Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
The fox came to his patio his first night
at the absurdly named Augustus Gardens.
The beginnings of emphysema –
slight punishment for nearly sixty years
of cigarettes – had forced the exchange
of a fifth floor city centre apartment,
with a view of the quays, for a ground floor
suburban residential home ensuite,
and the abandonment of decades of vice
with Passing Cloud, Lucky Strike and Gitanes.
He had been weary but sleepless;
‘…a very stable genius…’
DONALD J. TRUMP, Tweet 6.1.18.
One of the prints hanging in my grandmother’s
bedroom was Waterhouse’s ‘Echo
and Narcissus’. In a bosky, rather
English landscape, Narcissus and Echo –
before he became a flower and she a sound –
lie and sit respectively: she entranced with him,
and he with himself in the slow brook.
As a boy I thought it a picture
of a good looking chap and a pretty girl
with water and lilies,
I watched the TV parade of affluent
(and mostly public school) chancers, liars,
fantasists, hypocrites, law-breakers
vie to top each other’s warmed-up clichés
and self-serving platitudes. The social
and economic future dystopia most
seemed to desire would, they assured us,
bring out the British best in all of us,
just like the Blitz. I thought of bomb-razed
building lots in major cities still empty –
and a tale a cabby told me years ago,
taxiing me from the railway station.
Though we are not quite half way through November
four poppies are blooming in the front garden.
Papaver orientale: voluptuous,
shell-pink; stamens a dark heliotrope;
a cultivar by Cedric Morris, artist
and plantsman, who searched Suffolk’s hedgerows and fields
for common poppies with softer colours –
that simple weed the usual scoundrels
have made a shibboleth of belonging.
A night of wind and rain has downed all but one
in the narrow border, where sedum,
This October’s high water has almost reached
the top of the sea wall, its lapping
silenced by two oafish nabobs on jet skis –
iconoclasts shattering the seascape
of the Straits. Rain clouds along the mainland
are lifting, greyness lightening, slowly
becoming white – revealing early Autumn’s
gradual alchemy. Two porpoises
surface briefly out in the deepest channel,
swimming, in the remnants of the Gulf Stream,
from Cardigan Bay to Liverpool Bay.
As the tide drains northwards over Lavan Sands
from the unexpected south a cold breeze blows.
My first, and, so far, only – and that minor –
cardiac infarction fell on the date
of the sixty fourth anniversary
of The Battle of Cable Street, when the Jews
and the Irish stuffed Mosley and his Blackshirts,
the Old Wykehamist and his numbskulls,
the Daily Mail’s darling, a Great White Hope.
***
The consultant – of the old, aloof school,
and treated with awe by theatre staff –
liked Benny Goodman for accompaniment.
ON THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NATO ALLIANCE
MARTIN MERE WETLAND, LANCASHIRE
2019
2019
2019