’s town hall, courthouse, prison
and school, newly refurbished throughout
and re-named The House of Wisdom, it is now
bookshop, café, bistro, conference centre
and an esoteric museum –
in an eclectic city of museums
ranging from Marzipan through to Murder.
The refurbishment finally repaired
all the damage done by stray Red Army
artillery shells, and uncovered stonework –
exhibited behind glass now – not seen
since the Ottoman Empire ruled Hungary.
Eschewing the conundrum of hailing a cab –
On a snowy January Saturday
we were delayed for six hours or so
at Ferenc Liszt airport, Budapest.
Except for the purchase of a Pick sausage
and a small box of Gerbeaud chocolates
in Heinemann Travel Value/Duty Free
we spent our time in the Leroy Bistro
with its international fast food cuisine
from nigiri sushi to Wiener Schnitzel.
From my seat in the bistro I could see
continually an advert, a fifteen
by forty feet video with,
THE COLSTON BUN
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
A SORT OF EDEN
A SORT OF EDEN
PHILLIS WHEATLEY: 1753-1784