Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
We talked of those we had worked with that day,
and those with whom we would work again.
We passed, as always, so many walking,
as we left Chiawelo in Soweto.
We were returning to New Redruth,
where the Cornish tin miners were exiled
to grow the gold reefs and shine the diamonds.
We joined the steady rush hour traffic
on the N12 South. Passing the Gleneagles
shopping mall, I saw, on the hard shoulder
of the opposite carriageway, a man,
From Llandwyn Beach we watch – safely, distantly –
rain clouds, across the bay and the beginnings
of the Irish Sea, obscure the coast
and then the three mountain peaks, one by one,
of the Ll?n Peninsula. We hear thunder
trundle on the high ground and rumble
in the valleys, and see lightning fork,
furnace yellow, in the ash grey clouds.
Watching a storm at such a calm remove
is like two scholars in faux panama hats
watching the past,
For Kira Somach
I have regular readers – some I have known
for years, others I will never meet –
on every continent except
Antarctica: a wonder not a boast!
One, an actual friend from long ago,
tells me, via email, that she often reads
some of my poems over the phone
to her father – she in Missouri,
he in Florida: to remind them
of his years working in England,
and her years here becoming a woman.
Near one corner of the British Museum’s
Great Court – the largest, roofed, public square
in Europe – the Lion reclines on a plinth.
It was stolen, a couple of years
after the Crimean War, from a ruined
tomb in Turkey. Its limestone body
had once been adorned with marble, its empty
eye sockets with glass to glint in sunlight
and glow in moonlight. Whether because
its pockmarked flanks seem sad or its eyeless face
appears benign visitors are keen to pose
for photos with the beast as backdrop.
We drove towards the River Dee – down walled lanes
with rhododendrons festooning the sandstone,
their attic blooms in imperial colours –
to visit a doughty friend convalescing,
from two knee replacements, in Seize The Day,
a recently opened upmarket care home.
As we turned into the drive, I realised
that this, long before rebuilding, was where
my mother had first trained to be a nurse –
sixteen, with her friend, Belle. They cared for children
with TB from the Liverpool slums.
i.m. Samuel Selzer
He was never sure if it had been a joke
when the police arrested him for being,
he learned later, Jack the Ripper,
even though the last murder had been
a dozen years before, and he himself
had been eight and far away – or just
a lesson for yet another alien
wandering Whitechapel as if he had
a right to be lost in a pea souper.
Fresh from the Hamburg boat docked at Tilbury,
OCTOBER 4TH
OMENS
THE FIVE GIANTS
FROM THE PERCH ROCK CAUSEWAY, NEW BRIGHTON
FROM THE PERCH ROCK CAUSEWAY, NEW BRIGHTON