Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
‘O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe, and will look upon our testimony as a fable.’ Francesco Petrarch
Somewhere near the estuary of the Don,
with its mudflats and meanders, north
of the Sea of Azov, and somewhere
near the Volga Delta, with its pelicans
and flamingos, north of the Caspian,
on the steppe lands are black rats and fleas
and yersinia pestis. The rats
like human warmth, and the fleas can leap.
For John Chapman
I can see for miles across the wolds, low hills
receding. The top of the rise is a field
of stubble that was rape. I imagine
last year’s sweet scented, false meadow of sharp
yellow and green. On the field’s far side
a flock of wild geese is grazing the stalks.
The cloudless, cerulean sky, empty
of con trails, seems closer, domed, as if curved
like our planet. In an ancient copse,
below the rise,
‘We are the guests of life.’ Martin Heidegger
‘In ancient Greek the word for ‘guest’ is the same as the word for ‘foreigner’: xenos. And if you were to ask me to define our tragic condition, it’s that the word ‘xenophobia’ survives, and is commonly used, everyone understands it; but the word ‘xenophilia’ has disappeared…’ George Steiner
For Cicero books were the ‘soul of the house’.
The Ancient Romans knew a thing or two
about staying safe in uncivil times.
Nevertheless on his way to sail abroad
the lawyer,
For John Plummer
‘History is a people’s memory.’ Malcolm X
It is VE Day. Though those who still survive –
the eye witnesses – tell angrily of waste
not sacrifice, what should have been a day
of the dead, and the maimed, and the displaced
worldwide is here one of tea parties, sing-songs –
while the toll mounts as if it were the first day
of the Somme. They lied then. They are lying now –
On the notice board of the Methodist Church –
on the opposite side of the street
from where I sit at my desk typing this –
is a poster. It is a colour photograph.
In the foreground is a wooden five bar gate.
Once I am certain there are no prisoners,
like me, at their exercise – voluntary
exiles walking their dogs in the middle
of the road avoiding others in lycra –
I go over for a closer look.
‘He beheld the city, and wept over it.’ Luke 19.41
We went up Mount Vesuvius by bus,
and stood on the rim of the crater
watching gases emerge from fissures.
We bought two bottles – a red and a white –
of the local wine, Lachryma Christi,
for a fellow atheist from the gift shop.
As we walked back down the fertile slopes – the sea
before us, hazy, tranquil – we heard
a cuckoo. All of Campania seemed stilled –
All seemed particularly dystopian
as I walked out one morning down the high street,
towards MacDonald’s and KFC,
Café Nero, Costa and Starbucks,
boarded-up shops and charity shops,
and two young men selling the Big Issue.
Maybe it was the noise: the traffic’s grind,
an elderly busker’s cacophonous chords,
the fire engine howling – outside the KFC!
I approached the forming crowd, and overheard,
from customers smelling of smoke, rumours:
that one of the Kentucky Colonel’s
deep fat fryers had exploded into flame,
The heavy shower drilled on the frosted glass.
We sheltered under one of the high street’s
open arcades with sloping glazed-roofs –
a Victorian refinement to the resort:
shopping sheltered from seaside weathers.
We were, by chance, in front of Poundland:
one window displayed Pepsi Max, the other
Cadbury’s Highlights, both cut-price sugar.
The Bank Holiday crowd sheltering with us
seemed disproportionately stricken, impaired,
overwhelmingly loud or utterly
silent, with austerity’s complexion.
As the rain began to clear a man,
After dark, down the steep lanes of the Great Orme –
a two mile long limestone promontory,
named by Norsemen for a dragon’s head –
past the synagogue and the funicular,
avoiding the temptations of the Pier,
into the lamp-lit, locked-down thoroughfare,
came the Kashmiri billy goats, white as snow,
as clouds, as sea spume. Runaways or outcasts
from a flock imported for their wool,
occasional mascots for the Royal Welsh,
those noisome foragers with their prophets’ beards
and trophy horns capered to the churchyard
and its privet hedges,
Via Del Corso, Rome, March 2020.
The boutiques had been closed by decree, even
Calvin Klein Underwear and Brooks Brothers.
The only pedestrians were the Pope,
in his white robes, and his bodyguard,
in bulging suits – on a pilgrimage
to the ancient church of San Marcello
set back from the street. Beneath a crucifix,
used to assuage a 15th century plague,
Pope Francis prayed to God to stop the virus.
The street, in Roman times, was Via Lata –
FOUR SCREEN PLAYS
THE GUN EMPLACEMENT
THE GUN EMPLACEMENT
D-DAY CELEBRATIONS
THE RÜSSELSHEIM MURDERS