Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
You are Princess Ayesha, the principal girl,
in the youth group’s pantomime at St Barnabas,
West Street, Crewe. Disguised as a boy, you are searching
for Aladdin – your true, lost love – in the canvas
forest and the bazaar, among the painted caves
and the amphora. Heavily Max Factored, dressed
in torn shirt and ripped shorts – having crossed the desert,
outwitted each one of the forty thieves, bested
Abanazar, bamboozled the Genie and charmed
Widow Twankey to be downstage centre –
The hostel women came one summer evening
after tea. The noise brought Judith and me
from hiding-from-the-Germans, our game
in the bushy borders of the gardens
in our block of flats off Finchley Road.
A crowd of women, with some small children –
a few men were outside on the pavement –
were at the back of the building where we were
forbidden to go and the bins were kept.
A row of aspen saplings, planted
alongside the back fence,
Our DNA is filled with wondrous
commonplaces, luminous platitudes:
refugees from pogroms in the Ukraine,
refugees from the Famine in Connaught.
*
This was the house my mother’s family moved to
from 7 Moses Street, off Sefton Park Road,
Liverpool, three years before she was born;
Ma, Da, her two small sisters, her two teenage
step brothers; a rented end of terrace –
with gas, running water, outside privy –
in a cobbled cul-de-sac, where bread
still warm was delivered in the Co-op’s
horse drawn van,
The photo of Stephen Baum and me aged 4
falls out of the back of a book. Each of us
is holding a part of a redundant
Kodak Brownie and laughing in ecstasy.
The battered camera is Stephen’s.
The sun is shining, and we are on the lawn
in front of the flats where we lived. It was spring
or summer ’47. Our mothers
would take us to the entrance of the yard
of the dairy on Child’s Hill so we could watch
the horses and hear the waters rushing
through wooden slats,
At midnight on Sunday the 3rd of April
1881 the Bar lightship’s
paddle steamer tender, ‘Vigilant’,
is moored at Woodside Stage, Birkenhead.
Of the eight crew three were born in Wales,
two in Liverpool, one in Ireland,
one in Sweden and one on a ‘Yorkshire Farm’.
In immaculate copperplate, the First Mate,
my great grandfather, completes the form.
Meanwhile at 52 Harlow Street,
a street that slopes down to Harrington Dock,
where the Elder Dempster line was based
that sailed to Freetown,
Her maiden surname was Eisenberg, ‘iron
mountain’, one that had been chosen for them
from the Imperial list. I was often
uneasy, unsure in her presence.
She hardly ever smiled. I realise now
because I looked so like her son, my father.
She died, from kidney failure, when I was nine.
On the mantelpiece in our dining room
is a pair of figurines – faux Meissen –
brought in her parents’ wooden suitcase, wrapped
in linen, journeying from Leopoldstat,
Low water now and the motley of crabbers
is crammed towards the end of the pier,
leaving space for a merry metaphor
of our times, Uncle Tacko’s Flea Circus,
with its innuendo and innocence,
its knowingness and charm, its vaudeville
of outrageous unnuanced half-truths,
its charivari of anachronisms.
The Bulkeley Hotel on the front (once
a private mansion of many rooms)
and the stone terrace of late Georgian
town houses in this holiday resort
speak of its erstwhile strategic value.
Along the path beside the forestry road,
through the plantation of pine and larch
planted as saplings to keep the dunes in check,
there is a first sighting of the island
with its mediaeval saint’s ruined chapel,
between the trees and across a sandy beach.
Out of sight is a pebbly strand exposed
except at the highest tides: an impromptu
causeway – for holiday makers now;
once, for lovers to the chapel with its
rumours of martyred blessings;
The harbour breakwater built from limestone blocks
was the longest that the Admiralty
had commissioned. How important Ireland seemed!
On the Country Park lake sown with lilies
an old man sails his battleship. The lake
was a man-made pond that served the brickworks,
built to make the harbour buildings that are dressed
in the limestone quarried from the crags
beside which visitors park their cars.
A grass path leads through heather and gorse
down to low cliffs above the pebble shore.
Beside the first angle in the zigzag steps
that descend steeply to the lighthouse –
where I have stopped to rest lungs and knees
and vow again this will be the last –
unique to this place on our planet
a fleawort is growing, its flowerheads
like miniature sun flowers. A red beaked chough
calls from the heathland above – pyrrhocorax,
pyrrhocorax. I can see Ireland from here –
the hills and mountains south of Dublin –
PAINTING PARADISE
ORGANISED CRIMES
PAINTING PARADISE
WHAT IS IT THAT STARTS A POEM?
ARS POETICA