Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
The harbour breakwater built from limestone blocks
was the longest that the Admiralty
had commissioned. How important Ireland seemed!
On the Country Park lake sown with lilies
an old man sails his battleship. The lake
was a man-made pond that served the brickworks,
built to make the harbour buildings that are dressed
in the limestone quarried from the crags
beside which visitors park their cars.
A grass path leads through heather and gorse
down to low cliffs above the pebble shore.
Beside the first angle in the zigzag steps
that descend steeply to the lighthouse –
where I have stopped to rest lungs and knees
and vow again this will be the last –
unique to this place on our planet
a fleawort is growing, its flowerheads
like miniature sun flowers. A red beaked chough
calls from the heathland above – pyrrhocorax,
pyrrhocorax. I can see Ireland from here –
the hills and mountains south of Dublin –
On the coast road across the straits the blue flash
of an ambulance appears, then disappears
behind a stand of trees and a barn.
The mainland late morning is so pellucid
one might almost count the dry stones in the walls
that mark the fields, climb past the sparse woods
and delineate the cropped moorlands
from the mountain tops. A cannon thud
starts the regatta of red sailed dinghies.
They scud and tack on the silvery straits,
their spinnakers burgeoning vainly.
Yesterday was New Year’s Eve and the fountain
was drained to prevent too much merriment.
So the bronze, nude young ladies disport themselves
in dry, cold air. The equestrian statue
of Maria Theresa, mother
of sixteen, and the last of the Holy
Roman Empresses appears unamused,
though whether by the municipality’s
actions or the girls’ appears unclear.
Last month’s heavy snow remains in small,
sheltered drifts behind occasional trees.
What was an Hungarian aristocrat’s
formal palace garden in the French style
has become –
The guard detachment for the presidential
palace – an NCO and four privates –
arrives in a taxi cab at ten a.m.
in front of our boutique hotel (with its own
micro brewery). They march – in somewhat
Ruritanian uniforms, rifles
shouldered – beside the high, concrete-faced wall
of what is now a public park and once
was the palace’s formal gardens before
the maps were redrawn. Some time later
we watch the high stepping sentry-go
through the ornate iron gates –
In the summer of 1913, the last
Habsburg Emperor made a state visit
to Pressburg – later, after The Treaty
of Versailles, renamed Bratislava.
One photograph shows his open carriage
stopped in front of the Pressburg Yeshiva,
whose students came from every part
of the Empire. Franz Josef leans forward
to speak to Rabbi Akiva Sofer,
whose great grandfather founded the school –
two dynasties talking briefly together.
During the rule of the Communist Party
most of the erstwhile Jewish quarter was razed
to build a four lane bridge across the Danube.
A SHORT HISTORY
EZRA POUND IN VENICE
A SHORT HISTORY
WISHES
WISHES