Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
With her new camera, a Christmas present,
and with the intuitive surety,
at not quite nine, of how to make a picture,
she makes a sunlit panorama of Pest
from the Fisherman’s Bastion in Buda –
a Magyar edifice of walls and towers
built in the nineteen hundreds to celebrate
the permanence of the Habsburg Empire.
In a wall’s shadow she shows me the screen,
and what she has angled by chance. I note
the parliament building, the Great Synagogue,
Formerly Buda’s town hall, courthouse, prison
and school, newly refurbished throughout
and re-named The House of Wisdom, it is now
bookshop, café, bistro, conference centre
and an esoteric museum –
in an eclectic city of museums
ranging from Marzipan through to Murder.
The refurbishment finally repaired
all the damage done by stray Red Army
artillery shells, and uncovered stonework –
exhibited behind glass now – not seen
since the Ottoman Empire ruled Hungary.
Eschewing the conundrum of hailing a cab –
On a snowy January Saturday
we were delayed for six hours or so
at Ferenc Liszt airport, Budapest.
Except for the purchase of a Pick sausage
and a small box of Gerbeaud chocolates
in Heinemann Travel Value/Duty Free
we spent our time in the Leroy Bistro
with its international fast food cuisine
from nigiri sushi to Wiener Schnitzel.
From my seat in the bistro I could see
continually an advert, a fifteen
by forty feet video with,
‘O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.’
NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN, W.B. Yeats
Where the four main thoroughfares of our erstwhile
Roman city meet, a many-legged dragon,
in vivid gold and red, curved and reared, to gongs,
drums, fire crackers on a February day.
Dancers whirled long white ribbons, a whorl
of streamers like a wild, wispy sky.
This was the year of the omnivorous Pig,
Before the marsh on the coastal plain was drained –
to turn the dark, rich glacial soil
into the broad fields of market gardens,
selling fresh produce south to the port city
burgeoning daily from mouth to mouth –
the mere was vast, eight square miles and more.
Family groups wandered the margins –
to fish, collect eggs, snare birds. Settlements
became hamlets, became villages:
cutting the reeds for thatching, cutting the peat
for cooking fires from the ice age bogland.
Jimmy Buchanan, self-made whisky tycoon,
became Lord Woolavington of Lavington,
Sussex, in January ’22.
He acquired his peerage, it was said,
with a post-dated cheque signed ‘Woolavington’.
To celebrate he hosted a lavish
grouse-shooting party that Glorious Twelfth
on his moorland estate near the Moray Firth.
To prepare for the party, heather had been scorched
so young grouse might fatten on the new shoots.
The corpses of polecats and pine martens
had been hung on gates and from fence posts,
HOME TIME
TO SEE A WORLD
HOME TIME
UNDER THE PLUM TREE
TO SEE A WORLD