Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
As usual Uncle Tacko is trundling
his Flea Circus to the end of the pier,
and the Island Princess is embarking
for a trip up the Straits and around
Ynys Seiriol with its nesting puffins,
its elderberry woodland purpling.
And the dogged chambers of my heart, open
and close, open, close, like an harmonium.
All the familiar sounds – the Flea Circus crowd,
the paddlers in the pool, the revellers
on the hotel lawn next door –
For Annabel Honor-Lissi
In those stark dreams when sleep shades into waking,
dreams that haunt the light like a taste in the mouth,
or a name half-remembered, half-forgotten,
I am always travelling – this dawn
along the black tops and the turnpikes,
from the Texas Panhandle north east
to Casco Bay, Maine. Ahead is the thought
of moments, or a non-stop two day drive:
from the sun-belt’s stubborn, garish pandemic;
via the fame of Dallas,
I listened to Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman.
I liked the keys’ silver superstructure,
and the ebony stick with its subtle bell,
and its tones – mellow, lustrous, shrill, caressing.
So, to and from school, I chose to pass
a second-hand shop with a clarinet
on display in its eclectic window.
I saved for a year. ‘No,’ said the man. Next day
it was gone from the display forever.
My daughter took up the instrument
unprompted. Her daughter has followed.
If Ezekiel’s watchman, or, rather, God’s
had been on the job there would have been
some sort of heads-up – a cornet perhaps
if not a fanfare – that the Parish Church clock,
put in place in 1867,
would be chiming again, hours and quarters,
this summer morning. But it just happens –
almost surreptitiously, like some
member of the chorus in an opera
sneaking on late from the wings. And late it is
by a few minutes – as before it was fast.
Days after we had travelled east of Eden
we invented clowning and slapstick,
juggling and tumbling, magic and music,
and idleness to ease our banishment
from Paradise. So, for ninety minutes,
in this rare and aerial space of changelings
and kaleidoscopes, we watch acrobats
and clowns, conjurors and knife throwers turn back
the epochs as if pages in a book.
Like a sudden rush of snare drums, a brief
and heavy shower accompanies
the finale –
…though striped in part was not, in fact, a tiger,
or feline in any way, but related
to the kangaroo, so a marsupial,
with a head and muzzle a bit like a bear’s,
and the dimensions of an Alsatian dog.
Somebody named him Benjamin – a joke
probably: the last of Jacob’s sons,
and Israel’s progenitor. Some footage
survives, in black and white, of the animal
in his small, bleak cage in Hobart Zoo.
The newsreel’s pompous and slightly smarmy
voice-over,
A couple of weeks into the Great Lockdown –
robins nesting in the ivy, wild bees
in the eaves, as usual – we were
visited one day by a carrion crow,
its feathers of a blackness beyond
perfection, clinkered armour buffed bright.
It landed, the size of a large cat,
on our modest bird bath beside the lilies
beginning to burgeon. In its beak
was a portion-sized piece of baguette
or ciabatta, which it dropped in the water,
then flew off.
A young girl is reading in a white armchair.
On the crimson tablecloth is a pink rose
in a glass of water. (She has kept the bloom
from when she was weaving flowers – its petals
superfluous to her design). The book
she is reading she first read three years ago,
when she was seven: its themes – of childhood,
and alchemy, and unambiguous frontiers
only beyond which evil thrives – enclose like
the high arms of her chair, though she is tall,
‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate’. THE COMMON GOOD, Noam Chomsky
A dormouse, leaping into a boiling cauldron,
leaps out, protesting. Some others, resting,
with breathing apparatus, trustingly
at the bottom of a pot of water
arctic-cold,
On the south west coast of the peninsula,
among Mount Sinai’s arid sandstone foothills,
beneath the stoops of falcons and the gyres
of eagles, where quail and grouse migrate,
and ibex graze on sparse thorn bushes,
where Moses might have berated the Twelve Tribes,
near the temple ruins of Hathor, goddess
of fertility and a golden calf,
are the rubbled remains of turquoise mines.
The Pharaohs prized the stones bluer than skies.
Canaanite prisoners of war worked the seams –
A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
BIRTHDAY GIRL UNDER HOUSE ARREST
A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
LOCKDOWN