Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
One February night in ’74
the Army occupied Heathrow Airport.
The BBC’s Nine O’Clock news explained
the occupation was an exercise
in how to deal with a terrorist threat.
The new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson,
learned of the exercise from the TV,
recognised it as the dress rehearsal
of a coup against his premiership –
a coup that would have been sanctified
by an announcement from her Majesty,
an emergency government led by
her husband’s uncle,
Anti-Semitism is the demagogue’s
canard, the resort of the populist,
the calculating racist’s dog whistle,
the opportunist’s bigotry, hatred of,
and prejudice against, Jewish people.
When Alfred Dreyfus was humiliated
on the Champs de Mars there were three hundred
Jewish officers in the French Army,
ten of them generals. The real spy,
Major Esterhazy, with official
connivance, died in his bed as Count
de Voilement at ‘Holmleigh’, 21
Milton Road, Harpenden,
To dominate the conflux of the rivers,
the Minnesota with the Mississipi,
a place inhabited for ten thousand years,
Bdote in the local language,
Fort Snelling was built on the bluff above.
The confluence of the rivers was sacred
to the Dakota Sioux, who believed
that their first ancestors had come as spirits
from the stars, and had been made human
from the clay along the riverbanks,
with life breathed into them like a newborn’s cry.
The evangelist – spiritual aide-de-camp
to Old Glory’s Commanders-in-Chief,
and nostrum-monger of eternal life –
in white shirt, black shoes, socks, trousers, the Good Book
open in his hands, sits astride a donkey
near the Garden of Gethsemane
on Mount Olive. Below him on Temple Mount,
in noonday brightness, is the Dome of the Rock
and the Al-Aksa Mosque and, out of sight,
the Western Wall. He looks at the camera
as one who might say, ‘Behold! When the Jews
hold Jerusalem heaven will open.
Found among the effects in the bullet-pocked,
blood stained rooms of Bin Laden’s hideaway
in Abbottabad – named for Major Abbott
of the British Raj – was a journal
describing Osama’s time in the UK
as a young, ultimately disillusioned,
teenager. For some reason, unexplained,
with his hosts he visited Shakespeare’s birthplace
every Sunday. ‘Here’s a knocking indeed!…
How now? A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!’
Also found: ‘Mr Bean’s Holiday’
dubbed in Pashtu;
‘The park is named for Captain George H. Tilly, a local son of a prominent family who was killed in action in the Philippines while serving in the Spanish-American War, and a monument to the war is prominent in the park.’ New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.
From the park’s Memorial Hill one can see
Manhattan, and the World Trade Center’s
Twin Towers. Below, this Labor Day
early evening, the benches round Goose Pond
are filled with families – Sikh, Jamaican,
Hispanic.
For Doreen Levin
He was on duty the night Liverpool burned.
They watched the orange glow over in the east.
He remembered the convoy earlier that day
strung out along the horizon, waiting
for high tide. The Lance Jack, Scouser One,
told them where it was. One of the Taffies said,
‘My brother’s there too’, leaving things unspoken.
In the silence Saul wondered if Tilbury
was being done as well, the bombs drifting,
as usual,
The TV presenter speaks of ‘sacrifice’.
She is al fresco on a purple sofa
with puce cushions. In the middle ground
are dignitaries, veterans, and a band.
Beyond are the War Graves Commission’s white ranks
of the British dead from Sword and Gold.
Only one speaker – beret, blazer, medals,
a RN signaller on a landing craft –
comes close to hinting that no one chose
to be a sacrifice. His speech is short,
even appropriately amusing,
I was Gratiano, Bassanio’s pal
in The Merchant of Venice. He ends the play
with an obscene pun. We were an ensemble
of drama teachers performing the piece
in English at Rüsselsheim’s Stadttheater,
the year after the Wall came down – so the pun
was probably lost somewhere in translation.
We were a couple of hours from the border.
One of our group became ill. The doctor,
treating her in the hostel where we stayed,
thought at first she was an ‘Ossie’.
The prisoners were dispersed across the north,
being too numerous for one assize –
many had followers, women and children:
a lost cause’s collateral damage.
An unrecorded number – of both rebels
and dependents – was held on the heath
a quarter of a mile due west of here
where I am researching and typing.
They wintered among the gorse and the heather.
Maybe there were tents, or perhaps bivouacs,
certainly for the guards.
THE ABUNDANT DARK
PEN BARRAS PASS
PEN BARRAS PASS
SIX DEGREES: THE MAY BLITZ, LIVERPOOL 1941
OLD EUROPE'S SLOW DEMISE