Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
For Keith Johnson
‘Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.’ Carl Sandburg
I presume, since Carl Sandburg was a poet
of the railroad and the five-and-dime,
of prairie skies and the remarkableness
of the people, they are American
biscuits – that cross between scone and bannock –
to mop up the gravy from your beans
on the Chisholm Trail to Dodge City.
According to Homer, among others,
Hyakinthos,
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting…
AT THE FISHHOUSES Elizabeth Bishop
What is it that starts a poem? What rupture –
a fish tugging at a hook? What rapture –
the seventh wave breaking as it should?
Consider Elizabeth Bishop:
fatherless at one; her mother certified
four years later; taken from her grandparents
in Nova Scotia by her father’s parents
in Massachusetts; a Vassar girl
with a private income;
If I were a painter – and I would have
so many memorable titles – I would paint
your garden in all its rooms and seasons:
across the high back wall spring’s coral pink
clematis; summer’s sword-leaved, red-flamed
crocosmia by the aquamarine
gazebo; the white, weathered table and chairs
and the acer on the dark-brick terrace;
plants inherited, self-seeded, handed on
in stewardship – a world compendium.
You are the architect, builder, labourer –
and only begetter: ‘Sylvia Among
Her Sonnets Without Words’
I watched the TV parade of affluent
(and mostly public school) chancers, liars,
fantasists, hypocrites, law-breakers
vie to top each other’s warmed-up clichés
and self-serving platitudes. The social
and economic future dystopia most
seemed to desire would, they assured us,
bring out the British best in all of us,
just like the Blitz. I thought of bomb-razed
building lots in major cities still empty,
and a tale a cabby told me years ago,
taxiing me from the railway station.
For Barbara and John Huddart
On this calm summer evening the North Sea falls
unheard on the wide sands below the castle
in whose inner ward the play is set – and we
(an eclectic collection of friends)
have brought folding chairs, prosecco, pop,
and fish suppers from Seahouses nearby
along this coast of raiders and saints.
‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The beds of varicoloured reeds, fields almost,
stretch north and south along this bank for miles,
and westwards, nearly to Wales, across the wide,
silted river. Unseen marsh creatures scarcely
disturb the grasses. Egrets and herons
fly in and out of hidden lagoons.
Before silt, from here, the Dublin packet sailed –
with G.F. Handel and Jonathan Swift.
On the opposite shore are the ruins
of Flint Castle where Richard was dethroned –
‘…night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.’
ON THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NATO ALLIANCE
MARTIN MERE WETLAND, LANCASHIRE
2019
2019
2019