Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
For Harry Chambers
After the posthumous exhibition
at the library, I walked with my daughter
(a student at Hull and sure she’d seen him once
in the lift) down Newland Avenue
to Pearson Park. I pointed out the house
where Larkin’s flat had been and told her how,
more than twenty years before, a friend
and I had been persons from Porlock.
He’d answered the door in a dressing gown,
vest, grey flannels and, ruefully,
Flying to Athens and intensive care,
the injured Cretan motor cyclist died
some time in the night over Melos.
Shrieking her grief, his mother ran in the aisle.
A stewardess tried to calm, restrain her.
The boy’s bare, pale feet were protruding
from an orange blanket. The makeshift cortège
bore us faster than he had ever dreamed.
In couch grass, on Chester’s Meadows, a hedgehog
was embarrassed by death the surpriser.
A trickle of blood betrayed it –
When I drive over the moors
in the hugger-mugger traffic,
I think of the children
murdered, hidden.
When I see the southern sweep
of the Saddleworth Road
over the fern and the peat,
I think of them.
It is almost a prayer.
And I wonder if my chance,
fellow travellers think the same.
Remembrance is solitary, transitory.
Under a steel net – sponsored by a multi-
national – in a disused limestone quarry
were all of South Africa’s birds, except
the predators.
The black warden softly extolled the aviary’s
human values: calm, peace, gentleness.
How well he knew each of the inhabitants:
who delved, wove, fluttered, chattered, nested,
hatched, fed – and defended abundantly.
At home, damp autumn turned to cold winter,
birds pecked at the ice on the stilled fountain
and the coalition of the willing
prepared for war.
For Ian Craine
‘Marjorie Beebe is the greatest comic possibility that ever worked in my studio. I think she is destined to become the finest comedienne the screen has ever seen.’ Mack Sennett
Marjorie Beebe in 'The Farmer's Daughter' 1928
Her bottom was a serious matter:
the butt, as it were, of numerous pratfalls
in many Mack Sennett two reelers – like
The Chumps, Campus Crushes and The Cowcatcher’s
Daughter –
The succulent, bright green shoots of early spring;
the blackthorn – on distant hedgerows like
sporadic late frost or, close to, pearls
of scattered barley; the tiny goldcrest
with its mighty voice – see see see, see see see:
presage the summer’s rich beneficence.
This is her second spring. She points with wonder
and joy at a sudden breeze that shakes
the cherry tree, disturbs its white petals
against the bluest sky, the brightest sun.
She is walking now –
TOWARDS A DEFINITION
TOWARDS A DEFINITION
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS