Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
‘O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.’
NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN, W.B. Yeats
Where the four main thoroughfares of our erstwhile
Roman city meet, a many-legged dragon,
in vivid gold and red, curved and reared, to gongs,
drums, fire crackers on a February day.
Dancers whirled long white ribbons, a whorl
of streamers like a wild, wispy sky.
This was the year of the omnivorous Pig,
Before the marsh on the coastal plain was drained –
to turn the dark, rich glacial soil
into the broad fields of market gardens,
selling fresh produce south to the port city
burgeoning daily from mouth to mouth –
the mere was vast, eight square miles and more.
Family groups wandered the margins –
to fish, collect eggs, snare birds. Settlements
became hamlets, became villages:
cutting the reeds for thatching, cutting the peat
for cooking fires from the ice age bogland.
Jimmy Buchanan, self-made whisky tycoon,
became Lord Woolavington of Lavington,
Sussex, in January ’22.
He acquired his peerage, it was said,
with a post-dated cheque signed ‘Woolavington’.
To celebrate he hosted a lavish
grouse-shooting party that Glorious Twelfth
on his moorland estate near the Moray Firth.
To prepare for the party, heather had been scorched
so young grouse might fatten on the new shoots.
The corpses of polecats and pine martens
had been hung on gates and from fence posts,
At Chester Zoo, where conservation rules
and breeding programmes thrive, there are three
Asiatic lions – two females
and a male, without progeny as yet –
in the old African lion compound,
one of Zoo’s first fairly spacious
enclosures. There is sand, grass, mature trees –
reflecting the creature’s historical range
from the Euphrates to the Indus,
from the Levant to the Bay of Bengal.
They have been hunted almost to death,
and are teetering on extinction’s edge
confined to a forest in Gujarat.
Guarded from the people who elected them
and pay their wages, behind the high walls
of what was a country estate whose owners
hunted foxes for the fun, and answered
only to death and to penury,
the heads of state, with drums and with trumpets,
celebrate their fealty to weaponry –
while Australia’s forests are burning,
and bergs slip from glaciers into oceans
north and south, and melt discreetly, swiftly,
and Victoria Falls is silent, dry,
the plunging waters that were The Smoke
that Thunders,
Beneath the rows of limes edging to yellow,
the air, tangible with precipitation,
appears almost emerald, a sea green.
In the border beside the high wall, which marks
the tended gardens from the unkempt woods,
there are blooms still. A bee gathers nectar –
and the black, turned earth ripples slowly
as a mole forages in the underworld.
***
Beyond ruined Troy, and north of Paradise
abandoned, from where our words began,
The fox came to his patio his first night
at the absurdly named Augustus Gardens.
The beginnings of emphysema –
slight punishment for nearly sixty years
of cigarettes – had forced the exchange
of a fifth floor city centre apartment,
with a view of the quays, for a ground floor
suburban residential home ensuite,
and the abandonment of decades of vice
with Passing Cloud, Lucky Strike and Gitanes.
He had been weary but sleepless;
‘…a very stable genius…’
DONALD J. TRUMP, Tweet 6.1.18.
One of the prints hanging in my grandmother’s
bedroom was Waterhouse’s ‘Echo
and Narcissus’. In a bosky, rather
English landscape, Narcissus and Echo –
before he became a flower and she a sound –
lie and sit respectively: she entranced with him,
and he with himself in the slow brook.
As a boy I thought it a picture
of a good looking chap and a pretty girl
with water and lilies,
I watched the TV parade of affluent
(and mostly public school) chancers, liars,
fantasists, hypocrites, law-breakers
vie to top each other’s warmed-up clichés
and self-serving platitudes. The social
and economic future dystopia most
seemed to desire would, they assured us,
bring out the British best in all of us,
just like the Blitz. I thought of bomb-razed
building lots in major cities still empty –
and a tale a cabby told me years ago,
taxiing me from the railway station.
Though we are not quite half way through November
four poppies are blooming in the front garden.
Papaver orientale: voluptuous,
shell-pink; stamens a dark heliotrope;
a cultivar by Cedric Morris, artist
and plantsman, who searched Suffolk’s hedgerows and fields
for common poppies with softer colours –
that simple weed the usual scoundrels
have made a shibboleth of belonging.
A night of wind and rain has downed all but one
in the narrow border, where sedum,
THE COLSTON BUN
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
A SORT OF EDEN
A SORT OF EDEN
PHILLIS WHEATLEY: 1753-1784