Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
For Alison and Georgia Robson
‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.’ Isaac Newton
The ancient pear tree next door has not been pruned,
I would guess, for at least seventy years,
long before our time here, or the neighbours’.
It is now as large as a medium-sized oak,
with the remains of a magpie’s nest.
Its fruit, in these last days of summer, glow
a ruddy green; are plentiful,
Driving on education business to Crewe,
a quarter of a century ago,
I stopped for petrol on the Nantwich Road,
and there in a rack with Blur, Celine Dion
and Bon Jovi was Fred Astaire, Volume 2.
How my life changed! So many favourites
on one disc! I put the CD in the slot,
drove off the forecourt, and pressed the switch.
‘Heaven, I’m in heaven, And my heart beats
so that I can hardly speak, And I seem
to find the happiness I seek When
we’re out together dancing,
When I return with mugs of peppermint tea
you are asleep in the October sunshine –
a fallen golden birch leaf at your feet,
a last wasp buzzing in your shadow.
We have grown old together, ancient
in our ways. But age is a wrinkled
masquerade. ‘Old clothes upon old sticks
to scare a bird,’ as Yeats wrote, at sixty,
a mere stripling. We seem sole survivors
of our youth and prime – so many dead
have fallen by the way.
‘It is the most humble day of my life,’ Rupert Murdoch
Beech trees, in full leaf, more than a hundred years
high in the park a street away from here,
rise sheer like raggedy cliffs, a last hurrah
of pragmatic philanthropy – like Rome
before the fall – amid the indifferent
splendour of empire: town halls designed
like palaces, museums like town halls.
It dies spluttering in Flanders mud, choking
in dugouts on Gallipoli’s cliffs.
Rupert Murdoch’s dad,
One of my favourites poems is Dover Beach.
I read it first at school when I was fifteen.
It seemed a fine thing to have written –
evocative, erudite, sonorous,
personal. Matthew Arnold, the advocate
of ‘sweetness and light’, honeymooned abroad
the year of the Great Exhibition.
Returning to England they stayed the night
at the Lord Warden Hotel – before taking
the train to London – no doubt to recover
from the paddle steamer that ferried them
across the English Channel,
We have moved once to accommodate the tide
on this August strand, crowded with many
who otherwise would have been in the Algarve
or on some island in the Aegean.
At least the sands are free this year of the Christians
whose jocular misanthropy of games
of tug o’ war takes up so much space.
High tide is still nine minutes away,
and the beach here rises just perceptibly –
but ramparts have gone, and a castle keep.
Someone has placed a child’s spade in the sand
guessing where the flow will end,
At the edge of the waves, as the tide flows
and the beach is gradually deserted,
a young woman wearing a hijab,
dressed for a rainy day at the seaside,
watches, concerned, as her grandfather,
a perfunctory beard on his long
Mughal chin, smiling, with horn-rimmed glasses,
in his Ralph Lauren green and white polo shirt,
trousers rolled high, up to his knees in water,
using a Kashmiri technique he has seen
on YouTube, casts – into the sky –
The purple, jagged rocks on the island’s shore
were molten lava from volcanoes –
mere craters for aeons now – across the straits,
and limestone boulders in the hinterland
the slow detritus of the last ice age.
RAF Typhoons have flown from their air base,
ten miles or so from here, every day,
leaving the island with their stormy thunder,
over the mountainous Llyn Peninsula
out into the north east Atlantic,
as if it were quite another sea.
At the end of a dull August afternoon,
two little girls, sisters perhaps, in hijabs,
and a stocky boy of ten or so,
and two women, probably their mother
and grandmother, dressed in woollen hijabs
and abayas, are preparing to picnic.
They lay out a tartan rug, and Tesco bags,
on that part of the Green closed to vehicles:
between the low stone wall – beyond which
is the narrow walk along the sea wall,
and occasional notices of bye laws
strictly prohibiting the feeding of gulls –
Caernavon Bay is below, and to the west
the Irish Sea. The restive winds and waves
are lulled now to a breath, to a swell.
In the distance the London-Holyhead train
crosses the causeway. A multi-decked ferry
from Dublin is entering the harbour.
After the Druids hid, and the Romans left,
there came a multitude of saints, mostly
martyrs, not infrequently princesses,
renowned in death for healing the heart’s anguish.
St Gwenfaen – ‘Blessed White Rock’ –
THE ABUNDANT DARK
PEN BARRAS PASS
PEN BARRAS PASS
SIX DEGREES: THE MAY BLITZ, LIVERPOOL 1941
OLD EUROPE'S SLOW DEMISE