Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Via Del Corso, Rome, March 2020.
The boutiques had been closed by decree, even
Calvin Klein Underwear and Brooks Brothers.
The only pedestrians were the Pope,
in his white robes, and his bodyguard,
in bulging suits – on a pilgrimage
to the ancient church of San Marcello
set back from the street. Beneath a crucifix,
used to assuage a 15th century plague,
Pope Francis prayed to God to stop the virus.
The street, in Roman times, was Via Lata –
‘A camera on a tripod stood at the edge of the water, apparently abandoned; its black cloth snapped in the freshening wind.’
DEATH IN VENICE Thomas Mann
…Cholera is no longer a rumour.
Besotted, face rouged, hair dyed, he dies
staring unseeing at the shallow sea.
Artifice, made and re-made, fades in the rain,
like the islands with their ‘gorgeous palaces’…
Near the Palazzo del Cinema –
where, annually, insubstantial
figures, louder than life,
THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE
THE TOP OF THE RISE
THE TOP OF THE RISE
GUESTS OF LIFE
THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE