Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
I am standing near the loud evangelists
by the medieval sandstone cross that marks
the centre of this erstwhile Roman camp,
Castra Deva, base for two centuries
of the Twentieth, Valeria Victrix –
streets south and west to the Dee, east to forests
and the lush plain, north to sandstone outcrops.
The Presbyterian rhetoric
of Damnation and Sweet Jesus keeps
other spectators away, gives me
a clear view of the midsummer,
pagan parade –
Though they lived for decades no more than a block
from each other in Greenwich Village – one
in Washington Square, the other Patchin Place –
there is no record they ever met,
Hopper the painter, Cummings the poet.
They would have thought that they had nothing
in common – the real, the lyrical.
But, hey, what do geniuses know?
They may have passed each other on some sidewalk,
on Sixth Avenue or Bleecker Street,
or in the subway on 9th,
As we travelled back from a London weekend
in the Quiet Zone on the afternoon express
three very young, head scarved mothers nursed
their newborns and chattered softly all the way.
At Chester they headed for the North Wales train.
Not far from the Great Orme Tramway Station,
Church Walks, Llandudno, and near St Georges,
is a three storey detached house whose ground floor
has been a synagogue for a century
and more. Lubavitch rabbis officiate.
Above the shul,
Our house, the street’s first, was built epochs ago
on Cheshire pastureland. There has been nothing
for history to note here – only births, deaths,
the occasional fire and break-in,
and marriages at the Methodist Church
almost opposite us. Empires collapsed
from within – Austro-Hungarian,
British, French, German, Ottoman, Russian,
and Soviet. Here only the seasons came,
and bed-sits, then gentrification.
Now the St Petersburg Resurrection
A Cappella Choir – founded post-Gorbachev
to sing the liturgy in concert halls –
We flew late, on the year’s busiest Friday,
to Toulouse. As we drove in the hire car
through Haut-Garonne and Midi-Pyrénées
into Gascony, its rolling hills green
with August’s growth, the sun was setting –
the burgeoning fields of sunflowers paused, bats
swooped before the car like twilit angels.
As we topped each rise we could see the glow
fade in the west above the Bay of Biscay.
We arrived in darkness at the pension.
The patronne gave us supper on the terrace –
The timetabled rumble of the Northern Line
between King’s Cross and Euston stations
moves beneath the British Library’s
‘Harry Potter: A History of Magic’.
Aficionados like my granddaughter
are oblivious, focused on the wonder
of ancient texts and modern images,
the alchemy of ink, pigments, alphabets
transformed into art. Between trains there is
the clip-clopping of Centaur’s hooves.
We walk to King’s Cross to see Platform
9¾. People are queuing
to take selfies beneath the sign attached
to the wall next to The Harry Potter shop.
One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.
‘Memory,’ W.B. Yeats
Thomas Cubitt, London’s master builder, built
Woburn Buildings (on the Duke of Bedford’s land);
a pedestrianised street from Woburn Place
to what is now Euston Road, and abutting
St Pancras New Church with its caryatids
and ionic columns.
“Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn
filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes
and exclaim,’Good God! Here I am again!’…?” Virginia Woolf
The Woolfs’ house was on the south side of the Square.
From there the couple ran the Hogarth Press.
The place was razed by a stray bomb in the Blitz –
but they had moved, the year the war started,
to their house in Sussex near the river Ouse.
Two of the rooms in the British Museum
I always visit are numbers 7
and 8, ‘Assyria: Nimrud’. Named,
in modern times, for the Biblical Nimrod
the three thousand year old city of Kalhu
is twenty miles south of Mosul. On display
from the palace of Ashurnasirpal
are gypsum panels, carved reliefs, products –
faultlessly sculpted – from a master’s workshop.
They are, for the most part, pristine, and portray
absolute kingship, its circumstance, pomp,
and prisoners’ heads severed after battle.
I have made my English journey – by rail,
Chester to Euston return – maybe,
on average, three times a year since I was four.
It is like revisiting a ragged
museum of serendipitous
keepsakes: Canada Geese on Cheshire ponds;
GEC become Alstom in Stafford:
wind turbines and mobile phone towers
jostling radio masts near Rugby;
concrete cows in Milton Keynes; Ovaltine
in Kings Langley; Watford’s mosques;
and, anywhere, marshalling yards of
derelict rolling stock,
THE FORK IN THE ROAD
THE OUTING
THE OUTING
THE FORK IN THE ROAD
STAPLETON COTTON 1ST VISCOUNT COMBERMERE