Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
We came here more than twenty five years ago
but know when we reach the Trei Archi bridge
we have gone too far and turn. (Distracted by
a young black man begging with a baseball cap
we had walked passed the sottoporto
where the curfew gates had been). We see
a man in a keppel show the entrance
to his children. Inside the Old Ghetto now
are information points, and a café
and a restaurant with kosher options.
In the New Ghetto’s spacious campo
are more eateries,
‘Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know in life.
THE STONES OF VENICE John Ruskin
Many things are forbidden in Venice:
sitting on the steps in St Mark’s Square;
hailing water taxis from water bus pontoons;
putting out food waste except on the hook
provided between the designated hours
in order to deter gabbiani;
of which there are two species, compatriots,
the black-headed gull and the herring gull,
comune and reale respectively,
Like most houses over centuries here
this one has been divided. What was its
courtyard is part of a private gallery.
A vine, planted in the yard – perhaps
in the island’s original earth before
alder pilings made the city’s foundations –
has thickened, grown on top of a wall,
almost hiding the broken bottles
embedded in cement, and then up
to our third floor balcony, covering
the pergola. The grapes are pearly small, sweet.
There is no dulling roar to baffle sounds.
We met on the first working day of the week;
married, five years later, on a Saturday;
and sailed for Ireland on the Sunday.
This Monday marks fifty two years of mostly
wedded bliss; occasional toilsome woe;
loving; giving; hard work; grace – a pack of cards
without, for the most part, the jangling jokers.
Out of the grassy plains, along the Silk Road
from Samarkand, came the colours of
anarchy, of power and passion; came
the four corners of the world,
As goldfinches begin to sing and sparrows
chirp in polyphony, and swallows,
martins, swifts hunt with grace, the palette
of attenuated gold, amber, rose
is layered along the sea’s horizon
and the sun becomes a perfect disk
in the filtering, vermilion haze.
Anonymous con trails criss-cross the compass.
A lone swimmer crawls across the bay.
The evening star, sudden as a lamp, glints
in the afterglow. A wispy rain cloud forms
and drifts away like smoke.
Five men, in orangey yellow overalls,
using long handled rollers are painting
the paddling pool – which is the size of four
tennis courts – that blue which only colour charts
show or astronauts will see. Beyond
is the limestone headland with rock-roses
amongst the scrub and fulmars nesting.
Far out to sea is a gathering,
stately and serried, of white, wind turbines.
I think of David Hockney’s iconic pools,
and of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’ –
hybrids of sculpture and paint –
THE ROPE SWING
THE ROPE SWING
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