Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
‘It takes a village to raise a child’ YORUBA PROVERB
The rest of us are dressed for January’s
damp chill but she greets us on the driveway in
cool boots, black tights, black skirt, white shirt, and red cloak
Grandma has made for TikTok performances.
She smiles briefly, then gurns. A homemade cake
is brought carefully through the front door,
with candles blazing, duly blown out.
We sing the song, and mark her eleven years
upon the earth. She is lovely,
In a local church hall we wait, with fellow
ancients, for our first Pfizer vaccination.
Ours is a generation that has received,
since childhood, the blessings of technology
and science. Though the glitter ball
is stationary and the stage curtains drawn
there are shades still of dancing and pantomimes –
and, in the observation tent outside,
the fifteen minutes is quite jolly,
definitely determined. We humans are
social animals, prone to good causes.
We drive home in warm,
For Fikekahle Dlalisa
The casual use of an American
penal term as a figurative cliché
suggests our usual status quo is being
in some sort of custody. In consequence
the clamour of public nonsense rises
about the nature and scope of liberty.
Freedom is choice not action. Walking
with a Zulu friend in a busy mall
on the edge of Soweto, “Look,” he said,
“see how people do not crowd each other,
From Moscow to London, Stockholm to Venice
the world froze at 10, 12, 15 below
for three months. Wine froze in bottles, cows in byres,
and wolves came down to villages scavenging.
Tree trunks shattered. Church bells once rung fractured.
Travellers crossed the Baltic on horse-back,
skaters glided under the Rialto.
The War of Spanish Succession was paused
for more clement weather – and regiments
of Swedish soldiers died in Russian blizzards,
ceding victory in the Great Northern War
to Peter the Great almost by default.
Streaks of greyish cloud above the lovat hills
on the far shore attenuate the sunset
with striations of orange and yellow.
For a moment clouds part, and the sun
radiates a shearing silver like some
Turner landscape, or Wagnerian
allegory. And, as if on cue,
with a suddenness that shocks, amazes,
from the hidden lagoons amongst the reeds,
multiple flocks of geese rise calling, flying
towards the river’s mouth, fluttering shadows
receding into dark.
The Arena has become an aviary.
As we walk along the narrow corridor
into the auditorium, the sound
of eight and half thousand young voices
all chattering simultaneously
with wonder overwhelms us like a blast
of tropical heat, like a wall of bird song.
The music starts, the house lights go down.
In unison, as they begin to sing
‘Ode to Joy’, each one of the thousands
of song birds switches on a white, bright beam,
which shimmers and waves,
When I was a boy I was often taken
to the aquarium on the promenade
by the Palace Pier, Brighton – a resort
and commuter town on England’s south east coast.
It was an hour’s train journey from London
on the Pullman Brighton Belle – with its curtains
and its table lamps – restored to pre-war pomp.
My favourite tank was devoted to sea fish
found in the English Channel – teeming still
from wartime’s cessation of fishing.
There were skate and flounder,
Her previous enclosure was surrounded
by a wire mesh fence four metres high
and a low hedge, so she was used to seeing
big people from the knees up and small people
with heads only. Now she paces to and fro,
back and fore, in front of a plate glass
viewing window, as if on sentry-go.
We are a yard apart me and this fellow
being, whose shining bronze eyes slide away
each time they see mine. Every ten turns or so
she stops,
One day, after sunrise – in the time before
the ice sheets began to melt – a girl
or a boy, about twelve, carrying
an infant, walked quickly south with long strides,
stopping once to let the infant walk briefly.
At some point a woolly mammoth crossed their tracks,
and a giant sloth paused to sniff the air.
Later the young person walked back north alone.
The muddy footprints fossilised – some ten
millennia ago. The big beasts went,
Already what little sunlight there has been
each day of the new year dies a little
later in the west. Today the layers
of pale orange and gold seem to stretch
like a canopy far into the Welsh hills,
over the mountains, and the sea beyond,
as if hope were only a journey away.
Meanwhile the numbers of the sick rise
everywhere like a temperature gauge –
and those of us spared thus far, through luck
or circumspection,
OTHER PEOPLE'S FLOWERS: Three Poems by Alan Horne
BLOOMSBURY
THE NAKBA
ON LITTLE EYE
OTHER PEOPLE'S FLOWERS: 'Twelve Poems' by Clive Watkins