Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
The push for Aubers Ridge had been postponed
because of rain. But the Saturday
was dry and sunny. Going up the line
in the early evening, the Munsters
stood easy at the shrine to Our Lady.
‘…in remissionem peccatorum…’
By noon, next day, nearly half were dead,
caught on the German wire Haig’s ill equipped
artillery had, once more, failed to cut.
In Mazingarbe, an industrial town
ten miles south, the British commandeered
the abattoir.
Stapleton Cotton 1st Viscount Combermere’s
equestrian statue, surrounded now
by traffic, would grace any capital.
For more than a hundred and fifty years
set before Chester Castle he rides south
towards Thomas Harrison’s Grosvenor Bridge
– once the longest single-span arch in the world –
opened by Princess Victoria.
The Viscount – soldier, politician,
diplomat – holds his feathered bicorne
at his side as if just removed in salute.
Though Combermere’s seat (once an abbey,
They would never know that the narrow lanes –
one right, up the thickly wooded hill,
the other, following the valley’s curve,
quickly out of sight – led to the same place,
and that the few houses there were shuttered.
They had stopped – the diesel puttering,
the brown exhaust fouling the summer air –
in front of the triangle of long grass,
with a glass fronted shrine at its centre,
that marked the fork in the road. The officer
searched the landscape with binoculars,
Usually on a geometric plinth,
sometimes ahorse, once like Charlemagne,
here at the end of the wide, tree lined gravelled
Viale Giuseppe Garibaldi
that leads from the Giardini Pubblici,
he stands, as if on an Appenine peak,
with one of his Red Shirts below to one side.
Though probably better known in Britain
for his eponymous biscuit, the hero
of both Italian freedom and unity
faces what had once been a canal
but was made a street in his honour,
Each Armistice Day, she remembered it.
A walk along the riverbank. Her teacher took them –
one Saturday when the hawthorn was out
and the river slow after weeks of sun –
her and three of the other older girls.
Miss Davies’ young man came too –
in his uniform, on leave from the front.
When they all rested in the shade of a willow,
he unwrapped a large bar of chocolate
slowly, looking away, or pretending to,
across the river. Suddenly he turned.
‘Voila!’, he said, holding it out to them.
i.m. Liz Stafford
In the crematorium I try to sit,
if I can, where I can see the lawn
sloping up towards the landscaped copse,
and, today, blue sky. I assume the dead,
even if you could, would not begrudge
this longing to be elsewhere, to be free.
You have prepared for your death: choosing
the readings, and the hymns any pragmatic
atheist might know, briefing the eulogist
with selected work and leisure anecdotes.
The Afon Alun rises from hidden springs
on the peaty Llandegla moors, and courses
through ruined mill races to this valley
of ash woodland and wych elm, hazel, oak,
of vast limestone cliffs, of redundant lead mines –
a place named for a dispute between two landlords.
Here the river waltzes, tripping over stones,
and its tawny shallows ripple and gurgle.
***
My mother and her two sisters, often
at loggerheads, rhapsodized about this place.
I raise the blind of the small dormer window.
A night of rain has filled the cast iron gutter.
A jackdaw is perched on the rim sipping.
Suddenly the bird lifts off to join
a clattering of jackdaws mobbing
a buzzard. We are two hundred feet
above the littoral – once under sea
but now mostly pastoral land,
the fields a dull gold in the autumn dawn.
The shore is a mile away – but opening
the window brings the waves’
In the gardens of the Premier’s palace
with its white Baroque facade there are
children’s swings and a red roundabout.
The linden trees the old Archduke planted
though leafless are evergreen with outbursts,
festoons of mistletoe, their berries
opalescent in the gentle wintry light.
A dozen or so mistle thrushes graze
amongst the leaf mould and peck in the branches –
but one, perched at the top of a tree, sings
its trilling, boundless, woodwind airs as if all
of the provinces were quiet and listening.
His new apartment was in a converted
eighteenth century farmhouse stranded
in a nineteenth century coastal town that,
as is the way of things by the accident
of geography, had become a prosperous port
and then declined. The back way in was along
a sloping path through an unkempt garden
then down narrow steep slate steps – slippery
that day with leaf mould. In the twilight,
two Waitrose bags-for-life in each hand,
he slipped, falling neatly on his backpack.
However,
LLANDWYN, YNYS MÔN
THE BOX BROWNIE
SOUTH STACK, HOLYHEAD ISLAND
THE PIER, BEAUMARIS
THE RABBI AND THE EMPEROR