Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
We had finished the baked camembert
and begun to talk of the future
when we heard a dog fox bark up on the Downs
and went quickly into the garden.
The moon was full, large and low. The imagined,
fabricated constellations glimmered
in the polluted air. The fox was silent
or gone softly over the flints and the chalk
and all we had was the memory
of that wild sound across the long years
of settlement – like the echo of a star.
It was an iron hard January Sunday
before dawn when I left Bala – that one street,
Bible town – for the first time and forever,
a white fiver in the lining of my coat.
I shut up the rented, furnished cottage,
putting the key through the letter box.
I heard it rattle on the slate floor,
and walked down the dark track to the high street
with its single gas lamp. I had my father’s
cardboard suitcase for my clothes, my mother’s
worn music satchel for my poems.
…not Chopin’s Polonaise in A Major
that played on Radio Warsaw as
the Polish Cavalry fought the Panzers
nor the sculpture park in New York State
but a tree-lined business park for IBM
on the edge of Warwick, medieval stronghold
of Earl Richard Neville, the King Maker,
next to the town cemetery discrete
behind a hedgerow of hawthorn and yew,
with the Grand Union Canal nearby
and its Hatton Flight of locks, twenty one in
two miles, opened in 1799
when Chopin was not even a twinkle
and the six nations of the Iroquois –
The ruined, twelfth century limestone chapel
is Grade II Listed and the land owned
by the Welsh Assembly otherwise
it would have been converted into
somebody’s desirable holiday home
with views south through the empty windows
to woods and north down the moor’s sheep-cropped slope
across the sweeping, wind-surfing bay.
Who built the original chapel –
and the small side chapel with a vault
in the sixteenth century – or for what
specific purpose no one now knows.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited…
The Darkling Thrush, Thomas Hardy
I was standing at our front gate at twilight
with the people I love the most – wife,
daughter, granddaughter, each of them by turns
gossiping and bantering the way
some families do – beneath low, stormy clouds
still blush tinged from the westering sun
when we heard goose cries as if from all
compass points,
In the old stone house above the harbour,
however well sealed the windows are
against the rain and the wind, squalls invade
the chimneys and blow in the empty hearths.
The lamp at the end of the quay still shines
despite the waves spilling over the wall
and agitating the tethered lobster creels.
A surge douses the light – but wild clouds part
and a full moon shines on a sea running high.
Abruptly the turbulent clouds close –
INSPIRATION
'ANOTHER PLACE' REVISITED AT LOW WATER
IN CAMERA
'ANOTHER PLACE' REVISITED AT LOW WATER
THE TAXIDERMY