Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
I raise the blind of the small dormer window.
A night of rain has filled the cast iron gutter.
A jackdaw is perched on the rim sipping.
Suddenly the bird lifts off to join
a clattering of jackdaws mobbing
a buzzard. We are two hundred feet
above the littoral – once under sea
but now mostly pastoral land,
the fields a dull gold in the autumn dawn.
The shore is a mile away – but opening
the window brings the waves’
In the gardens of the Premier’s palace
with its white Baroque facade there are
children’s swings and a red roundabout.
The linden trees the old Archduke planted
though leafless are evergreen with outbursts,
festoons of mistletoe, their berries
opalescent in the gentle wintry light.
A dozen or so mistle thrushes graze
amongst the leaf mould and peck in the branches –
but one, perched at the top of a tree, sings
its trilling, boundless, woodwind airs as if all
of the provinces were quiet and listening.
His new apartment was in a converted
eighteenth century farmhouse stranded
in a nineteenth century coastal town that,
as is the way of things by the accident
of geography, had become a prosperous port
and then declined. The back way in was along
a sloping path through an unkempt garden
then down narrow steep slate steps – slippery
that day with leaf mould. In the twilight,
two Waitrose bags-for-life in each hand,
he slipped, falling neatly on his backpack.
However,
Although elsewhere they must compete with tall men
from Senegal selling faux Gucchi bags
and middle aged Roma women hunched like
supplicants as they beg with their cardboard cups,
short, slight Bangladeshi men of all ages
have cornered the market, on the always
crowded bridge, with selfie sticks, lovers’ locks
that illegally litter the rails, and a cache
of small umbrellas for wet, cruising tourists.
South is the church of La Salute with its
whorls, bell towers,
There are the Biennale’s Big Beasts, of course –
this year David Hockney’s ’82 Portraits
and 1 Still Life’ at the Ca’ Pesaro (each
painted in three days) and, at Palazzo
Grassi and Punta Della Dogana,
Damien Hirst’s ‘Treasures from the Wreck
of the Unbelievable’, which took ten years –
the pavilions in the Giardini
and the Arsenale; the freebies
in rented palaces and tenements.
And there are the abiding grand masters,
the Titians, Tinterettos,
On the island of Burano, where women,
sitting at their front doors for the light, make lace
and men fish in the lagoon, and houses
are painted the profound colours of sun and sea,
there is a family owned restaurant
Da Romano (opposite the headquarters
of the Communist Party) whose first owner
encouraged those painters rejected
for the first Biennale to hang their work
on his walls – since when artists of all kinds
have come: Miro, for example, Matisse,
SIX DEGREES: THE MAY BLITZ, LIVERPOOL 1941
WINTER
WINTER
WINTER
NO LESS LIQUID