Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Though we are not quite half way through November
four poppies are blooming in the front garden.
Papaver orientale: voluptuous,
shell-pink; stamens a dark heliotrope;
a cultivar by Cedric Morris, artist
and plantsman, who searched Suffolk’s hedgerows and fields
for common poppies with softer colours –
that simple weed the usual scoundrels
have made a shibboleth of belonging.
A night of wind and rain has downed all but one
in the narrow border, where sedum,
Her mother fixes a sheet of A4,
with a strip of masking tape top and bottom,
to the white board on the easel and ties
an apron round the little artist, who,
when she pulls the wrapping off the present
knows immediately what it is, holding
the child-size plastic palette exactly
as she should. Having chosen the colours –
her favourites: yellow, green, orange, red –
her mother places the paints in the wells.
She chooses a brush, begins, protrudes her tongue,
Another Place ©SCES 2008
We crunch through razor shells and squelch through
blackish silt – there is coal in the drenched sand –
to reach the artist’s cast iron avatars.
They are steadfast against anglers, vandals,
local Tories, jet skiers, the Coastguard,
and the RSPB – but not the wind
or the sea. Some are rusting deeply,
some barnacled already, some sinking
or rising – others missing on this
shifty shore. They have watched the North Sea.
ON THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NATO ALLIANCE
MARTIN MERE WETLAND, LANCASHIRE
2019
2019
2019