Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
for Ashen Venema
Walking back to the house from the composter
one late afternoon in early autumn
I looked up, and stopped. There was a roseate,
mackerel sky moving from North East Wales
over the Cheshire Plain towards the Pennines,
and drifting above me. Whatever weather
it presaged, it was ordinarily
lovely, a mundane epiphany.
At the kitchen door I turned and there
was a raven on the paving where I had been,
The front page of Brexit Day’s Forgers’ Gazette
was a photo of the White Cliffs of Dover
with ‘A NEW DAWN FOR BRITAIN’ superimposed
on the blue sky above – and the sun, by chance,
highlighting the erosion of the chalk,
ephemeral and flaky as metaphor.
***
After the war, when things were in short supply,
and we had drawing, occasionally,
I drew a layered landscape with wax crayons:
blue sky with bird and cloud,
On one of the corners of St Stephen’s square
is a café, the California
Coffee Company, with cheery slogans,
in English, extolling the benefits
of the bean. A window seat gives a view,
across the square, of the west entrance
to the basilica of Szent Istvan,
its portico embossed in gold with
‘Ego Sum Veritas et Vita’.
Our backs to the basilica we walk
down Zyrini Street towards the Danube,
Buda rising high on its western slopes.
There is a young woman with a wooden hoop
almost as big as herself – and a small dog
not much bigger than her head – who performs
circus tricks, where Terez Boulevard meets
Andrassy Avenue – named for an Empress
and a Count before old Europe fell apart.
As the three lanes idle at red and the dog
waits on the kerb the girl and the hoop
become an astrolabe, a gyroscope
within the interstices of traffic lights.
When she stills and bows to the varied windscreens
the dog leaps to her shoulder and together –
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 –
GUESTS OF LIFE
CONTAGION
GUESTS OF LIFE
THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE
THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE