Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
The purple, jagged rocks on the island’s shore
were molten lava from volcanoes –
mere craters for aeons now – across the straits,
and limestone boulders in the hinterland
the slow detritus of the last ice age.
RAF Typhoons have flown from their air base,
ten miles or so from here, every day,
leaving the island with their stormy thunder,
over the mountainous Llyn Peninsula
out into the north east Atlantic,
as if it were quite another sea.
For Annabel Honor-Lissi
In those stark dreams when sleep shades into waking,
dreams that haunt the light like a taste in the mouth,
or a name half-remembered, half-forgotten,
I am always travelling – this dawn
along the black tops and the turnpikes,
from the Texas Panhandle north east
to Casco Bay, Maine. Ahead is the thought
of moments, or a non-stop two day drive:
from the sun-belt’s stubborn, garish pandemic;
via the fame of Dallas,
‘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,
From one of the high rise budget hotels
in Portimao we picked up a group
of six challenged men and their two minders.
(Portugal, our tour guide told us later,
was enabling those – institutionalised
since childhood for learning difficulties –
to take vacations, with supervision,
from the drab, echoing, noisome halls).
Two were remarkable: a gaunt fellow
bent permanently double, always moving,
keeping close to the other, a joker
with moustached Arabic looks and frightened eyes.
‘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,
‘And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine…’
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, Marcel Proust
The day the season’s second Atlantic storm
was due there was I – after a sausage
and bacon bap with brown sauce and an Earl Grey
in the heritage station’s draughty café –
celebrating my 74th birthday
with my small family in a British Rail
standard compartment on the Santa Special.
We journeyed from Llangollen to Lapland
(aka Carrog) with mince pies,
…is our sort of place – an island only
at spring tides. Sant Dwynwen, patroness
of lovers, was a princess, virgin, nun.
Her true love test required fresh bread crumbs,
a linen kerchief, a well, an eel
– and an optimistic lad and lass.
The saint’s shrine was popular until
the Puritan heave-ho – although, even now,
perhaps, in the earliest of summer’s dawns
or when mists rise or by full moonlight
some lovers will come to find the well.
Beyond the lighthouse, the cormorants and
distant rocks,
‘Holt Bridge On The River Dee’ By Richard Wilson RA
Near where the Romans made pottery and tiles
from the rich boulder clay the Ice Age brought,
a fourteenth century eight arch sandstone bridge
spans the River Dee, Afon Dyfrdwy,
linking Welsh Holt and English Farndon.
The bridge’s stones are from the same quarry
as Holt Castle’s, the first the invaders built.
Three centuries later the Roundheads took it.
Occasional salmon from the Atlantic
navigate the industrial detritus –
Sand dunes, sharp with pampas grass, muffle
Caernavon Bay, St. George’s Channel,
the Atlantic. The Ffraw’s estuary flows
narrow as an eel. The curlews call.
The non-conformist chapel is up for sale
and the visitors’ centre does funeral teas.
The highway bypasses the village,
though here, fourteen centuries ago,
was the urbane, Christian court of Cadfan, Prince
of Gwynedd. Nothing remains. The Vikings
razed the wooden palace. He was buried
some two miles away,
2001
Riding the F Train that August –
from Queens to Manhattan, Jamaica
Estates to Times Square – were all
of the hues and tongues and tribes and faiths.
Dead at our door, on our return,
wings stretched as if in flight,
lay a hen harrier, a female.
You chose to bury it gently
in the warm September earth.
Five thousand miles away,
OTHER PEOPLE'S FLOWERS: Three Poems by Alan Horne
BLOOMSBURY
THE NAKBA
ON LITTLE EYE
OTHER PEOPLE'S FLOWERS: 'Twelve Poems' by Clive Watkins