Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
In a one storey Gothic-kitsch building
with small steeples – where Abbey Road meets
Mill Street – attached to the Bridge End Hotel,
opposite the pelican crossing,
angled on the corner of Wharf Hill
that leads steeply up to the canal
and, over the narrow, hump-backed bridge,
left to Ysgol Dinas Brân and right
through the sheep fields and onto the hills
there is an eclectic bestiary:
the hare about to box, the barn owl roosting,
the erect meerkat,
‘It is no hero, no ideal, just the industrially reproduced body
of a middle-aged man trying to remain standing and trying to breathe.’ Anthony Gormley
They are still standing and their slow carapace
of barnacles breathes. Small pools of eaten
razor clams and star fish lie at their feet – fry
dart amongst seaweed fronds and the dead.
An off shore breeze brings the calls of distant
sea birds close. The RNLI flag stiffens
and plastic kites,
January is like navigating
ice floes – then eventually heading east
for aromatic landfalls, or west
following the setting sun, or south
for the long haul like some latter day Cook,
journeying without guides into foreign parts.
The first port of call is in February.
Love fills the sails, the swell lifts the bow.
We met one July, married one August.
In May our daughter will be fifty one.
The bow lifts in the swell, the canvas fills with love.
We had finished the baked camembert
and begun to talk of the future
when we heard a dog fox bark up on the Downs
and went quickly into the garden.
The moon was full, large and low. The imagined,
fabricated constellations glimmered
in the polluted air. The fox was silent
or gone softly over the flints and the chalk
and all we had was the memory
of that wild sound across the long years
of settlement – like the echo of a star.
It was an iron hard January Sunday
before dawn when I left Bala – that one street,
Bible town – for the first time and forever,
a white fiver in the lining of my coat.
I shut up the rented, furnished cottage,
putting the key through the letter box.
I heard it rattle on the slate floor,
and walked down the dark track to the high street
with its single gas lamp. I had my father’s
cardboard suitcase for my clothes, my mother’s
worn music satchel for my poems.
…not Chopin’s Polonaise in A Major
that played on Radio Warsaw as
the Polish Cavalry fought the Panzers
nor the sculpture park in New York State
but a tree-lined business park for IBM
on the edge of Warwick, medieval stronghold
of Earl Richard Neville, the King Maker,
next to the town cemetery discrete
behind a hedgerow of hawthorn and yew,
with the Grand Union Canal nearby
and its Hatton Flight of locks, twenty one in
two miles, opened in 1799
when Chopin was not even a twinkle
and the six nations of the Iroquois –
A DEATH IN GASCONY
AT CHESTER CROSS
A NEW YORK TALE
LEVITICUS
A NEW YORK TALE