Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
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,
Flint Castel, Samuel & Nathaniel Buck, 1742
On liberty’s last morning, he said mass
in the Great Tower – the chapel was cold
as winter. August’s sun warmed the rebels
riding along the estuary shore,
their drums silent. He watched from the walls.
At his back,
This March day is replete with the bright warmth
of spring and ewes bleating for their lambs.
Cropped, walled grass rolls like a green, chequered sea.
The name translates: ‘Hillock of the black grove,
the dark cell’. The sacred trees have gone:
with the Druids, out-run by Rome’s legions;
and the wheat fields, which fed all of Cymru
before the Plantagenets came. High ground
and megalith survive: sign-posted, fenced.
A passage of shale slabs opens on a round
chamber,
PARADISE ISLAND, BAHAMAS
The sting ray slipped from the azure surface
of the narrow, empty sound, its wings
and tail so large and swimming in the air
for what seemed so long, we stared, speechless,
and, after it had gone, said: ‘Did you see
what I did?’ and looked along the silver beach
for others who’d seen but no one seemed amazed.
MIRABELLA GULF, CRETE
Under the cobalt waters are mermaids,
Minoans, Cretans, Venetians, Turks, Britons,
Bernard Selzer 1917-1943
He has been dead in the African earth
my lifetime. I am old enough to be
his grandfather. He used to shadow me,
sometimes like a conscience. Was I the man
he had been?
August ’91, the Gulf War over, Kuwaiti oilwells almost saved,
Kurds beleaguered, Marsh Arabs gassed…
From Schipol’s Duty Free, slow with tourists,
to Immigration at O’Hare, slow with Croatian refugees,
seemed like a long day with an early start…
But for icebergs still loose and multiplying
along Greenland’s uncompromising coast,
the tawny, unmarked miles of tundra,
the empty, unpeopled miles…
TOWARDS A DEFINITION
TOWARDS A DEFINITION
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS