Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
For Pat Rogerson
‘To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower…’
AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE, William Blake
From sixteen hundred miles away a friend,
on the southern most edge of Iberia,
with the Maghreb below the horizon,
and all of the South Atlantic beyond,
sends me a photograph of low dunes,
a cobalt sky, and flaxen sands that stretch
almost out of sight – and texts me to say
she imagines the poem I might write there.
Under the plum tree, in the sun, an old man,
reads the last paragraphs of ‘Wuthering Heights’.
‘My walk home was lengthened by a diversion
in the direction of the kirk. When beneath
its walls, I perceived decay had made progress,
even in seven months: many a window
showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates
jutted off here and there, beyond the right line
of the roof, to be gradually worked off
in coming autumn storms.’ From one of the branches
of the tree metal feeders hang with seeds.
The ditches along Duttons Lane have been full
much of March – because February-fill-dyke
was mostly dry, almost Spring for days.
The glinting water is dark as black tea,
brown as bitter beer. Along Acres Lane
the hawthorn hedgerows are beginning to green.
We park as near the school as we can.
The leafy lane is overflowing with song.
As we walk through the green security gates
a westerly wind brings the roars of lions
from the zoo nearby.
Once Parliament was in recess – both Houses
of Hypocrisy on their long summer hols –
in the basement of an office block near
King’s Cross (where you catch the Hogwarts Express)
one Saturday morning in July,
three journalists, watched by two technicians
from GCHQ, spent three hours to save
the Government’s face, and The Guardian’s,
by destroying hard drives with drills and grinders,
circuit boards whose data – from the exiled
whistleblower Edward Snowden – was
replicated throughout the Americas.
The summer LA hosted the Olympics –
the year the UK miner’s strike began,
and comrades became enemies, and things sure
fell irredeemably apart – we went
on a four day tour of mostly ancient Greece:
Corinth Canal; the amphitheatre
at Epidaurus; Nafplio’s converted
mosque; the Lion Gate at Mycenae;
Olympia’s temples; Delphi’s omphalos.
Swallows had made their mud nests in the eaves
of the three concrete hotels we stayed at,
the birds’ tender flights twittering omens
for travellers who were,
From the west front of this Restoration house –
built a century before the demand
for coal brought, in hearing of the brocaded
drawing room, the daily clank and hiss
of the pit head winding gear and the pumps
keeping the seams dry, and, in direct
line of sight of the spacious steps, the slagheap’s
incremental growth on land previously
considered worthless so not purchased –
was a view, across the shallow valley
and extensive pasture land, of benign hills.
GUESTS OF LIFE
CONTAGION
GUESTS OF LIFE
THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE
THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE