Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
‘…mourning and sorrow shall end,
when I return to Jerusalem…’
Mediaeval Jewish Prayer
‘We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.’
Mahmoud Darwish
On a land mass that is the size of landlocked
Rutland, the smallest county in England,
Gaza, the Earth’s third most populated
polity, has two small rivers and a hill.
Its city, four thousand years ago,
was the site of a Pharaonic fortress.
From the kitchen door of the holiday let,
down the hill, over roof tops, on a clear day,
are the summits of the mainland’s mountains;
from the front door the gaol’s stone grey massif;
above the cottage’s small courtyard,
where the privy was and now are festive lights
and a hot tub burbling, is a square of sky.
Around the corner in Steeple Lane
high in the prison wall is a door,
with rivets either side to hold the scaffold
when it was needed.
Only the highest tides reach this small island’s
sandstone rocks. A collar of flaxen sand
surrounds it. A quarter of a mile north
is Middle Eye. A hundred yards further
is Hilbre, habitation of hermits,
custom’s officers, weather stations.
These three are rugged, stony outcrops
in the mouth of the estuary.
Leaving West Kirby’s suburban promenade,
we had walked, at low water, to Little Eye
across the Dee’s hard, striated sands.
Westward is Wales, and the redundant lighthouse
at Point of Ayr,
My granddaughter and I paused before Turner’s
‘War: the Exile and the Rock Limpet’
in the collection of the artist’s work
at Tate Britain, Millbank, beside the Thames.
The exile is Napoleon Bonaparte
on St Helena. He stands – in signature
outfit including the hat – arms folded,
contemplating obscure life in a rock pool.
A guard, musket shouldered, stands some paces off.
The sun rises or sets on a swirling, volcanic coast.
‘Was Napoleon really that tall?’ she asked.
‘O, there you are,’ Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.
ULYSSES, James Joyce
Joyce read his poems to Lady Gregory
in Dublin. She was impressed and gave him five pounds
to help fund his escape to Paris
from the ‘coherent absurdity’ (his words)
of Catholicism. She wrote to Yeats –
her close friend and patronee, who had lodgings
a five minute walk from Euston – to meet him
off the Holyhead train at six a.m.,
give him breakfast,
Our present government, unfairly perhaps,
is often caricatured as self-serving,
racist and incompetent – and yet,
with a rather modest investment
of taxpayers’ money, has published
a report which may revolutionise
our study of history, showing
not just the costs but the benefits
to victims of great crimes: ‘There is a new
story about the Caribbean
experience which speaks to the slave period
not only being about profit
and suffering but how culturally
African people transformed themselves
into a re-modelled African/Britain.’
Begun the year of Waterloo, finished
in that of Peterloo, built on rents
and sugar, this – according to Pevsner –
‘modest’ Palladian mansion sits
on a slope, a belvedere. Mature trees
overhang the erstwhile stable block,
now a spa. The hotel is a venue
for weddings – featured in ‘Bride of the Year’ –
and funerary teas, like today’s in sun.
From the terrace, and over the ha-ha,
sheep graze in broad fields hedged with hawthorn,
For Clive Watkins
‘The maker’s rage to order words…’
THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST, Wallace Stevens
There, as we drove past the Heritage Centre
that once was a medieval church, on the steps,
among the shoppers and the trippers,
there on a provincial, English street
was a busker with a blue guitar.
And I thought of the poem by Wallace Stevens,
who did not drive, and walked to work each day –
Whether the same crow as last year has returned
or this is a different crow with the same habits
is as much a metaphysical issue
as a zoological one – whichever
is the case the sequence of events
in the Great Lockdown is being repeated.
Early morning the crow flies in, and places
a piece of bread in the bird bath – where blackbirds
have bathed, and robins sipped; flies off; returns
in hours, and snacks on the marinated bread;
flies off;
A long section of the grassy bank beside
the ornamental lake is roped-off –
a pair of Canada Geese is nesting,
the first in the history of the Park
with its long-serving Coots and Mallards.
We sit on a bench and contemplate the geese –
almost as big as Mute Swans; adept
colonisers, considered still, after
three hundred years, non-native; this chance pair
perhaps blown off course between raucous lagoons.
We are distracted by raised voices
from the opposite bank –
A SORT OF KADDISH
THE FOURTH ANGLO-AFGHAN WAR
BENLLECH BAY LATE SPRING 2021
HIMALAYAN CHARNEL
HIMALAYAN CHARNEL