Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
for Elise Oliver
If, when I grow even older than I am
now and were, perhaps, too old to make poems,
I would become a sower of wildflowers.
Each year, I would begin with the Narrows,
an ancient path where our street ends –
where children are walked to school, commuters
walk to work, and revellers sway home
caterwauling. Each spring and summer
in the unkempt verges there would be the sight
and scent of Bird’s-foot Trefoil,
Walking – toward the town – down Henlys Lane,
its low, lichen covered dry stone walls
adorned with bird’s-foot trefoil, its borders
with cow parsley and, where run-off
gathers from Baron’s Hill, red campion,
we note ahead, amongst the cattle,
the usual, large flock of herring gulls,
facing south in the low-lying marshy field.
All as we have come to know and like.
But, today, we hear an explosion – loud
enough but too workaday to be thunder.
We stop and look beyond the library,
‘Even if I could have done when I was young what I’m doing now –
and it is what I dreamed of then – I wouldn’t have dared.’ Henri Matisse
In his early eighties – a magician
in colours with his (genuinely)
lovely assistant, Lydia – Matisse
creates a canvas, twenty five foot
by eleven, of pinned-on then glued-on
painted paper cut-outs of fronds and fruits,
in many colours, and a profound blue
parakeet and a profound blue mermaid –
seductive, tropical and teeming…
his Oceania revisited,
CELEBRITY
CELEBRITY
THE NETHER PORTAL
THE MERMAID'S PURSE
IN PRAISE OF HERB ROBERT