Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Impelled by Wall Street and the Pentagon,
and the vanity of Presidents,
the astronauts had seemed to sail beyond
experience – but we TV millions watched
live ‘Old Glory’ stiffen above us;
heard Nixon speak; saw Aldrin at attention.
Meanwhile, oblivious, the Vietcong
were waiting patiently in their tunnels.
***
The day of the moon landing we walked up
Bidston Hill to the Observatory,
where my great grandfather – who had captained
coffin ships to Boston –
Sleepless I opened the slats of the bathroom’s
white Venetian blind expecting darkness
but the eastern sky over our neighbours’ roofs
was already pale, and the Morning Star glowed
gilded, and I suddenly remembered
being in the yard of an old coaching inn,
standing by a sandstone horse trough still used
for hunts, its water frozen so deeply
I could only crack the surface with my fist.
Behind the inn farmland – ploughed, hoar frosted,
horse trampled – stretched unfenced over a rise.
I watched the TV parade of affluent
(and mostly public school) chancers, liars,
fantasists, hypocrites, law-breakers
vie to top each other’s warmed-up clichés
and self-serving platitudes. The social
and economic future dystopia most
seemed to desire would, they assured us,
bring out the British best in all of us,
just like the Blitz. I thought of bomb-razed
building lots in major cities still empty,
and a tale a cabby told me years ago,
taxiing me from the railway station.
We talked of those we had worked with that day,
and those with whom we would work again.
We passed, as always, so many walking,
as we left Chiawelo in Soweto.
We were returning to New Redruth,
where the Cornish tin miners were exiled
to grow the gold reefs and shine the diamonds.
We joined the steady rush hour traffic
on the N12 South. Passing the Gleneagles
shopping mall, I saw, on the hard shoulder
of the opposite carriageway, a man,
From Llandwyn Beach we watch – safely, distantly –
rain clouds, across the bay and the beginnings
of the Irish Sea, obscure the coast
and then the three mountain peaks, one by one,
of the Ll?n Peninsula. We hear thunder
trundle on the high ground and rumble
in the valleys, and see lightning fork,
furnace yellow, in the ash grey clouds.
Watching a storm at such a calm remove
is like two scholars in faux panama hats
watching the past,
For Kira Somach
I have regular readers – some I have known
for years, others I will never meet –
on every continent except
Antarctica: a wonder not a boast!
One, an actual friend from long ago,
tells me, via email, that she often reads
some of my poems over the phone
to her father – she in Missouri,
he in Florida: to remind them
of his years working in England,
and her years here becoming a woman.
Near one corner of the British Museum’s
Great Court – the largest, roofed, public square
in Europe – the Lion reclines on a plinth.
It was stolen, a couple of years
after the Crimean War, from a ruined
tomb in Turkey. Its limestone body
had once been adorned with marble, its empty
eye sockets with glass to glint in sunlight
and glow in moonlight. Whether because
its pockmarked flanks seem sad or its eyeless face
appears benign visitors are keen to pose
for photos with the beast as backdrop.
We drove towards the River Dee – down walled lanes
with rhododendrons festooning the sandstone,
their attic blooms in imperial colours –
to visit a doughty friend convalescing,
from two knee replacements, in Seize The Day,
a recently opened upmarket care home.
As we turned into the drive, I realised
that this, long before rebuilding, was where
my mother had first trained to be a nurse –
sixteen, with her friend, Belle. They cared for children
with TB from the Liverpool slums.
i.m. Samuel Selzer
He was never sure if it had been a joke
when the police arrested him for being,
he learned later, Jack the Ripper,
even though the last murder had been
a dozen years before, and he himself
had been eight and far away – or just
a lesson for yet another alien
wandering Whitechapel as if he had
a right to be lost in a pea souper.
Fresh from the Hamburg boat docked at Tilbury,
Where the Menai Straits are at their narrowest,
between two bluffs, Thomas Telford chose to build
his one span suspension bridge, high enough
for tall ships to pass. The two towers,
exposed to the tides, were built of limestone blocks
from the Penmon quarries on the coast
north of here. Caernavon Castle had been built
from Penmon stone – and blocks were shipped to Dublin
to line the Liffey with wharfs and quays.
Telford, the ‘Colossus of Roads’, was reared
in penury –
POPPIES
APPLES AT ERDDIG: A GLIMPSE OF AVALON
ORGANISED CRIMES
APPLES AT ERDDIG: A GLIMPSE OF AVALON
OCTOBER 4TH