Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
‘But the worst mistake I made was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-semitism.’ Ezra Pound
Sitting in a traghetto, Olga Rudge
from Ohio and Ezra Pound from
Idaho – together fifty years,
from concert violinist to poet’s helpmate,
poet maker to fascist propagandist,
he, typically, with stick, wide brimmed hat,
floppy collar, she, wearing woollen gloves,
left hand clutching a large, canvas bag, right hand
a carefully folded scarf, dressed, like any
elderly woman,
'East End Girl, Dancing The Lambeth Walk' Photo by Bill Brandt
He’s set it up, of course. Or, rather, framed it.
There’d be no feigning this young woman’s delight
in being ‘free and easy’ and doing
‘as you darn well pleasy’. She’s got her best blouse on,
with shoulder puffs, her sister’s shoes, which fit her now,
black ankle socks and shoulder length, unpermed hair
freshly washed – and waved,
I am a gumshoe tailing mortality,
a shammus staking out history,
death’s sleuth. The past has bequeathed itself,
its deceiving legacy of meanings.
Here is the evidence, thronging the cramped,
provincial streets – the line of a wall,
family remembrance, an ancient name.
Before terraces and villas, before
canal and railway, under pavements
and metalled roads, beneath fields is lost heathland,
a forsaken brook. There are only stones
and ghosts and the heart’s testimony – childhood,
ambition,
The silence woke her. Beyond the locked door
by now her maids should be chattering
in that harsh tongue. She went to the window.
Even the gulls on the battlements were mute.
And no guards on the ramparts, nobody
in the bailey. The straits were the colour
of the emerald at her neck – her father’s
wedding gift. A barque moved edgily
through the sands. Its pennants spoke of home.
The island’s coast was clear in the sun.
She imagined the light summer wind
stirring its fecund,
i
Rome’s legionnaires quarried its sandstone cliffs
and Ptolemy put the Dee on the map.
William the Conqueror, in winter,
force-marched his army over the Pennines
to reach the river and waste the town – the last
to submit. For eighteen years, Prince Gryfyd
ap Cynan, shut in the keep, heard only
the river’s voice, dyfrdwy, dyfrdwy.
Parliament’s forces sent fire rafts downstream
to purge besieged citizens. On its banks,
Dee Estuary, Gayton ©SCES 2009
The sands now are out in the estuary
beyond a multitude of reeds and a
labyrinth of runnels, nearer Wales than
England. We walk along the old sandstone
seawall, side by side, looking up as we talk
towards that startling, empty horizon
– midway between Point of Air and Hilbre.
What confidence in the future to build
a sea defence as far as the next parish!
We make way for joggers and dog walkers:
at Cottage Lane,
He came in winter, buzzing by the stove.
She fed him crumbs and butter. She was very
lonely. She liked his talk of summer,
grew perceptive as a fly. But in June,
when she still saw nothing, she squeezed her fist
and heard him scream. “I am the universal
suffering man, a sacrifice in
an empty room, reduced to a shadow
on a public wall, tearing my way
to the top in the bathhouse.” She called him
Gabriel. The night she was born bombs blitzed seeds
in her brain,
At dawn, a white jogger ran along a side road
beyond the budget hotel’s high, spiked railings.
So the neighbourhood was safe. But for whom?
Later, beneath the barbed wire topped wall
of the dentist’s opposite – a notice warned
of armed response – half a dozen or so black men gathered
in ones and twos. Some had crude boards announcing
their crafts: brick layer, gardener. Sometimes a pick-up stopped.
The men moved forward. There was talk with the baas.
With the six o’clock news on Thursdays,
Uncle Tom, smelling of sweat and sawdust, brought
the Dandy – and the Beano! Unlooked-for,
like a lodger, in the bare, spared room over
the hall of brasses and ‘Off Valpariso’,
bachelor Tom had no more substance
than Lord Snooty or Desperate Dan.
He had been gassed twice and died of bronchitis
the year the King died of cancer. I lost
his chisels, which he honed but never used,
one by one in the garden.
Marooned for three years, Ben Gunn was
‘sore for Christian diet’. He dreamt of cheese,
toasted mostly.
Doctor Livesey always had about him
a piece of Parmesan in a snuffbox.
When he heard about the dreams, he said,
‘Well, that’s for Ben Gunn!’
But we never find out if the ‘half mad maroon’ savours
the King of Cheeses.
Maybe he eats it and thinks of Cheddar.
I was walking up the Farnham Road in Slough.
I passed an off-licence run by Sikhs,
TOWARDS A DEFINITION
TOWARDS A DEFINITION
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS