Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
On the coast road across the straits the blue flash
of an ambulance appears, then disappears
behind a stand of trees and a barn.
The mainland late morning is so pellucid
one might almost count the dry stones in the walls
that mark the fields, climb past the sparse woods
and delineate the cropped moorlands
from the mountain tops. A cannon thud
starts the regatta of red sailed dinghies.
They scud and tack on the silvery straits,
their spinnakers burgeoning vainly.
Yesterday was New Year’s Eve and the fountain
was drained to prevent too much merriment.
So the bronze, nude young ladies disport themselves
in dry, cold air. The equestrian statue
of Maria Theresa, mother
of sixteen, and the last of the Holy
Roman Empresses appears unamused,
though whether by the municipality’s
actions or the girls’ appears unclear.
Last month’s heavy snow remains in small,
sheltered drifts behind occasional trees.
What was an Hungarian aristocrat’s
formal palace garden in the French style
has become –
The guard detachment for the presidential
palace – an NCO and four privates –
arrives in a taxi cab at ten a.m.
in front of our boutique hotel (with its own
micro brewery). They march – in somewhat
Ruritanian uniforms, rifles
shouldered – beside the high, concrete-faced wall
of what is now a public park and once
was the palace’s formal gardens before
the maps were redrawn. Some time later
we watch the high stepping sentry-go
through the ornate iron gates –
In the summer of 1913, the last
Habsburg Emperor made a state visit
to Pressburg – later, after The Treaty
of Versailles, renamed Bratislava.
One photograph shows his open carriage
stopped in front of the Pressburg Yeshiva,
whose students came from every part
of the Empire. Franz Josef leans forward
to speak to Rabbi Akiva Sofer,
whose great grandfather founded the school –
two dynasties talking briefly together.
During the rule of the Communist Party
most of the erstwhile Jewish quarter was razed
to build a four lane bridge across the Danube.
Fearless, determined, yet circumspect, she briefly
glides, skims, and then glissades among strangers
on the ice rink in Archbishop Square.
The tannoy is broadcasting Christmas songs.
The skater coasts to ‘Chestnuts Roasting
On An Open Fire’ – music and words
by two American Jews and sung
by a man of colour from Alabama.
Before the Archbishop’s Palace – in whose
Hall of Mirrors, after Austerlitz,
Napoleon’s proxies sorted Europe,
with glitter ball diplomacy, for good –
she coasts,
It is not the winter-grey Danube flowing –
hundreds of feet below – fast to Budapest,
nor the suspension bridge – with its high rise
circular restaurant – commemorating
the failed uprising against the Nazis,
nor the outline of the Vienna Alps
fifty miles away, nor the wind turbines
covering the plain between, but the concrete
Soviet era apartment blocks
now painted white and some in pastel shades
that first catch the eye from this stronghold
on a rocky hill far above the town
on the second day of 2018.
It was 82 and humid the Sunday
before 9/11 when we walked
onto the crowded bridge from Brooklyn Heights.
Two teenage Latino-looking girls –
unsmiling, unsure, uneasy – were standing
by an insulated cart – no doubt
pushed up the walkway by some enterprising
dad or brother – filled with plastic bottles
of glistening water. The sellotaped price
was two dollars – but trade was measured
despite the weather. A guarded city
even in diversity? I thought of Hart Crane’s
‘Migrations that must need void memory,
Footballers in the park grow younger, play
longer into December nights. In my garden,
leaves decompose. Fogs rise to the window.
I see my father’s features in the glass.
Gulls are grave, funereal in their white
seriousness. Bad weather visitors,
fickle as spume-flecks, they flitter from grass
into heavy skies, craftsmen in gravity.
Winter is too human for comfort.
Natural we should shudder as darkness
drifts in sooner. Ice seasons carry home
truths on incisive air.
For Sandra Lewis
We were unsure where to put the Christmas Rose,
aka hellebore niger, you brought us
this December gone. We chose, pro tem, the room
where I write, with its two long windows.
The light the north facing one lets in
is unambiguous. The other accepts
occasional sun from late mornings
to early evenings. I write in a corner
by a wall of books. With its much travelled
piano,
I am reminded of Professor Wallofski’s
Omelette, Prince of Demark, and the rotten egg
the curate ate, watching this particular
‘peasant rogue…tear a passion to tatters’
as if each word were merely a bagatelle
on a stage the size of a tennis court.
‘Oh, what a noble mind…’ But, yoking apart,
who would wander those chill corridors,
discouraged by the guttering torches
in their sconces, where duty and hatred,
love and negligence throng in the smoky
shadows only words discombobulate –
DAY BREAKING
DAY BREAKING
SAME OLD, SAME OLD
SAME OLD, SAME OLD
SAME OLD, SAME OLD