Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Garden, Hoole © SCES 2006
For more than half our lives, we have lived
in this enigmatic, anachronistic
Victorian villa – built to look like
a Georgian farmhouse – with ashlar blocks
at three corners, the fourth unfinished.
A Valentine’s Day removal, we ate
a takeaway in the kitchen with friends.
The wife is a widow now. Our daughter
has grown, gone and visits: her childhood
still blesses the rooms sun touches through the day’s
compass.
Window, KwaZulu-Natal © SCES 2006
This is a declaration of love
on August the 6th, our anniversary.
Here is your essence: the pathos of ink
pristine on domesday parchment makes you cry –
“Ah, bless them!” you say – not only the sad,
the halt but the deluded and the unmasked.
Wisely, you leave me few pretensions.
On Hiroshima Day, I celebrate
our forty four years with ephemera:
images of figures in landscapes;
Door, Marrakech © SCES 2009
GUBBIO, WINTER 1992
Where the tourist buses turned, the Werhmacht
had murdered partisans – La Piazza
di Martiri Quaranti. The cold from the hill –
old, old rock – rose from the cathedral’s floor
into our very soles. Outside, February seemed mild,
seasoned with wood smoke. We bought a hand thrown,
hand painted jar with an ill fitting lid.
Since then: earthquakes, marriages…
GUILDFORD,
Stepping Stones, Kettlewell © SCES 2007
Lasting longer than the Thirty Years War,
than half our biblical shelf life, this marriage
has grown like coral – drops of the slain
Medusa’s blood – become, like Corallium
Nobile, a charm against fits, poison,
sorcery, whirlwind, lightning, fire, shipwreck!
From Norway’s fjords to the Cape Verde isles,
the Niger’s delta to the Orinoco’s,
reefs build, decline: the slow massing of
defunct algae,
Embrasure, Spinalonga © SCES 2003
This house is sentient, light with rapture,
replete with canny, familiar ghosts.
This house has been indifferent
to vicissitudes of human fortune:
train wreck and famine, siege and tsunami.
The grounds have diminished. From the residue,
you have made an L-shaped paradise:
rhododendron, camellia, nasturtium,
eucalyptus – a global gazetteer.
On some summer nights, the pomaded air
heavy still with heat,
They lie after loving in a shuttered room,
lit with an underwater vagueness,
replete with jasmine. They hear but
do not listen to the hoopoe calling
in the almond tree or the goats clinking
softly in the olive grove. They no longer
even hear the roar of the cicadas.
She lies in his arms. They sink into sleep,
lovers drowsing in a perfumed sea.
The spate plucks willows weeping from the banks
and careers them swirling, whether or not,
From the long window on the half landing, I saw,
almost as soon as you had filled the small bird feeders
under the pine and come inside, the big beasts land
to eat the scattered seeds – three wood pigeons, two turtle doves
and a solitary magpie – then a cat appear, the birds scramble
and you again, shooing.
From where the hawk stoops, I heard the magpie’s
irrelevant chatterings, saw a tableau of live flesh;
saw our Victorian suburb from where the airplane flies –
The tide is at its ebb. Late sun quick-silvers
the narrowed estuary, where river and sea
conflict and oyster catchers race upstream.
An ice cream van’s jingle jangle sounds
across the almost empty sands. ‘O sole
mio’… And you are suddenly there –
aged three – digging with purpose into the dusk.
Your daughter – that longed for, longed for joy –
already strives unprompted towards the sun,
scrabbling beyond the bounds of her play mat!
‘…n’aria serena doppo na tempesta!…’
How calm you are,
The Duke owned both banks. The pleasure steamer,
stuttering, washed his clay into the current,
older than property. His oak woods moved
past us into dusk. We disembarked and
strolled between lascivious, attic blooms
to where, before the Great Hall, his Grace
had let the play be set. Like smoke on summers’
nights, the plot unwound down the lawn’s gentle slope.
The crossed, cross lovers mazed each other
but we knew how it all would end neatly –
the affluent young,
Though there is no evidence that Busby
Berkeley was a descendant of Bishop
Berkeley (in spite of the Californian
connection), who would deny that George
were the spiritual, or, rather,
philosophical ancestor of Bill.
Bishop George Berkeley, John Smibert, circa 1729
Busby Berkeley circa 1935
Hundreds of girls’ legs opening in unison
is a pure if anachronistic
example of the Irish Divine’s hypothesis.
And Busby was keen on fountains too!
Fountain Scene from 'Footlight Parade',
GUESTS OF LIFE
CONTAGION
GUESTS OF LIFE
THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE
THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE