Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
After the shoot on Long Island’s Cedar Beach
they drove next to a local playground.
While Eve loaded her camera, Marilyn sat
on some play equipment and read a book –
her worn copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’,
which she kept in her car, and had been reading
for some time, often aloud to get it’s sense.
(She looks to be about nine tenths through
so into Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated
soliloquy of love and longing).
This photograph of a pretty woman
in her late twenties,
In the gardens of the Premier’s palace
with its white Baroque facade there are
children’s swings and a red roundabout.
The linden trees the old Archduke planted
though leafless are evergreen with outbursts,
festoons of mistletoe, their berries
opalescent in the gentle wintry light.
A dozen or so mistle thrushes graze
amongst the leaf mould and peck in the branches –
but one, perched at the top of a tree, sings
its trilling, boundless, woodwind airs as if all
of the provinces were quiet and listening.
the storyteller’s trapdoor: ‘And it so
happened…’ But it does sometimes. Aristotle
called them ‘accidents’ – and here’s a pile-up!
It is a Thursday night – and bell ringing
practice at the parish church we can see
from the long window on the half landing.
Our house was here years before the church
or the houses behind us or in our street.
The Shoulder of Mutton Field was bought
at auction and the first built was ours
more than a hundred and sixty years ago.
It is wooden, a gent’s, with ‘Elder Dempster’
machined then varnished into one of
the shoulders. It belonged to the shipping line
which plied between Liverpool and Lagos,
via Freetown and Accra. It was purloined,
accidentally or otherwise,
by my father or mother, possibly
the latter on her last trip home, with me
in her womb, to ensure a safer birth
in temperate climes – U-Boats permitting.
He died of septicaemia three months
after I was born –
THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE
THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE
THE TOP OF THE RISE
THE TOP OF THE RISE
GUESTS OF LIFE