Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
i.m. John Wareham
The tide of chance may bring
Its offer; but nought avails it!
THE OPPORTUNITY Thomas Hardy
Each week on Tuesday promptly at seven –
chicken curry and chips from Barry Wong’s
on West Derby Road at the ready –
he and I would turn on the TV
in our rented rooms to watch Hughie Greene’s
‘Opportunity Knocks’. It was an hour –
including adverts – of metaphors
of the mid-sixties: kitsch;
Maya Angelou would pronounce ‘poetry’
with each syllable given equal, gentle
weight, and the first two clear as a call, a soft
sonorousness as if water spoke.
***
There are few words in the English lexicon
with so many, diverse, Attic meanings
as ‘poet’: maker, inventor, composer,
speech writer, legislator, author:
images of workshops, and lecterns;
chambers with high ceilings and long windows;
the law’s austere and tempered modalities;
stanzas memorised then taught by rote;
There are gaps between the Velux windows
and the blinds – intentional, of course,
to let in shafts of sunlight. At night
the sodium street lights make arrow shapes
on the bedroom’s walls. Raindrops the flood tide brings
slide like orangey, silvery glitter balls –
almost the colour of the wheat grains
that would have been piled on tarpaulins to dry
on the oak floorboards of this converted loft.
Thinking the street lights daylight herring gulls
halloo all night from chimney tops and gables.
For Keith Johnson
‘Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.’ Carl Sandburg
I presume, since Carl Sandburg was a poet
of the railroad and the five-and-dime,
of prairie skies and the remarkableness
of the people, they are American
biscuits – that cross between scone and bannock –
to mop up the gravy from your beans
on the Chisholm Trail to Dodge City.
According to Homer, among others,
Hyakinthos,
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting…
AT THE FISHHOUSES Elizabeth Bishop
What is it that starts a poem? What rupture –
a fish tugging at a hook? What rapture –
the seventh wave breaking as it should?
Consider Elizabeth Bishop:
fatherless at one; her mother certified
four years later; taken from her grandparents
in Nova Scotia by her father’s parents
in Massachusetts; a Vassar girl
with a private income;
If I were a painter – and I would have
so many memorable titles – I would paint
your garden in all its rooms and seasons:
across the high back wall spring’s coral pink
clematis; summer’s sword-leaved, red-flamed
crocosmia by the aquamarine
gazebo; the white, weathered table and chairs
and the acer on the dark-brick terrace;
plants inherited, self-seeded, handed on
in stewardship – a world compendium.
You are the architect, builder, labourer –
and only begetter: ‘Sylvia Among
Her Sonnets Without Words’
I watched the TV parade of affluent
(and mostly public school) chancers, liars,
fantasists, hypocrites, law-breakers
vie to top each other’s warmed-up clichés
and self-serving platitudes. The social
and economic future dystopia most
seemed to desire would, they assured us,
bring out the British best in all of us,
just like the Blitz. I thought of bomb-razed
building lots in major cities still empty,
and a tale a cabby told me years ago,
taxiing me from the railway station.
For Barbara and John Huddart
On this calm summer evening the North Sea falls
unheard on the wide sands below the castle
in whose inner ward the play is set – and we
(an eclectic collection of friends)
have brought folding chairs, prosecco, pop,
and fish suppers from Seahouses nearby
along this coast of raiders and saints.
‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The beds of varicoloured reeds, fields almost,
stretch north and south along this bank for miles,
and westwards, nearly to Wales, across the wide,
silted river. Unseen marsh creatures scarcely
disturb the grasses. Egrets and herons
fly in and out of hidden lagoons.
Before silt, from here, the Dublin packet sailed –
with G.F. Handel and Jonathan Swift.
On the opposite shore are the ruins
of Flint Castle where Richard was dethroned –
‘…night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.’
The park’s diagonal avenue of limes
is in leaf. A warm southwesterly
billows through the foliage like falling surf,
like the tumultuous rushing of flames.
I watch you walk away under the trees,
and disappear into the green shade.
On the path directly opposite,
across an uncluttered expanse of grass,
you reappear some moments later,
undeterred by a surge of carefree cyclists
taking short cuts, or self-absorbed dog walkers.
You vanish beyond the wind-swept tennis courts.
LAMENT FOR THE FOURTH ESTATE
HOME TIME
TO SEE A WORLD
DANCING ON AIR
HOME TIME