Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
A sudden heavy shower of summer rain
slows the early evening motorway
to a blood red blur of brake lights.
In my mirror, I see two cars collide,
career across the lanes – and others stop,
receding out of sight into the downpour…
I am thirteen and a half and tall for my age –
the year of Hungary and Suez;
am sitting on the red leather back seat
of an almost straight-from-the-showroom
Morris Minor (in the inexorable green),
Above me, on the slates, pigeons are cooing –
and some already billing, though winter
has many weeks to run. Like a shadow play,
sunlight silhouettes them on the wall
the study window faces. From the desk,
I have looked up, over three decades,
to tease, from bricks, reluctant words of love.
Before the allotments were sold off,
by the railway, there were pigeon lofts.
At dawn, out of a livid sky, birds
would home with only guessed at effort,
A dirty night in the Menai Straits…
a paddle steamer on a sudden sandbank –
pounding itself, pounding itself, pounding…
seas silencing the hullabaloo.
For the last time, the lifeboat pulls for the shore.
Two lovers, roped to the mast, drown their joy.
All turned to chalk on the dark sea bed.
Far, far above was the muffled cry
of gulls, the cormorant’s swift shadow.
Ram, The Aberdeen Bestiary
i
A swan, standing, preening itself obliviously
in the nearside lane of the overpass,
diverts the chance commuters into
storytellers for the day.
ii
One morning, perched on a bird table, a kestrel
was tearing a head.
A pheasant, late in the afternoon, whirred from the terrace
and over the privet.
At twilight from the hills across the Straits, a sudden
drift of smoke – then a fire’s deep orange eye blinked.
We talked of cruising the Nile; of moon rise and sun set,
of the narrow compass of the earth’s curve;
the river pilots’ open armed, hand-on-heart salaams;
and the stars rushing through the night.
Later and sleepless in the early hours,
I kept watch at the bedroom window.
The hotel sign lit a faded Union flag,
threadbare at its outer edges.
Dedham Vale, John Constable, 1802
Dedham Vale, John Constable, 1828
September touches the Vale like a sigh,
Citizens falter in the purposeful street.
Above the fumes of money, confusion,
from the leaden gaps of sky comes a murmuring,
a sigh like breathing, pulsing of blood.
Swans are flying on unhurried wing beats,
necks as prows towards horizons. Glinting
like new coins, pedestrians’ faces
turn skyward… The city smells of warm stone.
Sun illuminates the prison’s granite.
Thrust through the bars of a cell window
are a pair of hands, palms upward. Whatever
they have done,
Year of austerity’s end when Atlee
and the dying King launched the festive concrete
of the second half of the twentieth
century. That spring, at Uncle George’s
hotel, we had chicken. Labour defeats
tumbled from the wireless in the chintzy
lounge. I read Five Go Off On Holiday
and Biggles In The Orient. I heard
a family playing tennis, laughter
and plimsolls, stared at a girl sunbathing
by the empty pool. I was Julian
taking command, Biggles shooting up Japs,
For all the pretty curtains and the tasteful prints
and the carers’ determined bonhomie,
this is the house of the mad and my mother
a permanent resident.
Sane, she was aggressive. She is docile now.
She was unsociable, sane. Now she smarms –
at folk she’d once have considered common.
She thinks I am dead or my long dead father.
You’re a nurse or her daughter. Alzheimer’s
is the ultimate in wish fulfilment.
The deranged have no beauty or dignity,
PAINTING PARADISE
ORGANISED CRIMES
PAINTING PARADISE
WHAT IS IT THAT STARTS A POEM?
ARS POETICA