Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
When I was a boy I was often taken
to the aquarium on the promenade
by the Palace Pier, Brighton – a resort
and commuter town on England’s south east coast.
It was an hour’s train journey from London
on the Pullman Brighton Belle – with its curtains
and its table lamps – restored to pre-war pomp.
My favourite tank was devoted to sea fish
found in the English Channel – teeming still
from wartime’s cessation of fishing.
There were skate and flounder,
Her previous enclosure was surrounded
by a wire mesh fence four metres high
and a low hedge, so she was used to seeing
big people from the knees up and small people
with heads only. Now she paces to and fro,
back and fore, in front of a plate glass
viewing window, as if on sentry-go.
We are a yard apart me and this fellow
being, whose shining bronze eyes slide away
each time they see mine. Every ten turns or so
she stops,
One day, after sunrise – in the time before
the ice sheets began to melt – a girl
or a boy, about twelve, carrying
an infant, walked quickly south with long strides,
stopping once to let the infant walk briefly.
At some point a woolly mammoth crossed their tracks,
and a giant sloth paused to sniff the air.
Later the young person walked back north alone.
The muddy footprints fossilised – some ten
millennia ago. The big beasts went,
Already what little sunlight there has been
each day of the new year dies a little
later in the west. Today the layers
of pale orange and gold seem to stretch
like a canopy far into the Welsh hills,
over the mountains, and the sea beyond,
as if hope were only a journey away.
Meanwhile the numbers of the sick rise
everywhere like a temperature gauge –
and those of us spared thus far, through luck
or circumspection,
One February night in ’74
the Army occupied Heathrow Airport.
The BBC’s Nine O’Clock news explained
the occupation was an exercise
in how to deal with a terrorist threat.
The new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson,
learned of the exercise from the TV,
recognised it as the dress rehearsal
of a coup against his premiership –
a coup that would have been sanctified
by an announcement from her Majesty,
an emergency government led by
her husband’s uncle,
Anti-Semitism is the demagogue’s
canard, the resort of the populist,
the calculating racist’s dog whistle,
the opportunist’s bigotry, hatred of,
and prejudice against, Jewish people.
When Alfred Dreyfus was humiliated
on the Champs de Mars there were three hundred
Jewish officers in the French Army,
ten of them generals. The real spy,
Major Esterhazy, with official
connivance, died in his bed as Count
de Voilement at ‘Holmleigh’, 21
Milton Road, Harpenden,
THE ABUNDANT DARK
PEN BARRAS PASS
PEN BARRAS PASS
SIX DEGREES: THE MAY BLITZ, LIVERPOOL 1941
OLD EUROPE'S SLOW DEMISE