Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Although elsewhere they must compete with tall men
from Senegal selling faux Gucchi bags
and middle aged Roma women hunched like
supplicants as they beg with their cardboard cups,
short, slight Bangladeshi men of all ages
have cornered the market, on the always
crowded bridge, with selfie sticks, lovers’ locks
that illegally litter the rails, and a cache
of small umbrellas for wet, cruising tourists.
South is the church of La Salute with its
whorls, bell towers,
There are the Biennale’s Big Beasts, of course –
this year David Hockney’s ’82 Portraits
and 1 Still Life’ at the Ca’ Pesaro (each
painted in three days) and, at Palazzo
Grassi and Punta Della Dogana,
Damien Hirst’s ‘Treasures from the Wreck
of the Unbelievable’, which took ten years –
the pavilions in the Giardini
and the Arsenale; the freebies
in rented palaces and tenements.
And there are the abiding grand masters,
the Titians, Tinterettos,
On the island of Burano, where women,
sitting at their front doors for the light, make lace
and men fish in the lagoon, and houses
are painted the profound colours of sun and sea,
there is a family owned restaurant
Da Romano (opposite the headquarters
of the Communist Party) whose first owner
encouraged those painters rejected
for the first Biennale to hang their work
on his walls – since when artists of all kinds
have come: Miro, for example, Matisse,
‘A camera on a tripod stood at the edge of the water, apparently abandoned; its black cloth snapped in the freshening wind.’
DEATH IN VENICE Thomas Mann
…Cholera is no longer a rumour.
Besotted, face rouged, hair dyed, he dies
staring unseeing at the shallow sea.
Artifice, made and re-made, fades in the rain,
like the islands with their ‘gorgeous palaces’…
Near the Palazzo del Cinema –
where, annually, insubstantial
figures, louder than life,
At Punta Della Dogana, a cellist
seated under the arcade, is playing
melodies from operatic arias.
It is early evening. A fog horn sounds.
A cruise ship is sailing for Dubrovnik.
With a tug at the bows to pull, one to steer
at the stern, The Queen Elizabeth –
its superstructure higher than St Mark’s
Campanile, moves slowly toward us
through the Giudecca canal. Passengers,
silhouettes on the top deck, look down
on the packed, diverse crowds jostling along
the Riva Degli Schiavoni,
On the third floor of Ca’ Rezzonico –
where gondoliers slept when the palazzo
was let to the song writer Cole Porter –
is Egidio Martini’s collection
of five centuries of Venetian art.
Three of the floors’ small windows survive,
each an intentional belvedere.
Two view the Grand Canal, the third south west.
The eye follows the perspective below:
a canal and its quay with inevitable
eclectic craft, stone bridges and turisti;
then tenements and the terracotta tiles –
‘ The hand holds so much power – the power to love, to hate, to create, to destroy.’ SUPPORT, Lorenzo Quinn
The resin and fibreglass installation
of one of the sculptor’s small children’s
hands and wrists emerges from the Grand Canal
many times life size and startlingly white
to brace the rose Ca’ Sagredo Hotel –
once a palace where Galileo stayed –
as if to prevent its imminent collapse.
When we arrive on the opposite bank
so you can take photographs the market
has closed,
We came here more than twenty five years ago
but know when we reach the Trei Archi bridge
we have gone too far and turn. (Distracted by
a young black man begging with a baseball cap
we had walked passed the sottoporto
where the curfew gates had been). We see
a man in a keppel show the entrance
to his children. Inside the Old Ghetto now
are information points, and a café
and a restaurant with kosher options.
In the New Ghetto’s spacious campo
are more eateries,
‘Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.
THE STONES OF VENICE John Ruskin
Many things are forbidden in Venice:
sitting on the steps in St Mark’s Square;
hailing water taxis from water bus pontoons;
putting out food waste except on the hook
provided between the designated hours
in order to deter gabbiani;
of which there are two species, compatriots,
the black-headed gull and the herring gull,
comune and reale respectively,
Like most houses over centuries here
this one has been divided. What was its
courtyard is part of a private gallery.
A vine, planted in the yard – perhaps
in the island’s original earth before
alder pilings made the city’s foundations –
has thickened, grown on top of a wall,
almost hiding the broken bottles
embedded in cement, and then up
to our third floor balcony, covering
the pergola. The grapes are pearly small, sweet.
There is no dulling roar to baffle sounds.
LLANDWYN, YNYS MÔN
THE BOX BROWNIE
SOUTH STACK, HOLYHEAD ISLAND
THE PIER, BEAUMARIS
THE RABBI AND THE EMPEROR