Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
The rain has stopped. We can hear only the wind
and a swollen stream – hidden beneath
the high moor’s golden fern – rush through a culvert
under the road, which glistens, after the shower,
in an unexpected shaft of sunlight.
Rain clouds are blackening the mountains
to the west but northwards, beyond bracken
and gorse that stretches seemingly to land’s edge,
through a gap in the hills, we can see the sea,
a sunny blue, and a white ship sailing east –
too far away to recognise her flags.
Buzzards splayed their wingtips against the sun.
A Phantom entered the glacial valley,
its fuselage burning – the pilot
and crewman still at the controls, their choice made.
In school, it was story time – magical
oak woods, changelings secreted. The children
heard a rushing like oceans. Their teacher
saw the fire approach and two young men,
with a hundred years of technology,
burst upon the huddled village’s
common land… Children dreamt of foreign men
gone to dust in a golden fire for a
neighbourhood of strangers.
As fire storms travel, we are twenty miles
from the marshalling yards at Crewe, some twelve
and a half from a tracking station near
Wardle, sixish from British Nuclear
Fuels at Capenhurst and slightly more than
four from an unspecified RAF
electronic complex in Sealand – which
all must have their numbers on at least
one ICBM in a silo
east of the Urals and/or west of
the Appalachians. And so, though there may be
nuclear winter in Hoole,
A WINDY DAY, J.M.W.TURNER Tabley, the seat of Sir J.F. Leicester
They bought up land, made marriages, dispossessed
tenants and built their fortune on rents.
These commissions mark their zenith. Since then,
the estate has been sold off acre by
acre, piece by piece – one Turner remains,
the other hangs in another museum.
Some things are unchanged: in the distance,
the house’s palladian exterior
in local sandstone, the round turreted
folly on the small island in the lake –
With branch, stalk, thorns, by a dry summer’s
overgrowth obscured, in one unkempt border,
a rose – traditional, heart red – bloomed.
Over tall weeds and grasses, tangled, brittle,
I leant to pluck it, found it blown, blooded,
a bouquet of wormy petals – left it
blighted, inviolate. Where the black gate
hinged to the wall banking our garden,
coffin-sized, skeletal leaves gathered,
whispering, stones, stones. Come winter, frost fissured
bricks and luxurious, pitchy earth sprinkled.
'La Clef Des Champs,' René Magritte, 1936
When the landscape breaks, shards of painted trees,
clouds, turf cascade in crystal slabs onto
the carpet – and the landscape is there still
on the next pane. Over the brow of the rise
are the world’s kingdoms: deserts silenced
by polished bone; uneasy rooms where
sepia furniture flowers; canvas; wood;
the gallery’s wall solid as money –
asservir le bourgeoisie through draughtmanship.
‘…hardly any Jews!’, The Matabele Campaign 1896,
Colonel R.S.S. Baden-Powell, Methuen, London, 1897
The British in Africa seem always
to have verged on the comical. There was
BP chasing a Matabele girl
through bush. He was ahorse, she on foot.
In tranquillity, he sketched the scene – the girl
bare-footed and -breasted, himself at a
gallop – for publication. She escaped –
but Rhodesia was made safe for Cecil,
the continent for Aids and exploitation.
2001
Riding the F Train that August –
from Queens to Manhattan, Jamaica
Estates to Times Square – were all
of the hues and tongues and tribes and faiths.
Dead at our door, on our return,
wings stretched as if in flight,
lay a hen harrier, a female.
You chose to bury it gently
in the warm September earth.
Five thousand miles away,
From the terrace at Polesden Lacey, it was
the guttural calls caught our attention –
then sheep flowing fast over rising ground
like a pale yellow banner in the wind,
then the shepherd himself, then his dogs
flattening themselves at his command.
By the time we reached the valley bottom,
the beasts were penned – lambs from ewes,
the latter funnelled for the shearers.
The bleating drowned the whirring of the clippers.
From the high bridge over the Tweed at Kelso,
You were here last year in your mother’s womb
at this cottage high above the straits.
Now you grab for buttercups, daisies, clover,
self-heal – and edge toward sleep in the stillness
under the parasol. Ringlet butterflies
flit across the grass. Blackbirds forage
among the mulch of last autumn’s leaves
at the margin where garden and woodlands merge.
A pheasant rattles somewhere out of sight.
Watching over you is a privilege.
Some time since last year,
THE GREAT UNCONFORMITY
THE LAST TASMANIAN TIGER....
THE LAST TASMANIAN TIGER....
THE LAST TASMANIAN TIGER....
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: WINDOWS OF DISCOURSE