Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
For Kira Somach
I have regular readers – some I have known
for years, others I will never meet –
on every continent except
Antarctica: a wonder not a boast!
One, an actual friend from long ago,
tells me, via email, that she often reads
some of my poems over the phone
to her father – she in Missouri,
he in Florida: to remind them
of his years working in England,
and her years here becoming a woman.
Near one corner of the British Museum’s
Great Court – the largest, roofed, public square
in Europe – the Lion reclines on a plinth.
It was stolen, a couple of years
after the Crimean War, from a ruined
tomb in Turkey. Its limestone body
had once been adorned with marble, its empty
eye sockets with glass to glint in sunlight
and glow in moonlight. Whether because
its pockmarked flanks seem sad or its eyeless face
appears benign visitors are keen to pose
for photos with the beast as backdrop.
We drove towards the River Dee – down walled lanes
with rhododendrons festooning the sandstone,
their attic blooms in imperial colours –
to visit a doughty friend convalescing,
from two knee replacements, in Seize The Day,
a recently opened upmarket care home.
As we turned into the drive, I realised
that this, long before rebuilding, was where
my mother had first trained to be a nurse –
sixteen, with her friend, Belle. They cared for children
with TB from the Liverpool slums.
i.m. Samuel Selzer
He was never sure if it had been a joke
when the police arrested him for being,
he learned later, Jack the Ripper,
even though the last murder had been
a dozen years before, and he himself
had been eight and far away – or just
a lesson for yet another alien
wandering Whitechapel as if he had
a right to be lost in a pea souper.
Fresh from the Hamburg boat docked at Tilbury,
Where the Menai Straits are at their narrowest,
between two bluffs, Thomas Telford chose to build
his one span suspension bridge, high enough
for tall ships to pass. The two towers,
exposed to the tides, were built of limestone blocks
from the Penmon quarries on the coast
north of here. Caernavon Castle had been built
from Penmon stone – and blocks were shipped to Dublin
to line the Liffey with wharfs and quays.
Telford, the ‘Colossus of Roads’, was reared
in penury –
By our side gate the old laburnum – whose wood,
in time, may make a chanter or a flute –
is in bloom. I look up through its branches.
There is a little azure and smidgens
of green – and droplets, ringlets, links, chains
of cascading yellow, a torrent of gold.
***
Our Edwardian neighbourhood fills
with the machined roar of twin turbofans.
An Airbus Beluga – more Arctic whale
than Caspian sturgeon –
For Sizwe Vilakazi
ROBBEN ISLAND, CAPE TOWN
Except when the Atlantic fog surprises,
from high ground in the city the island
is present like a leviathan,
its lights at night like white phosphorous,
a place of banishment since the first ships,
among seals and penguins.
DISTRICT SIX, CAPE TOWN
Razing its streets, clearing this cosmopolis
of Asians, atheists,
The incoming tide brings shoals of mackerel fry.
Herring gulls, perhaps a hundred, more,
young among them in their mottled plumage,
are yelling at the water’s edge, feeding
in frenzy as the small waves scatter.
Far out on the low, narrow, wooden jetty
my small family leans over to marvel
at the fishes before landfall. At my back
is the white crescent of hotels, the town,
the estuary, the mountains, sun setting.
They cross the beach, granddaughter running ahead,
After the shoot on Long Island’s Cedar Beach
they drove next to a local playground.
While Eve loaded her camera, Marilyn sat
on some play equipment and read a book –
her worn copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’,
which she kept in her car, and had been reading
for some time, often aloud to get it’s sense.
(She looks to be about nine tenths through
so into Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated
soliloquy of love and longing).
This photograph of a pretty woman
in her late twenties,
For Mike Rogerson
The layout of our local park was finished
the year my mother was born, the year
before the Great War was started, and named
for Alexandra Saxe-coburg and Gotha
née Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg,
widow of the late King. An avenue
of lime trees – and a single row along
another path – was planted. My mother,
the Spring of the year she was war-widowed,
pushed me in my pram beneath them.
ON THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NATO ALLIANCE
MARTIN MERE WETLAND, LANCASHIRE
2019
2019
2019