Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
We drove towards the River Dee – down walled lanes
with rhododendrons festooning the sandstone,
their attic blooms in imperial colours –
to visit a doughty friend convalescing,
from two knee replacements, in Seize The Day,
a recently opened upmarket care home.
As we turned into the drive, I realised
that this, long before rebuilding, was where
my mother had first trained to be a nurse –
sixteen, with her friend, Belle. They cared for children
with TB from the Liverpool slums.
i.m. Samuel Selzer
He was never sure if it had been a joke
when the police arrested him for being,
he learned later, Jack the Ripper,
even though the last murder had been
a dozen years before, and he himself
had been eight and far away – or just
a lesson for yet another alien
wandering Whitechapel as if he had
a right to be lost in a pea souper.
Fresh from the Hamburg boat docked at Tilbury,
Where the Menai Straits are at their narrowest,
between two bluffs, Thomas Telford chose to build
his one span suspension bridge, high enough
for tall ships to pass. The two towers,
exposed to the tides, were built of limestone blocks
from the Penmon quarries on the coast
north of here. Caernavon Castle had been built
from Penmon stone – and blocks were shipped to Dublin
to line the Liffey with wharfs and quays.
Telford, the ‘Colossus of Roads’, was reared
in penury –
By our side gate the old laburnum – whose wood,
in time, may make a chanter or a flute –
is in bloom. I look up through its branches.
There is a little azure and smidgens
of green – and droplets, ringlets, links, chains
of cascading yellow, a torrent of gold.
***
Our Edwardian neighbourhood fills
with the machined roar of twin turbofans.
An Airbus Beluga – more Arctic whale
than Caspian sturgeon –
For Sizwe Vilakazi
ROBBEN ISLAND, CAPE TOWN
Except when the Atlantic fog surprises,
from high ground in the city the island
is present like a leviathan,
its lights at night like white phosphorous,
a place of banishment since the first ships,
among seals and penguins.
DISTRICT SIX, CAPE TOWN
Razing its streets, clearing this cosmopolis
of Asians, atheists,
The incoming tide brings shoals of mackerel fry.
Herring gulls, perhaps a hundred, more,
young among them in their mottled plumage,
are yelling at the water’s edge, feeding
in frenzy as the small waves scatter.
Far out on the low, narrow, wooden jetty
my small family leans over to marvel
at the fishes before landfall. At my back
is the white crescent of hotels, the town,
the estuary, the mountains, sun setting.
They cross the beach, granddaughter running ahead,
ORGANISED CRIMES
ALL THIS IS BUT A DREAM
ALL THIS IS BUT A DREAM
ALL THIS IS BUT A DREAM
ACROSS THE ESTUARY