Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
We met on the first working day of the week;
married, five years later, on a Saturday;
and sailed for Ireland on the Sunday.
This Monday marks fifty two years of mostly
wedded bliss; occasional toilsome woe;
loving; giving; hard work; grace – a pack of cards
without, for the most part, the jangling jokers.
Out of the grassy plains, along the Silk Road
from Samarkand, came the colours of
anarchy, of power and passion; came
the four corners of the world,
As goldfinches begin to sing and sparrows
chirp in polyphony, and swallows,
martins, swifts hunt with grace, the palette
of attenuated gold, amber, rose
is layered along the sea’s horizon
and the sun becomes a perfect disk
in the filtering, vermilion haze.
Anonymous con trails criss-cross the compass.
A lone swimmer crawls across the bay.
The evening star, sudden as a lamp, glints
in the afterglow. A wispy rain cloud forms
and drifts away like smoke.
Five men, in orangey yellow overalls,
using long handled rollers are painting
the paddling pool – which is the size of four
tennis courts – that blue which only colour charts
show or astronauts will see. Beyond
is the limestone headland with rock-roses
amongst the scrub and fulmars nesting.
Far out to sea is a gathering,
stately and serried, of white, wind turbines.
I think of David Hockney’s iconic pools,
and of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’ –
hybrids of sculpture and paint –
Paris, 1920
The treaty was signed in the Exhibition Room,
overseen by Marie Antoinette’s
dinner service. Like porcelain owls’ eyes,
they were witnesses of the delegates’ harsh
geometry, the fretwork jigsaw of desk
wallahs – Ottoman Mesopotamia
become modern Syria and Iraq.
Gertrude Bell was one of the delegates:
daughter of a philanthropic iron master;
Oxford graduate like T.E. Lawrence;
cartographer, mountaineer, linguist;
archaeologist, administrator,
public servant;
Dreamily among the leaves, uneasily,
in my age, up a shining ladder
I am plucking plums – discarding those
rotten, prune-like encrusted with sugar,
or pecked at by passing tits and dunnocks.
I pass the whole, ripe ones down carefully
to my granddaughter, who holds her bowl
high as she can. You look on, pleased for us both
and concerned. Later you will place the blushed plums
in a wide shallow dish of the deepest red
adorned with foliage –
And suddenly there, through the high sash window,
is a rainbow – lit by the westward sun –
from behind the church and over the park’s
leafless, lichened trees to the gated, faith school.
This is the season of illusion and sleight
of hand; the season of the braying bluster
of blinkered donkeys spooked by mayhem
in a cathedral city; the season
of the wet slap of the laundering of money
on the banks of the gun metal Thames;
The simple memorial of slate and part
of a propeller was relocated
from the mountainous North Stack, where the plane crashed,
a mile to sea level in the Holyhead
Breakwater Country Park. The US
B24 Liberator bomber
was based at Valley ten miles away.
Returning from a radar jamming raid
over Northern France in very bad weather
the B24 overflew and, making
a re-approaching circuit, ran out of fuel.
Believing the aircraft was over land
the pilot ordered the eight non-commissioned
crew members to bail out.
Our felucca tacked across the river Nile
to Aswan from Kitchener’s Island –
with its well watered botanical gardens
and its straight boulevards of tall palm trees –
gifted to Lord Kitchener of Khartoum,
pre Great War, as Egypt’s Consul-General.
As we approached the east bank, out of nowhere
it seemed, a boy appeared along side us
in a small zinc bath paddling with his hands
and singing, “‘Michael, row the boat ashore!
Hallelujah!’” – the old slave song learned then turned,
In more civilised days we might have appeared
on Wilfred Pickles’ radio show
‘Have A Go!’ and when he asked our age
and we told him he would say, ‘Seventy five,
ladies and gentlemen!’ and they would applaud,
and, before he asked ‘What’s on the table, Mable?’
and instructed ‘Give them the money, Barney!’,
he would ask how long we had been married –
more applause – and then he would ask us,
in his warm, BBC Yorkshire voice,
for the secret of our years of wedded bliss.
for Glyn Smith
When the meticulously landscaped gardens
were left to hazard, during the estate’s
long, reclusive neglect, some of the trees
in the two avenues either side
of the wide ornamental canal – whose
perspective frames the classical proportions
of the house – began to grow together
like errant, statuesque teeth. A couple
have been extracted to save the rest.
… Limes are almost indestructible – felled trunks
will sprout.
THE FORK IN THE ROAD
THE OUTING
THE OUTING
THE FORK IN THE ROAD
STAPLETON COTTON 1ST VISCOUNT COMBERMERE