WINTER SONNET

This weather shrinks the soul: wet, cold and grey;
Freezing your face like a December grave;
It cannot but recall mortality.
You wait in the cavernous, empty nave
And wish for the bright, fleeting clarity
Of winter sunshine to stream through and save
The stained glass from the gloom of dying day,
To lift and light you up and make you brave.
The world turns and flowers yielded to frost
Will stir again beneath hard, ancient ground,
To remind you that some of what is lost
May rise up like a proverb and be found:
That what you can’t control, you rise above
And though seasons pass, what stays is our love.


(2010)

The last one from ‘The Seasons: A Sonnet Sequence’. When I had finished this, I became aware that it does somewhat recall Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’ and I considered reworking it, but then I thought, what the hell, there’s room for both and, as they say, there’s nothing new under the sun anyway…

The photograph was taken in a church at Palma in Mallorca.

MOONSHINE

Old, grey ocean rolls in
And siren stars slink out.
Now the evening wears thin
And, with night, comes sidling doubt.

Crawl along the kerb of the shore,
Kidding yourself it’s all for experience;
Never satisfied, you always want more,
Cruising for some new, blue radiance.

There she is: ancient, vapidly proud,
Blue Moon playing her cheapest trick,
Gliding behind a rainy cloud
In the dark sky louring thick.

Skewbald charlatan rides, can disappear;
Two-faced, she can wax and she can wane;
She’s nothing but a chameleon-fakir,
Making idle fools wonder if they’re sane.

She’s just a grey, dead stone
Stuck up in a void of black-blue,
Pale, pocked and windblown,
With no more magic than me or you.

But still the old heathen exerts a pull,
Mesmerizes with her illusory rides,
Making us passive, making us dull,
Turning us to her magnetic tides.

All things pass in this way
And flat, black sand strikes chill;
While you hesitate to go or stay,
Moon’s false motion holds you still.

Swing back from this sibilant surf!
Tramp that guttural shingle – inhale!
Mount the steps, cross the turf,
Shake from shoes a riddle gone stale,
Kick it back where it splashed from
Then stride alive the peopled prom.

Never mind having come this far
Or where to go from here:
There will always be another bar,
Another smoke and another beer;
Wind in your face makes you feel free:
Toss back your head, shake that philosophy!


(1981)


Conceived in Llandudno during a comparatively happy period. Why then so much doubt and disgust lurking behind the puns and symbolism here? Maybe it was that lack of ‘magic’ mentioned in stanza 5. The magic would arrive after much misery a decade later and – praise be – it’s still there.

I like the ‘Pull your socks up, lad!’ air of the final stanzas (hence the poem’s second-person narrator) and the ambiguity of the last line: was the philosophy shaken off or shaken up, I wonder.

Of course, this was written when you could still smoke in pubs and long before I, at last, quit.

The picture of Lise was taken many years later by a different sea, in a galaxy far, far away (Koversada, Croatia, actually).

MY MOTHER'S HEADSTONE

The photograph on my Mother’s headstone
Has faded whilst others nearby stay bright and clear,
But her memory remains, each shade and tone,
Despite her absence here.

On the shelves, old volumes sleep, long since read;
The spines of paperbacks slack and the pages brown,
But whilst many of the authors are dead,
I may yet take them down.

Skin wrinkles, bones ache and hair withers grey;
Getting out of that armchair makes me groan and sigh,
But the flame still burns strong within the clay
And the shadows dance high.

The oak in winter has froze like dark stone,
By the graveyard path it stands, naked and sere,
But the vernal pulse will climb its backbone
And wake another year.


(2010)


I’d had the first verse of this for months but didn't know where it was going. Then, one day whilst waiting for Spring, during the coldest winter in the UK for over thirty years, the rest of it suddenly arrived.

Today is the fourteenth anniversary of my mother’s passing so it is fitting that I include this poem now. A couple of weeks ago, I visited Gilroes Cemetery and was uplifted by the sight of a blaze of Autumn trees facing her headstone. The photograph however, was taken at the church of St. Mary De Castro in Sanvey Gate during that long awaited Spring and seems to compliment the poem effectively.

THE BACK OF BEYOND

The force of faith and the crystal of truth
May shatter before they are called the same:
Neither belief nor science can tender proof
Of a world created in a god’s name.
Art, music, architecture, charity:
Even these may never forgive so much
Torture, hatred, war and stupidity;
Should we then clutch at what we cannot touch?
Back through space, on a journey in reverse
Through a void before bibles and theories,
To the gate of an expanding universe
At the beginning and end of all stories:
Then may we see past the what, when, where and how,
And solve the mystery of why - there and now.



(2009)


This sonnet is probably a belated response to reading ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins a couple of years before. The book provides a very persuasive argument for atheism, but, after finishing it, I realized that my own position was still best describedas being agnostic.

The picture was taken in Koversada, Croatia a few years ago.

AUDIAL

AUDIAL

There’s no sound

Quite

Like the sound

Of a late afternoon breeze

In gold, autumnal trees,

As we walk

Through waves of leaves

By some quiet riverside;

Unless

It’s the sound

On a still day

Of the shoreline’s whispering reach

On a long, golden beach,

As the day leaves and waves

Whilst we walk

At some hushed eventide.

(2010)

This came to me the other day when I was wandering along beside the River Soar taking pictures of the autumn. If I had to come up with my favourite ambient sounds then it would be these.

AUTUMN SONNET

All outside is green and russet and gold.
In late sunlight, the leaves curl and glitter
Against the clouds’ bustle and sky’s blue cold.
In our garden, they dance like bright litter
With wind-chimes pealing wood, steel and seashells.
Much as we bid this rainbow season stay,
We heed a bell that Man, not Nature, knells:
Time thus will turn back on itself today.
Soon the darkness will account for the hours
And night fall on the brink of a decade
Held in the world’s hand like fading flowers,
Long before a New Year can be remade.
Tomorrow, beyond our bedroom curtain,
Through a mist of voile, this much is certain.



(2009)


Third in ‘ The Seasons: A Sonnet Sequence’. The Autumn of 2009 in the UK was a fabulously colourful one and this poem came to me one bright Sunday morning when I was gazing out over the back gardens of the houses where we live and vaguely wondering about the effects of climate-change.

The picture was taken on Abbey Park.

QUOTIDIAN

Dawn

Dissolves

Into dew

Resolves

Into day

But soon

The noon

Is gone

Burnt down

To a husk

Of dusk

Tonight

Tomorrow

Creeps

In

And tomorrow

And tomorrow

Round

And around

Circle the crows

And the shadows

Over the wheat field

And who knows

Where the time goes

Only that it does

Somehow because

Time knows

That it must

Return to dust

(1998)

We’d been to the funeral of my Aunt Laura and it started me thinking about how the uncertainties of life and death all take place within the predictable mystery of time.

‘Wheat Field with Crows’ was apparently Van Gogh’s last painting and, even before I knew that, I’d found it a profoundly haunting image.

THAT SPECIAL KISS

Turning with the precipitant alarm
Into each other, we sleepily kiss
Before you rise in the pointillist dawn
As the light crystallizes in the air.
Now you stretch nakedly and statuesque,
Dab the babbling clock still, ‘til soon I hear
The jolting of the pipes from the shower,
Your splashing and the cistern’s gentle hiss.

Now you pad downstairs and breakfast briefly,
Spoon clinks dish as you lean by the heater;
Junoesque, you drip-dry, wrapped in your towel,
Which is oh, so carelessly cast aside
As you rematerialize back upstairs
And sit on the bed before the mirror.
Only now, yawning, do you light the lamp
As we murmur our dreams to each other.

Then the rapid massaging all over
Of moisturizer, deft application
Of hairbrush, make-up and touch of perfume
Chosen to chime with the day’s smart ensemble.
At once, you gracefully launch yourself
Into tiny knickers and matching bra
And toss on a tissue blouse bravura,
Arms entering sleeves simultaneously.

Yes - how that last always strangely thrills me!
Next comes today’s smart suit and heels and then,
With a shimmy and a glance in the glass,
You’re finished - and in under half an hour.
You’re no less than alchemized before me
And I’m just hypnotized here before you:
Adoring you, my love - and loving this -
That lingeringly special goodbye kiss.


(2009)


It’s Lisa’s birthday today so this is for her. The picture is one of my favourites and seems to encapsulate the essential Lisa.

A domestic scene which I appreciate more these days, enjoying, as I do, the luxury of weekday lay-ins. Lisa is one of those people who spring out of bed at 6.15 am Monday to Friday without so much as a syllable of complaint. A team of wild horses is needed at the weekend, mind you…

WHERE THE BEE

June in this garden,
Where rose petals confetti a patchy lawn;
The evening breeze susurrates in branches
After the sun has sunk beyond rooftops.

I become aware of another, fainter sound
And find, flailing against the glass,
A huge bee, its gold faded, in our conservatory.

Despite open doors and windows,
It seems to be trapped;
Buzzing feebly, it flies time and again
Into the same pane.

I think he must be old
And losing his way through life;
The blooms of yesterday have dimmed
And now he battens blindly
On to the dried flowers in a vase on the sill
Where he seems to suck and then become still.

Moved by some vague fellow-feeling,
I gently and gingerly take up the bee
And release him into the trees
Where he falls and crawls
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

The breeze turns cold and plaintive,
And I turn back now
Into the house where we live.


(2000)


I don’t know why but, for some reason, bees seem to lose their navigation-system when they fly into our conservatory. Every summer, it happens so often that Lise bought a little fishing net on a stick, the sort kids have, and we use it to rescue and release the bees back out into the garden.

The title comes from ‘The Tempest’ by Shakespeare. It’s Ariel’s song of freedom:-

‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie:
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.’

MYTH AND LEGEND

Reflecting
On Camelot and Coleridge,
Kierkegaard and the Bible,
Abstraction coalesces
Into images of water,
As I stare into the sea
From a cliff-top in Anglesey.

I’m reminded of the story
Of a ghostly young man
Walking on the rheumy water
In an old sailor’s eyes.
Then, from a misty lake,
Another man in another story
Sees a silver sword rise;
But, sidewinding
Through rotting water,
A scaled and sinuous snake
Is all this mariner can see.

And this hand
Will not wither, Moses;
It only remains firm,
Gripping a rod
That refuses to squirm.
Your stick will not strike
Water from this rock,
Let alone cleave a path
Through any sea
For me.

Time
Rolls out on the tide
And the wind turns
Leaf after leaf.
I gazed out
To horizon’s sunset
And tried to believe
What I had read.

But why look for the dead
Among the living?
I see no young men
In dazzling robes.
I’m frozen
Out here on this ledge,
Clutching maybe faith
Or merely
Some kind of question;
Fearfully trembling now
Over grey waters
Seventy thousand fathoms deep
And not knowing
How I could ever leap.


(1979)


Studying literature and religion for a degree in my mid and late twenties meant my head was often up in the sky whilst my feet were adjusting to marriage and fatherhood down on the ground. I’m not sure that I ever experienced a crisis of faith as such -because there always were more questions than answers for me. I have, however, had several epiphanies – usually when gazing out to sea – and this kaleidoscopic poem began its gestation during a solitary couple of hours during a 1974 holiday in Wales.
It was a hot day and I was lying on a grassy cliff-top looking down at the bay where, I remember, these brown and white cows kept venturing into the shallows to cool down.

I have another recollection of Anglesey cows: each morning I would walk about a mile from where we were staying to the village shop for bread, milk and a paper. Mike Oldfield’s famous album ‘Tubular Bells’ hadn’t been out long at that time and I had a recording which I used to listen to on a portable cassette-player. There and back from the shop, the cows in the fields would follow me as I tinkled along on my way in the early morning sunshine. It’s a very vivid memory.

There’s a lovely, light, little Betjeman poem called ‘A Bay In Anglesey’, too.

I took the picture a few weeks ago on holiday in Portugal. It's the fabulous coastline of the southernmost tip of Europe, Cape St. Vincent - what the Portuguese call 'the end of the world' from which explorers like Columbus used to set sail.

AEGEAN SUNSET

The Zenith

Sunlight shimmers on swelling wavelets

Down through to the sand-bed below

Where it pulses like sparkling veins

Deep in the high life;

And we are in our element:

Swimming with glinting sardines and distant sails

Whilst bodies brown on rocks and beaches

Where cicadas whirr continuously in the green cliff

As they have since time began,

On this island

To which we have now returned.

The Blueness

Pure azure

By late afternoon,

The blueness has emerged

Infinitetisimally:

A slow water-colour evolving

In the faraway hills of the bay.

Greens, browns and yellows

Of trees, soil and beach

Coalesce in tones of blue,

Dissolving down from the sky,

Rising up from the sea.

The sun, still high, fringes the horizon

With a brilliance about to send bright scintillas

Sailing towards us.

The Shimmering

Now the sky, hills and sea merge

Into the blueness,

And a glittering spire of sunlight

Advances on the lambent water,

Flashing instants and breaking on the shore at our feet

Like seconds in the golden grains of ancient time.

The Dazzling

Down through the ages,

Romans, Turks and Venetians

Have watched this same shimmering

That we see now,

Turn to dazzle

On the sea between these shores,

And the point of this spire

That touches our toes

Now, in this lazy, hazy present

Touched others long past:

Always the same and always different,

Now and then,

Here and gone,

Always one.

The Afterglow

Molten gold,

The sun sinks to the crest of distant hills

And the moon rises silver behind us.

The last of the dazzling draws us in

To slip like snakes

Into the liquid silk of still sea.

We silhouette our way

Far out,

Into the twinkling heart of the dazzle

As the sun, its spire built,

Burns down behind the blue hills

Where a small, solitary cloud darkens and dispels.

In the afterglow burnishing the sea,

An aurora appears

From great unseen lanterns of gentle gods,

Briefly dawning the dusk,

And we glide back

To our deserted beach,

Naked and new

In the moonlit night.

(2005)

We’ve been to the Greek island of Skiathos a number of times and lain on our favourite beach, swimming, dozing and reading as the light changes through the day (that’s the actual view in the photo). I started this poem on the inside covers of a paperback edition of William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist’ which I was re-reading at the time. Perhaps the sun-drenched hedonism of the poem acted as an antidote to the dark horror of the story.

It took me another visit to the island and a couple more attempts to finish the poem. Although it doesn’t have a regular structure or a rhyme-scheme, ‘AS’ is the sort of poem that demands every word should be in the right place and every line be the right length. Coleridge said that if the definition of prose was the putting of words in the right order then poetry should be ‘the best words in the best order’.

That's the actual sunset on the actual beach with the actual Lisa in silhouette.

HERE SHE COMES

When walking,
Your beauty is a fresh May skyscape,
All cloudroll and blue yonder.

And I am a high flying kite.

When you smile,
Your beauty is a rising sunscape,
All birdsong and horizon,

And I am a spire full of praise.

In loving,
Your beauty is a noontide seascape,
All swelling and sundazzle,

And I am a galleon set sail.

In repose,
Your beauty is a new June landscape,
All blossom and moonshadow,

And I am the dew on your rose.

Here in church,
Your beauty is a Christmas snowscape,
Drifting down the August aisle,

And I am your right-hand man,
With a gold ring shining on your left;
Henceforward,
Into all our future, I shall escape,


(1998)


Many church buildings are beautiful; the Church as an historical institution and pillar of the establishment is not. Was it hypocritical to marry in church (I’ve done so twice)? Possibly – I saw it more as a compromise, I think. There would have been too many disappointed relations. The symbolism of the rings is meaningful though, and a sense of ritual is also important to me. Hatches, matches and dispatches etc.

Not that this is a poem about the church (incidentally, the organist at our wedding must have been the only one in the land who wasn’t note-perfect on ‘The Wedding March’…).

No, this poem is about Lisa and the metaphors are an attempt to convey what a beautiful person she is. I wrote this for her on the occasion of our wedding on the 1st August 1998.

Most people’s wedding pictures can seem rather dull in retrospect and ours are no exception so rather than a shot from the day I’m including one of my favourite pictures of Lise which I took a few Christmases ago.

GONDOLA

We swing out
From high, narrow shadows,
Smiling and serenaded
Through shimmering reflections
Of peeling paint and plaster,
Afloat on splashing backwaters,

Into sunburst panorama
Of sky and Grand Canal,
Whilst pealing bell-towers
Announce our presence
In an epiphany of time and space,
Bridging history and this hour.

Our grinning gondolier
Sings out, con brio,
‘Rialto! Ri-al-to!’
With sweeping gesture;
As, to others before, did his father
And his father before.


(2008)


On our first stay in Venice, we contented ourselves with a ride on a vaporetto up the Grand Canal – which was a quick, cheap and sensible thing to do. It was wonderful too, (as is everything in Venice). On our second time, though, we decided to indulge ourselves with a gondola – and it was every bit as magical as I try to convey above.
The gondoliers aren’t just ‘O Sole Mio’ merchants either – at least, ours wasn’t; he regaled us with a selection from Ennio Morricone!

We almost literally bumped into Neil Finn of Crowded House on a bridge near our hotel. I wanted to say hello and tell him how much we loved what was then his latest record (‘Everyone Is Here’ by The Finn Brothers) but we were lugging our bags at the start of our return journey and he was stood on the crest of the bridge, gazing around and taking it all in, so we just carried on our way.

WHATEVER

OK now, guys -
You don’t mind me, like, referring
To you all as ‘guys’, do you, guys -
Even though some of us are female
And none of us are sort of like American?
And when I ask if you’re alright and things like that
And you say you’re good and it’s so not a problem,
I’ll know that you’re basically just fine
And not actually declaring your, like, moral status
Or anything like that, know what I mean?
And yes, guys, I’ll know what you mean too.
And I’m like, cool with this now – we’re all cool, yeah?
This is so absolutely not a problem, is it, guys?

Right then, guys, hey, it’s all good, no worries,
Because, you know, at the end of the day,
We’re all sort of like - in this together?
And we’re on a journey and stuff like that?
Even though we’re going kind of like – nowhere?

Right, OK, listen, you have a nice day now, guys,
Because, hey, at the end of the day, it’s like
We so totally have nothing better to say.
Do you know what I mean?
Do I know what I mean?
OhMyGod!
End of.


(2010)

Lise and I both loathe conversational tics and threadbare clichés. These days, it seems like the spiralling babble above actually passes for cool chat. It reminds me of ‘duckspeak’ - the distilled form of ‘Newspeak’ in Orwell’s great satirical novel, ‘I984’. (You can, perhaps, hear the modern form of this corrosive prattle in TV’s ‘Big Brother’…).

Of course, we’re all susceptible to this kind of thing - no matter how hard we try to avoid it. Myself, I can’t seem to shake off ‘like, y’know’ at the end of too many sentences when I’m in the middle of a good natter. It might have come from my Mother because I think my brother and sisters all fall prey to it as well. Oh well, not to worry, or should that be - no worries?

The picture is a nod in the direction of that famous painting 'The Scream' by Edvard Munch. Lisa took it on the bridge at Abbey Park yesterday.

FROM ABOVE

As the G-force takes hold, lurches and lifts us from the land,
I know a critical point has passed and let go your hand.
You start to read but, as ever, I crane at the window,
Awed to see so much in so small a space so far below:
The miniature world before it dissolves into cloud-haze -
The churches, towns and hills and the woodland and waterways,
And I am humbled with wonder at such infrastructure
Wrought on the sprawl of land, the order of agriculture,
The charting of seas and skies, the power of invention,
Which, from above, seems entwined with nature’s evolution.

A crimson band of sunset girdles the horizon’s glow
Between high, blue heaven above and deep, black cloud below.
The feeling is of floating in limbo between it all,
As evening sifts into nightfall and then into landfall,
And our aeroplane descends through tonight’s rare clarity.
Coastlines twinkle now and the bejewelled urban circuitry
Defines itself in the eye, whilst the vacuum in our ears
Quickens the pulse and the mind is clenched by echoing fears
When the wheels hit the runway to rush, then slow to a stand,
And we kiss and smile at the intense, white grip of each hand.


(2010)


A few flights in the making, this one. Unusually, I’d developed a number of single words - rather than phrases – which eventually suggested the beginnings of a rhyme-scheme. The long lines distance the resulting couplets and hopefully make the structure of the poem an effective one.

Completed after a wonderfully clear return-flight from Dubrovnik. We’re not sufficiently ‘frequent fliers’ to be blasé about the experience, hence the ritual of holding hands.

THE PICTURE AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS

I’m about eight, my fair hair starting to darken,
Dressed in t-shirt, shorts, sandals and ankle-socks,
Clutching bucket and spade, sat on the sand between them,
At the back of a beach, in the front of a wall.
Grandma, on my right, would be around seventy;
Mum, on my left, is in her mid-thirties;
Grandma always looked older than she was
But both seem to me old-fashioned with their forties
Hairstyles: Gran grey, Mum dark but silver at the parting
And both wearing calf-length, flowered frocks.
They sit in deck-chairs holding drinks on little trays
And we’re all sort of smiling, with our backs to the wall.

My sister stitched this picture from a pattern
Made from an old black and white photograph.
It must have been taken by her father - not my father -
Before she was born. I wonder where her older sister is -
A baby then, I think. Perhaps her father – not my father –
Is holding her in one arm whilst taking the picture
With his free hand. He didn’t take many pictures –
Their father – but he did take away almost all of those
Taken before he took Mum and me away from my father.

I’m guessing it was the East Coast in the summer of 1960 –
The five of us packed into one of his old black bangers
With the running boards and yellow indicator-pointers -
Great Yarmouth, Skegness or Mablethorpe, maybe,
Or Chapel St. Leonards in Aunt Agnes’s cottage, perhaps.
The monochromatic British fifties linger on, poised
To blossom forth into the century’s most dazzling decade.

So the story goes, a true story too but beneath it another lies.
The picture seems clearer from the bottom of the stairs
But step by step, it blurs the nearer you climb.
Neither will reality bear too much scrutiny:
The camera’s kind white lies may dissolve under our stares
As when we try to recollect this or that half-forgotten time
And the road forking when we took our right and wrong ways.
Memory’s sunshine can turn to thunder down the ages,
Playing tricks with some of those good old bad old days;
But see how the rainbow arcs above the album’s pages
To shelter us, if we choose, from yesteryear’s rain and rages


(2009)


My sister, Lorraine, gave me the cross-stitch when she emigrated to New Zealand. She later found the original photograph and sent that too. It’s one of precious few pictures that survived the divorce of my parents, because my stepfather – rot his soul – destroyed almost all of them. The original shot shows that my Mum and Gran were actually writing postcards and that behind us was not a wall but a stack of deckchairs. So the metaphorical notion of ‘backs to the wall’ turns out to be unwitting poetic license…It’s the blurry indistinctness of the cross-stitch that appealed to me – like glimpsing a scene through a portal of time and space. Perhaps I should re-title the poem ‘Postcard From The Past’…

SUMMER SONNET

After the brief bluebells and daffodils
And the simmering blossom-swell of spring,
Summer comes galloping over the hills,
The sun beating through a billion wings,
Bringing it on, singing it in with long
Days, hot spells, short showers and old folksong
Grown new in the swaying fields of barley,
Gathering in the harvest finale.
But, before the fall of the merry scythe,
We will roll in the grass by the bandstand,
Carelessly young again, laughing and tanned,
To sing the song of leaf and fruit so blithe:
Summer is a-coming in, year on year -
And see – the trees, the trees, the trees are here!


(2010)


So much poetry grows out of doubt and melancholia, and I’ve heard songwriters say that it’s somehow easier to write sad rather than happy songs – and I wonder why that is. Perhaps when we’re happy we’re too busy being happy to reflect too much about why we are. And then many positive poems tend to be tinged with sadness when the experience is being recalled in nostalgia.

I often want to write something really bright and upbeat but, being of a rather pessimistic disposition, I don’t usually find that easy to do. Let me tell you, I must be ‘in a good place’, as they say, to have come up with this!

‘Summer Is A-Cumen In’ is one of the very oldest of English folk songs. It features on one of my favourite soundtrack albums, ‘The Wicker Man’, which I was playing whilst writing this poem.

I never seem to tire of photographing Abbey Park just a couple of minutes away from where we live in Leicester and the picture included here is of one of my favourite views.

IN CONCERT

(I)

A seated study

Blurred still

String-hardened fingertips

Taloned

Slide like live china

Along the frets

Skill

Intent and long

Refined in the bones

*

Astride

And stomping

To beat of skins

Plectrum

In nicotine grip

Skids primal

As loins grind

Soul

Improvises from the heart

And through the boot-heel

(II)

Wing-collared

And funereal

Grand Master

Undertakes classics

Patient eyes

Follow pale hands

Which instruct

Patent feet

Embalming old symmetries

Note for note

*

Open-necked

And pounding

Holy Roller

Rocks his pulpit

Accusing fingers

Vamp and stab

Brimstone chords

Smoke and roar

Pushing the crescendo

Further every time

(III)

Eyes on dots

White-gloved

Sniper

In the distance

Surveys his tools

Waits for his moment

Measures his beat

Selects and strikes

Steadies the vibrations

Replaces and reloads

*

Eyes wild

As sticks are twirled

Tossed and snatched

Above volleys of sound

Power

Locked with bass

Blizzard of cymbal

And crash of pedal

Rolling with thunder

The avalanche of beats

(IV)

Muscular larynx

Flexes

Perfect diction

From banal libretto

Takes up positions

On polished stages

From rich boxes

The elite rise

In measured ovation

*

Leathery throat

Convulses

Slangy melismas

From juvenile lyric

Hips jerk

Almost sacrificial

On sweaty boards

At brandished mike

Surging crowd

Whoop tribal

(1989)


I hope this poem doesn’t give the impression that I don’t like classical music – because I do (a fair bit of it, at least). In a live context though, it can seem rather clinical and stilted compared to rock music. I’m not certain I had particular musicians in mind when I wrote this, but the classical guitarist is probably Julian Bream who I remember seeing quite often on TV. The rock singer looks like it might be Mick Jagger. The rock piano, however, is definitely being played by Jerry Lee Lewis and the rock drummer simply has to be Keith Moon. I doubt whether he was always ‘Locked with bass’ because he may not have been the best technical drummer ever, but he was surely the most exciting.

The photograph is of one Frano Gryc, an extraordinary musician we saw several times on the isle of Lokrum near Dubrovnik. He plays acoustic guitar with an electric pick-up every afternoon at an outdoor bar-café there. Beautiful rippling classical and jazzy renditions of all sorts of song emanate from him. No singing though and very little talking. The shades and cigs are permanent features of the unsmiling Frano-fizzog. Supercool.

SEASIDE

Midnight

On the slow-wind beach

And the hungry sea

Licks black sand.

Moonlight

And me,

Throwing stones,

The way people do

On lonely beaches,

A stone’s throw

Away from the town;

Lonely people,

Making sinking splashes

As the long tongue of sea

Licks grey sand.

A bloody ribbon of sky,

Distant

In tattered blackness;

And me

On the cold-wind beach

At first light.

(1975)

Writers need to ‘find their own voice’ and this is one of the first poems in which I felt I’d shaken off, if only temporarily, the powerful influences that had inspired me to write in the first place.

The beach in question was somewhere in Wales; possibly Rhyl.

The photograph is a recent one and was taken overlooking the beach at New Brighton, a few miles north of Liverpool. We’d hopped on a train to go and see the sunset there and spotted the lone figure you see in the picture.

THE FLIGHT OF THE MONARCHS

It is September in a corner
Of Lake Eyrie in Canada
And, until now, this place
Has been the whole world
To billions of their kind.
They have never ventured
More than a few hundred yards
But now, as the cold inches in,
Some genetic memory urges them
Beyond this cooling microcosm
To turn their wings southward;
And now they are soaring
Like Autumn in reverse
And filling the sky with a golden sunset.

Gorged on nectar and guided by the sun,
They will fly two thousand miles
To a patch of shrinking forest,
High in the mountains of Mexico,
Where they will hang in dense clusters
Through the long night of winter.
Some will drop and perish in the frost below
Whilst some fall prey to the few birds
Immune to their protective poison.
Most, though, will survive to wake
And drink at the renewed river;
Drifting down to ground
Like Spring in reverse,
Before filling the sky with a golden sunrise.


(2009)


Over the years, I’ve watched all of David Attenborough’s TV series about the natural world. This poem was inspired by one of the stories about migration in the last one.

I read a newspaper article recently in which DA was warning about the widespread decline in the world’s butterfly population. And then there’s the alarming fall in bee-colonies – not to mention the thousands of other species at risk. Many of us are, I think, complacent about environmental issues and whilst we may feel sorry that there are only a few pandas and tigers left, we assume that most of the natural world is simply too profuse to be at real risk. Well, drastic reductions in species like bees and butterflies should give us pause for thought.

It’s worth remembering that, back in the last Ice Age, human beings had almost certainly dwindled to very small numbers indeed. Our own species was probably perpetuated by a mere few thousand, or even hundreds, of its kind. We’re lucky to still be here at all and should take more care of what is left

The picture was taken in our kitchen the other day. That’s a real butterfly perched on the clock. A case of time flying. A pity the time wasn’t more dramatic than ten past six – say, five to midnight...

FOSSE PARK

Still the same.
And yet different.
Better perhaps. Greener.
More trees than when I first played here
Half a century ago.

The children’s playground
More varied and safer
Than when Georgie Smith
Fell from the high swings.
His blood still there a week later.

Those swings long gone -
And the hut where Harold,
The straight-backed park-keeper,
Forbidding in his uniform,
Dubious with his glass eye
And the other on the little girls,
Drank tea with his epileptic gardener.

The toilets – ‘Gents’ at one end,
‘Ladies’ at the other - and the shelter
Half-way (romantically known
As ‘The Arbour’) - all gone too,
Due to graffiti, vandalism and various
Misbehaviour, I suppose, but look:

The brook and circle of elms in the middle
Are still there and the wrought iron railings
Where Paul Botterell impaled his leg:
They still fence the terraced perimeter,
And ring with the echoes of the stick
That I’d clatter along on my way home.

My childhood came alive here,
A stone’s throw away from the unhappy house;
It was my first route of escape
And for ten years this park was my second home.

How many balls did I chase towards the jacketed goal
And how many bat away from the bicycle wicket?
How much water did I drink from the tap
Behind one of the great oaks
With George and Chris and Geoff?

I can taste that water now,
Feel it cooling my hot boy’s face.
I can see the old men playing chess
Under the trees at the top of the hill,
(Like in that song about another park),
And the kids queuing at the tinkling ice-cream van.
I can smell the new-mown grass making me sneeze
Where we loll with our portable pirate radios
As the psychedelic pop songs of the mid-sixties
Stream like butterflies on the rippling evening breeze.

I used to lose track of time there -
Or maybe time lost track of me.
When I left home and school,
Time would quickly find me,
The park soon left behind me.
Since then, life has been
Both cruel and kind to me,
But the park remains to remind me
Of the roots here that will always bind me.


(2009)


Nostalgia set in very early for me and I tried to write this poem several times without success over the years, so I was pleased when it was finally finished. The song alluded to in the eighth stanza is Jimmy Webb’s ‘MacArthur Park’ (‘the old men playing checkers by the trees’). It was a worldwide hit for the Irish actor, Richard Harris during the Summer of 1968, by which time my tenure at the park was just about over.

SHOWER AND STORM INTERLUDE

May,
And a pink, trodden snow of blossomfall in the road black with rain;
Me in this avenue,
Rambling back from the old college, trying to induce a dim brain
To think of something new.

Evening in this avenue,
Where the trees drip and glisten in the close vacuum of a deep day
Beneath an ocean on high.

Down deep in the avenue
Becalmed with glinting cars and glowing curtains, the starless darkness
Drifts down a boundless heaven.

Now,
In a silence less soundless than profound, these my homeward feet pause,
This my pageward hand stirs;
And then suddenly in the electric sky a dark dragon roars,
Awesome and mountainous.


(1977)


About the drama of the creative process. Conceived on the way back through Spring showers from Scraptoft College to my first matrimonial home, a flat on Sykefield Avenue, Leicester.

I took the landscape photograph on that very avenue the other day. It hasn’t changed much – just more parked cars. The portrait picture was taken a few streets away on Kirby Road. The church is now up for sale.

CHANT OF THE APOCALYPSE

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

The apple is bitten and the rainforest dies;
Cadillac overtakes and the ozone layer fries:
Can’t take the truth so double-think it into lies.

Species cannibalized, poisoned, clubbed and shot;
Another one bites the dust, then another, so what?
Get out of the kitchen if you can’t stand it so hot.

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

We all just want another hit, another thrill,
So foul the seas as gulls dive over that landfill.
Meanwhile, Mother Nature moves in for the kill.

Waste and weapons of mass destruction pile up steep;
Can’t disarm – too far an imaginative leap;
It’s much too late to laugh now, get ready to weep.

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

In heat one last time, the rabid hellhound breaks jail
And with its bitch of money, chases its own tail.
Now shares plunge as the price of profit bleeds us pale.

Life is short, love is sweet but hatred is bitter:
Only the strong survive, you better get fitter.
All you own turns to trash, your cash into litter.

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

Like always, imperialist forces invade
And, for sure, the rich will exploit the poor with trade.
Now suicide-bombers explode out of the shade.

Don’t want no eye for an eye or no tooth for a tooth;
Thousands of years later, still waiting for the truth:
Billions of believers and not a single shred of proof.

Simply won’t read the writing wailing on the wall;
Just go forth and multiply and come one, come all:
We’ll all be refugees soon, here comes that final fall.

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

Here’s capitalism’s reason and rhyme:
The greatest amount of profit
For the least amount of people
In the shortest possible time.

Kill, eat, breed, sleep.
Our time is dear but life is cheap;
All that we sow, prepare to reap;
Mountain high, ocean deep.

Here’s capitalism’s reason and rhyme:
The greatest amount of profit
For the least amount of people
In the shortest possible time.


(2008)


Sometimes you just despair of the world – or should that be, despair for the world.
This seems timely, given the continuing global financial crisis and impending General Election in the UK.

It’s not so much a poem, more a Rant & Roll song – a lyric, at any rate. If anybody out there would like to give it a tune, well, you know how to reach me. I always thought Bob Dylan’s 1965 song, ‘It’s Alright, Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’ was a tremendous piece of polemic – and it may be a distant inspiration for the above.

Hence the picture. For the Dylanologists out there, I can tell you that, in the upper image. the bikini-clad figure in the background is Sally Grossman, the wife of Dylan’s manager at the time. In the lower image, Dylan is watching Dean Martin on TV (more a swayer than a rocker – what a thought: Dylan & Dino!).

EASTERN PROMISE (BETJEMANESQUE)

Oh, Miss Mistry, charming new head of school P.E.,
You do, I confess, have an alarming effect on me!
Skilled at hockey, swimming, rounders and netball, too,
In the staffroom, I can’t keep my eyes off be-shorted you.
Praise be, Lord Krishna, for bringing you here to Kent
From darkest Bradford, just north-west of mystic orient.
Oh, your sweaty brown forearms shine like buttered toast
And oh, those sturdy thighs, juicy no doubt, as Sunday roast –
But these are English images – I’d much rather
Dream of you as a tastier dish: my chick masala!
Let me promise to spoil you so very nicely –
Even if you turn out to be only half as spicey.
Oh, dark and dusky, pretty Miss Preeti Mistry,
Would you, could you, fall for a middle-aged Head of History?


(1994)


Another homage. Betjeman and Larkin are two of my favourite English poets and I learnt much from them both – particularly the value of being concise and using everyday language when occasion calls for it (as it often does).

Like Larkin, Betjeman can also be very funny and there are quite a few of his poems that inspired the one above, but perhaps most notably, ‘A Subaltern’s Love-Song’.

BORED YESTERDAY (LARKINESQUE)

So – one day nearer the grave, then?
Poor unnecessary little sod;
I have to say I find it odd
How we keep having kids when
Most that you’ll do in this first year
Is simply kip and crap and cry
As you’ll do again, as you near
That day when you get old and die.

In between: boredom, betrayal.
Most things you’ll try, you’re bound to fail.

Hospital, birth, school, work, hospital, death,
(And don’t talk to me of love and marriage –
They go together like gun and cartridge)
It’s barely worth drawing another breath.

Life fucks you up, then fucks you down –
Why wave, just bloody well drown!

(1994)


In an uncharacteristically joyful and life-affirming moment, Philip Larkin once wrote a poem called ‘Born Yesterday’ to celebrate the birth of a child born to his friend Kingsley Amis. Then he got back to being The Master of Misery. However, like other arch-miserabilists such as Leonard Cohen and Morrissey, Larkin’s work is often very funny – and that’s what I’ve tried to capture in this little tribute.

Apologies for the effing and blinding but, if you consult PL’s poem ‘This Be The Verse’, you’ll see why. Apologies also to Stevie Smith for kidnapping her most famous title for my punchline.

The picture is one of the last taken of Larkin and possibly the only one of him laughing. He was librarian at Leicester university back in the 1940s when there were only about 200 students, you know...

THE BLACK WATCH

Battery-powered, hour on hour,
Time tocks digitally, silently,
Slowly on my workaday wrist.
Clear of face and sober,
My Monday to Friday watch
Is a faithful old timekeeper
Who buses me to work
With morning Metro
For wake-up coffee,
As the great, grey grind
Begins again and again.

Then, on Monday to Thursday
Evenings which never become nights,
I watch tired TV on the somnolent sofa
And retire early to bed, early to rise,
Too weary to wipe sleep from bleary eyes.

Meanwhile, waiting all week long,
The strong black watch has been brooding
In the gewgaw and jewellery drawer,
Impatiently counting down the flight
To freedom and the heyday of Friday night.

Identical quartz disports
Time, ticks quickly, gallops
Apace on my latenight wrist.
Dark and mysterious,
My holiday-weekend watch
Converts must-do into want-to
And jets us to pleasure
With midnight vodka
Until Sunday’s Rose` glow
Glisters, gleams, grins
And beams golden again.

But bar, garden and conservatory
Drift blithely towards industry,
As Friday turns into Monday,
As candlelight turns to electricity
And music and talk turn to work and TV.

Willing old workwatch, up every weekday,
Heaves the leaden hours all the way
Down through the tunnel to the light of payday;
But dark in the drawer, soon to make hay,
Our thrilling, deadly nightwatch waits to play.


(2007)


The hedonism hinted at in the previous poem is also the subject here but considered in a more Yin and Yang context.

I have two watches, both of them presents from Lise, both the same model, but one of them clear of face with a brown strap for weekdays and the other black of face and strap for the weekends. They provide a neat little object lesson in the relativity of time.

SPRING SONNET

Now, as holy Spring does just that, right here
To rise and bring in the heathen new year,
Conservatory doors swing wide open -
So mow the grass as the leaves glow greener
And buds grow and brighten; hearts now lighten
And float on the warmer breeze cradling bees
And seashells hung high above bluebells chime:
Now, now, now, they ring out, now is the time!
There in our garden lair, we now retrieve
From their webbed slumber deep in the lumber
Of the musty, cool and dusty toolshed,
Alfresco table and chairs; find lanterns
With wine and music past later sunsets,
We agree: this is as good as it gets.


(2008)


Our garden isn't very big but it is secluded and south-facing. The front of the house is very dark for most of the day and consequently we spend a lot of time in the conservatory watching the seasons change. This poem is the first in a sequence of four sonnets about the seasons.

I think it's true that people tend to notice the natural world much more as they grow older. It's certainly the case for me and Spring, in particular, with its annual transformation, both imperceptible and sudden, never fails to inspire.

This Is Me

I took most of the pictures that accompany my poems. If the picture quality is a bit iffy in some of them, it's because sometimes they are photos of photos. It took me ages to find a half-way decent one of me to go in this introduction. The one here was taken in Lanzarote a few years ago.

Introducing the blog:-

Hello Out There,


What I intend to do here is create a catalogue of my poetry by instalments. I shall post a single poem on a weekly basis along with a short passage of prose which will add context and perhaps a little backstory where appropriate (there won't, however, be any explanation of the poems which will hopefully be able to stand for themselves). Where possible, I will also include photographs - largely ones I've taken myself.

The poems will not appear in a chronological order although I might - if I remember - pay some attention to topicality, anniversaries and seasons atc. The first one, for instance, will be 'Spring Sonnet'.

It would be nice to acquire a readership via this blog and I hope people will find it an enjoyable experience and feel free to respond. I'm aware that there is an element of vanity in this project but if I were a songwriter I would want people to hear my songs and if I were a painter I would want people to see my pictures. So, if this blog seems like something of an ego trip, then so be it.

Here we go, then...

(All photography, poetry and prose published in this on-going blog Copyright C. 200X by I.G. Roberts).