Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
The photo of Stephen Baum and me aged 4
falls out of the back of a book. Each of us
is holding a part of a redundant
Kodak Brownie and laughing in ecstasy.
The battered camera is Stephen’s.
The sun is shining, and we are on the lawn
in front of the flats where we lived. It was spring
or summer ’47. Our mothers
would take us to the entrance of the yard
of the dairy on Child’s Hill so we could watch
the horses and hear the waters rushing
through wooden slats,
At midnight on Sunday the 3rd of April
1881 the Bar lightship’s
paddle steamer tender, ‘Vigilant’,
is moored at Woodside Stage, Birkenhead.
Of the eight crew three were born in Wales,
two in Liverpool, one in Ireland,
one in Sweden and one on a ‘Yorkshire Farm’.
In immaculate copperplate, the First Mate,
my great grandfather, completes the form.
Meanwhile at 52 Harlow Street,
a street that slopes down to Harrington Dock,
where the Elder Dempster line was based
that sailed to Freetown,
Her maiden surname was Eisenberg, ‘iron
mountain’, one that had been chosen for them
from the Imperial list. I was often
uneasy, unsure in her presence.
She hardly ever smiled. I realise now
because I looked so like her son, my father.
She died, from kidney failure, when I was nine.
On the mantelpiece in our dining room
is a pair of figurines – faux Meissen –
brought in her parents’ wooden suitcase, wrapped
in linen, journeying from Leopoldstat,
Low water now and the motley of crabbers
is crammed towards the end of the pier,
leaving space for a merry metaphor
of our times, Uncle Tacko’s Flea Circus,
with its innuendo and innocence,
its knowingness and charm, its vaudeville
of outrageous unnuanced half-truths,
its charivari of anachronisms.
The Bulkeley Hotel on the front (once
a private mansion of many rooms)
and the stone terrace of late Georgian
town houses in this holiday resort
speak of its erstwhile strategic value.
Along the path beside the forestry road,
through the plantation of pine and larch
planted as saplings to keep the dunes in check,
there is a first sighting of the island
with its mediaeval saint’s ruined chapel,
between the trees and across a sandy beach.
Out of sight is a pebbly strand exposed
except at the highest tides: an impromptu
causeway – for holiday makers now;
once, for lovers to the chapel with its
rumours of martyred blessings;
The harbour breakwater built from limestone blocks
was the longest that the Admiralty
had commissioned. How important Ireland seemed!
On the Country Park lake sown with lilies
an old man sails his battleship. The lake
was a man-made pond that served the brickworks,
built to make the harbour buildings that are dressed
in the limestone quarried from the crags
beside which visitors park their cars.
A grass path leads through heather and gorse
down to low cliffs above the pebble shore.
ASYLUM SEEKER
THE DIGITAL MUSE: THE POET AS WEBSITE OWNER
THE LION OF KNIDOS
THE LION OF KNIDOS
THE BRIDGE