Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
For Sandra Lewis
We were unsure where to put the Christmas Rose,
aka hellebore niger, you brought us
this December gone. We chose, pro tem, the room
where I write, with its two long windows.
The light the north facing one lets in
is unambiguous. The other accepts
occasional sun from late mornings
to early evenings. I write in a corner
by a wall of books. With its much travelled
piano,
I am reminded of Professor Wallofski’s
Omelette, Prince of Demark, and the rotten egg
the curate ate, watching this particular
‘peasant rogue…tear a passion to tatters’
as if each word were merely a bagatelle
on a stage the size of a tennis court.
‘Oh, what a noble mind…’ But, yoking apart,
who would wander those chill corridors,
discouraged by the guttering torches
in their sconces, where duty and hatred,
love and negligence throng in the smoky
shadows only words discombobulate –
‘Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind…’
CATS II, A.S.J. Tessimond
With your lithe delight, at the refuge for strays
and rejects, you and she chose each other
immediately. She had a white tuft
at her throat but otherwise was truly
sable; with Egyptian eyes – emerald,
unblinking, discerning; a sycophantic
charmer; an aloof dowager; a great
mouser, night or day, bearing carcasses
as reward for those that worshipped her.
The push for Aubers Ridge had been postponed
because of rain. But the Saturday
was dry and sunny. Going up the line
in the early evening, the Munsters
stood easy at the shrine to Our Lady.
‘…in remissionem peccatorum…’
By noon, next day, nearly half were dead,
caught on the German wire Haig’s ill equipped
artillery had, once more, failed to cut.
In Mazingarbe, an industrial town
ten miles south, the British commandeered
the abattoir.
Stapleton Cotton 1st Viscount Combermere’s
equestrian statue, surrounded now
by traffic, would grace any capital.
For more than a hundred and fifty years
set before Chester Castle he rides south
towards Thomas Harrison’s Grosvenor Bridge
– once the longest single-span arch in the world –
opened by Princess Victoria.
The Viscount – soldier, politician,
diplomat – holds his feathered bicorne
at his side as if just removed in salute.
Though Combermere’s seat (once an abbey,
They would never know that the narrow lanes –
one right, up the thickly wooded hill,
the other, following the valley’s curve,
quickly out of sight – led to the same place,
and that the few houses there were shuttered.
They had stopped – the diesel puttering,
the brown exhaust fouling the summer air –
in front of the triangle of long grass,
with a glass fronted shrine at its centre,
that marked the fork in the road. The officer
searched the landscape with binoculars,
SOUTH STACK, HOLYHEAD ISLAND
THE PIER, BEAUMARIS
THE RABBI AND THE EMPEROR
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THE PIER, BEAUMARIS