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.