LEICESTER

The weather is bitter and grey
And I can see my breath today
As I pass transitional places,
Glimpsing strangers’ pale, pinched faces,

Passed by students in loud bunches,
Hurrying for fast-food lunches
Past the college and hospital,
Where the trees shiver and leaves fall.

Now, as a church chimes the cold hour,
I imagine time as that tower:
The remembered apartment-block,
Its bricks like minutes on a clock.

The hospital’s grey height rises
On one side, this white cliff rises
On the other, where bare black trees
Clutch at it like fingers that freeze.

Does she still stand, I wonder now,
At her easel by the window
High in that white cliff of concrete,
Where, now and again, we would meet.

It was a fraction of our lives
That passed between husbands and wives;
Poems read, songs sang once or twice;
Hearts betrayed, broken in a trice.

Her voice now is but a whisper,
As faint as that of her sister.
Those were times that didn’t last long,
Back when our lives had all gone wrong.

* * * *

Summer now and I walk the route
Again, knowing every long root
Of the tree of this old hometown;
Heading upwards to look back down

From where I sit beneath a tree,
Counting blessings, lucky old me
In the cemetery on the hill,
Gazing at buildings standing still

In time on this bright, dappled day,
Past the prison and the railway,
The memorial in the park
And that bone-white apartment block.

Past graves of infants and ancients,
I praise the virtues of patience
And fortitude and hope whereof
I give my thanks for joy and love.

Clanking the gate shut behind me,
I get my bearings and then see
Students in mortar-boards and cloaks
With proud, dressed in Sunday-best folks.

Processing from graduation,
Some of them, in this transition,
May be lost, some found, all will grow
Beyond a point none yet can know.

Two decades span a century:
Twenty years since I was set free
From one life into another;
Though the bridge still spans the river.

A life lived fully in one town
Means the past will follow you down
And round the corners of your days:
You move on, but everything stays.


(2010)


A couple of winters ago I was having a course of treatment at the Leicester Royal Infirmary and each week would pass the white tower-block where I used to meet someone with whom I had a brief relationship back in the late ‘80s (followed by another brief relationship with one of her sisters. Not a very neat situation).

Anyway, one of my many meditations on the meaning and the passing of time ensued and most of the first half of this poem stumbled into being before falling down unfinished.

Then, last summer I went for a walk around that area of Leicester, past the Victorian sites that have thankfully survived the ravages of the town’s philistine developers and ended up in the Welford Road Cemetery (incidentally, you can’t literally End Up there anymore because it’s been shut for business for some years now). I saw the graduates and suddenly the poem was all but finished.

That striking white tower-block opposite the Infirmary has weathered remarkably well, by the way, and is one of the very few buildings of the last few decades that I actually like in the city.

DAWN

Sleep has fallen away early
And I listen to the gradual sounds
Of the house waking with me.
The eaves and heat pipes creak gently
As the joists and lintels and slates
Yawn and stretch
With the vibrations of the first traffic.
I imagine the pointillism of light
Starting to minutely dapple the last of the night,
As somewhere beyond the park,
The sun is inching up yet again.
A dish clinks in the sink below,
Whilst down in the deeper dark,
Techtonic plates exhale millimetres
In the unfathomable reaches of time.


(2011)

On this particular morning, I’d woken with three first drafts of poems swimming behind my eyes, the lines writing themselves on different pages in my mind. It proved to be a productive spell because I finished all three later that day. One of them was ‘In The Cavern’ (see above), but this, I think, was the best.

I’m more of a man for the sunset than the sunrise, I’m afraid, so I struggled to find a suitable photo for this poem. The one here was taken from the front of our house just after daybreak the other day.

EMPTY ECHOES

(And I ask myself, is this The Rock?)
My imposing gothic notion runs down like an old clock
As I wander through the airy, shining space that is modernity.
(Where are the lungs of praise, the forever and ever, the eternity?)
The laminated missals and magic trinkets are all locked away;
But for the dapper young priest, this church is quite empty.

(And is this The Rock?)
Amid these villas and trees, this smooth suburban symmetry
Is more in the manner of a theatre ‘in the round’, really,
(Where is the power and the glory?).
Here is only sound without fury
And a stage is just a stage sans audience
And the priest merely an actor sans his flock:
This place is mere oblivion with exits and entrances.

(But sans everything, is this still The Rock?)
The bricks and glass and wood are so clean, immaculately;
No encroaching tenements come hunching here, bleak and swarthy.
Beyond the altar and candlesticks
Lies the box of tricks, the communion of mystery,
And the priest says, ‘He is in there…’
(The Host, The Real Presence, The Corpus Christi)
As if to wind me up, tick-tock.

(But I tell myself, this is not The Rock)
This clock is beyond repair, atrophied with age
In its last hour of all, its second childishness.
Nevertheless, the priest begins to prepare the stage:
He switches on the candles and lowers his eyes,
But I see no curtain rise.


(1977)


A more specific version of ‘Myth And Legend’ (see below) and written around the same time. My mother used to say that, as a small child, I was frightened by the sight of churches… At this time, I hadn’t yet developed the agnostic fascination with them that I have today.


This poem was inspired by a field trip to a modern Catholic church in Leicester as part of the Religious Studies course I was doing at college. I later realized the place was modelled on the Catholic cathedral in Liverpool (affectionately known by locals as ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’, its four bells representing the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John’ likewise being known as ‘John, Paul, George & Ringo’. The picture of the altar was taken there).

Reading T.S. Eliot had shown me that it was possible to use material from other sources without actually plagiarizing and in this poem I enjoyed experimenting with ideas and phrases drawn from Shakespeare to point up the analogy of the church as theatre.

IN THE CAVERN

It is only an ordinary afternoon in Liverpool,
But we are sitting in this replica of the real thing,
Half a century after it was rebuilt here, brick by brick,
A few doors up Mathew Street, its heart and soul intact.

On stage, a singer with a poet’s name is reciting
From the world’s most well-known songbook;
Behind him, the famous psychedelic wall of honour
Proclaims the name of every act it’s had the pleasure to have shown.

The singer’s guitar reverbs the shape of the sacred songs,
While all around the crowd in this catacomb,
Thousands upon thousands of original bricks bear names
Signed by previous pilgrims from all across the universe.

And now, many visits past, we are sharing marker pens
With nearby French men and American women
And finding spare bricks like needles in a haystack,
To add our names here at last and promise that we’ll be back.


(2011)

That’s Jon Keats (sic) performing in The Cavern last Thursday afternoon. The original club was demolished by the council in 1973 to make way for a car-park, would you believe? It was before the city had realized what it possessed in terms of Beatles heritage.

The rebuilt Cavern, despite being not quite original, is still steeped in atmosphere and authenticity. If you want to sign one of its walls, arches or ceilings, you’d better hurry because almost all of those little bricks have already been scribbled on.

BLACKBIRD ROAD

Blackbird sings as the sun shines low,
Atop the pine tree planted long ago.

I think I remember you from last year,
All winter long you have echoed in my ear.

Yes, I recall you, I’m sure, especially when
You drop into our garden with your hen.

Your eye and beak bright, your dark wing strong;
Are you come again to honour us with your song?

On and off, you sing from dawn to dusk, then rest
In the darkness of our shrubs, hidden in your nest.

But one day we find one of your young, forlorn -
Crippled and dying in the middle of the lawn.

The next day, another has taken its exact place,
Far from nest and branch either side: an unsolved case.

Gone for a month now, you briefly return alone
And we wonder where your brown hen has gone.

Feathers now flecked grey and head almost bald,
Blackbird, are you sad, are you sick, are you old?

Is it for fallen fledglings that you come to grieve?
After pecking hopelessly at grass, you finally leave.

It warmed my heart to hear you sing from on high,
But have you gone now to wherever birds go to die.

Blackbird, come back next year and sing again,
Here to our garden, on this road that bears your name.


(2010)


A true story: The Blackbird of Blackbird Road. That’s him in the picture.

You have to be careful with rhyming couplets – that way doggerel may lie. Hopefully I’ve avoided that trap here – along with the other pitfall of bathos…

I read somewhere that an astonishing 75% of wild birds die before they reach six months old - but WHERE do all those billions of birds go to die? Apart from the odd fledgling fallen from the nest and the occasional casualty of cats, how often do you see a dead bird?

THE RAIN HITS THE CITY

Way up
High,
Spiralling,
It is waiting
And watching;
The Rain is gathering its forces,
Wild and whirling and whiling time
In its swarming, darkling orbit;
But wheeling
Without warning,
Down
It comes.

The Rain
Hits
The City
Hard,
Its hailish teeth mechanical as sharks’,
Hammer and rivet sky to street in a swooping lock,
Fast and cold,
And then the rain rains upwards,
Bouncing ravenously back at itself,
Insatiable,
Invincible,
The Rain roves
And threatens the fat banks stuffed with money,
Dins above the throb of the night-shift machinery
And the pulse of traffic is drowned by its drumming,
Making of its desperate wipers, a locust mockery.

With no abatement
The rain keeps on;
Dives off ledges and bridges:
Never dies
As it pocks the costive canal,
The Rain defies;
Stabbing the dark and lonely parks,
It batters blossom out of aching trees
And floods all routes of the shallow pipes and gutters.

Dust is thus turned into streaming scum
And holy gargoyles choke;
Drains spume,
Spate:
The Rain is swilling out the City’s mouth
East and west,
North and south,
Whilst behind blurring windows
Men cannot rest
As they shiver through these early hours,
Until suddenly the Rain
Stops.

The City is thrown into sodden black relief,
Left like some colossal Ark,
Awaiting some undeserved deliverance.
Daybreak
Over the towers and spires,
And a dark bird now flies out,
Bearing litter in its beak.
There is no rainbow.


(1983)


Even with 'free verse', almost always, some kind of form emerges as I write, though not necessarily or even usually, a traditional form. Most of the shaping of metre and rhyme in my work is of my own device. Even in a poem like this one, where the lines begin and end is vitally important, although there is no overall regularity beyond the typographical trick of making the print resemble a storm-cloud structure.

I had in mind here the financial district of London (‘The City’) with the rain as an elemental nemesis which periodically purges the obesity of the banking system. All these years later, it now seems very topical in the worst recession since The Great Depression.

A few years ago we went on The London Eye and, as we approached the top, a tremendous storm broke out – as you can see in the photograph that Lisa took of me. Below us, the city darkened and there was a real feeling of apocalypse in the air.

THE DILEMMAS OF TIME AND CHANCE

When it’s nearly midnight and at last you’re asked to dance,
Will you step into the arms of a prince or a dunce?
Do you seize the moment, will it only come once?
These are the dilemmas of Time and Chance.

Call it Kismet, call it Karma, call it Destiny or Fate,
Just be careful when you go out waltzing on a date -
That man of your dreams may be a nightmare full of hate -
So don’t turn up too early, but oh, don’t arrive too late.

So is it to be carpe diem or que sera sera?
Were you born under a lucky or an unlucky star?
Will you amount to nothing or will you go far?
If you miss the last boat, will you thumb down a car?

They say Time’s a healer, it will lead you by the hand
To follow the footprints leading away in the sand.
They say grief will pass when you reach that other land
Where life goes on and you must finally make a stand.

Now those vows you made for better or for worse,
Will they deliver the blessing or do they bring the curse?
But Chance is the dealer and you may win or you may lose -
Are the aces played low or high - which of them will you choose?

And it is said that what goes around will come around
And for everything lost something else will be found,
But listen to that sound, that awful, grinding sound -
Can that be the Wheel of Fortune breaking down?

Now you see you’re caught between a hard place and a rock
And the hands are a blur on the face of the clock.
Is there still enough time to reflect and take stock?
You find the key, but no guarantee and there may not be a lock.

Back at the ball, see the mysterious masquerader advance;
That swirling of his magical cloak is meant to entrance.
Will this be your very last appointment with romance?
These are the dilemmas of Time and Chance.


(2011)

Started a while back but only licked into shape now. It’s really just an exercise in compressed rhyme and having a little spooky fun with the basic idea of coincidence.

OBJET TROUVE

On this fine April day with great clouds
Rolling overhead, coolness vying with warmth,
I am photographing daffodils in the park,
Pointing the camera at bright splashes of gold
On the grassy slopes and in small clumps
Around the dusty roots of waking trees,
When something seems to flash silver
In a surge of sunshine streaming fresh
Through the emergent leaves high above.

Squinting at the shrubbery, I find I am
About to photograph a photograph:
An eight by ten, black and white shot
Of two Asian girls in traditional finery -
Indonesian perhaps - sat cross-legged,
Their sequins and pearls glamourizing
What looks to be a mundane, functional hall,
Where this sliver of sun has now found a window
And caught the silver of their head-dresses.

I’m struck that it may be a wedding celebration,
And the girls are singing some hymn of praise,
With their faces immaculately painted and hair
Swept back, they are a picture of elegance.
Behind them a vague, banal jumble of wires,
Speakers and amplifier, but inside the moment
The girls are transcendent, the more beautiful
Of the two enraptured, with her eyes closed,
Fingers outstretched to capture some sublime note.

I pick up the picture, place it carefully in my bag
And wander back along the dappled, breezy path
Wondering, along the way, about the bride and groom
And wishing them well on this auspicious Spring day.


(2011)

That’s the actual picture, which I found on Abbey Park near where we live in Leicester.

‘Objet trouve’ - with an accent on the ‘e’ - is French for ‘found object’ and the idea – from the French – is that ordinary everyday things can be found to have inspirational qualities and be used for artistic purposes. I was going to call the poem ‘Found Object’, but it’s not the most elegant phrase, is it?

Pretentious? Moi?

GHOST STORY

Returning from the grove of grass and stone,
Grievers gone away, I am left alone
To wander these cold rooms broken-hearted,
Searching for the soul newly departed.
Your scent is everywhere, like morning dew;
As fresh as ever, unmistakeably you.

The house is empty now – less like a home –
With all life gone, waiting more like a tomb.

And how will I bear so heavy a cross?
How to rise above such deep, aching loss?

But in the garden, I think I see you
Standing by the trees, still as a statue.
Then you turn, pale, tearful; begin to walk
Towards me; but now when I try to talk,
You shake your head and pass through me blindly,
And wander into the house behind me.

The day is done, the summer sun has shone.
Dusk fades down. Now even your scent is gone.


(2006)


As the title suggests, this poem is a fiction. It did, however, arise from an actual funeral from which I had returned: that of my ex-wife’s grandmother. I had been very fond of Granny Dolly who was buried in the small churchyard of the village where she had lived.

But this poem is not about Granny Dolly. I had stood in our garden thinking over the funeral that evening and listening to the rustling of the leaves, when an uncanny impulse made me wonder whether I was there at all.

I wrote a very vague outline of the poem shortly after but didn’t finish it for several years. That shake of the head towards the end came, I’m sure, floating up through my subconscious, from the red-hooded dwarf that murders the character played by Donald Sutherland at the climax of the film ‘Don’t Look Now’. He’s so sure the figure in red that he’s been pursuing through the dark, foggy backstreets of Venice is the ghost of his recently drowned daughter, but when the dwarf turns to finally reveal herself, she shakes her head before delivering a terrible coup de grace...

The photograph of Lisa is much more recent than the actual poem but it only occurred to me the other day that it might be the right image to go with the poem.

THE LILY OF MY LIFE

Grandad lied about his age in World War One;
Got gassed; came back to years on the dole;
Worked out his life at the cemetery;
Dead and gone by the time I was three.

Grandma never once used a telephone;
Was even nervous about radio
And switching on appliances and the TV;
But oh, she was always there for me.

In a storm, she turned the mirror to the wall;
Put away the cutlery then hid in the hall;
Yes, she was afraid of all electricity;
But she was always brave for me.

Lived a cold, hard life in a grey city slum;
Raised her children - two uncles and my Mum -
In a sunless street by a high factory wall
And she was always there for them all.

Then cleared by the council to a new house
On a crescent by a green roundabout
With lawns, a shed and a lilac tree,
Where I would play happy and free,

When I escaped from the Hell House
To her cosy, cold-water, corner terrace;
Time and again the regular refugee,
In the house that was a second home to me.

Torn from her head the silky white hair,
One dark night when Mum and I sheltered there
From him who attacked her most brutally,
Whilst she was busy protecting me.

And Grandma would take me to the Co-Op
And hand in hand, we’d go from shop to shop
Trawling up and down that little community
Of Narborough Road, my Grandma and me.

And, later on, I would lean in to steady her
Arthritic body and take her to the butcher,
The baker and grocer - the places she had taken me,
Safely away from my warped and broken family.

I lived with her during her last crippled years
And although that mixed up kid cried the tears
And somehow knew that his childhood was done,
He didn’t really know what he’d had ‘til it was gone.

Born before the twentieth century,
Lily Weldon came into this life a nobody
And seventy-nine years later, she left it still a nobody,
But afterwards and always, she was a somebody to me.


(2011)

My Grandma was a lovely old lady who lived a long life for that time - and considering the physical frailty that increasing blighted most of her life. My Grandad died in 1955, having worked as a verger at Gilroes Cemetery for most of his life. Perhaps it’s from him that I get my fascination with graveyards. Grandma died in 1970 when I was eighteen and I really don’t know what I would have done without her from about 1957 onwards, following Mum’s divorce from my father.

Being a fairly typical selfish teenager with more than my fair share of angst, I didn’t always treat her as well as I might have done towards the end and I often wish I could turn back time and take with me some of the compassion and patience that I often lacked back then.

‘Always there for me’ is a threadbare phrase these days, but it was literally true in this case. I’m not sure exactly where or when the photograph was taken: maybe Bournemouth or the East Coast somewhere c. 1956. It’s one of my favourites but I can’t help but notice that the angles are weirdly askew, as if things are starting to tilt…

JOE GORILLA

There – behind the reinforced window
In a chamber of tiles and televisions –
Which is a cage all the more
For the absence of bars,
Smoulders silverbacked Joe,
In an attitude of unyielding dignity
That is a continent beyond
What I suppose to be his sadness and my pity.

Doors open and close on the holiday sun
As harassed humans filter through,
Pulled by children in search of ice-creams
And rides and all the other fairground fun
So thoughtfully provided by the leisure-park zoo.
A glance at Joe, a glance at the flickering screens
And they pass him by –
This being so wholly himself –
Like a something on a supermarket shelf.

And what kind of life is this, Joe?
The question is more than merely rhetorical -
Dare to look deep in the eyes of the oracle –
Joe Gorilla knows.


(1982)


Lise and I visited Chester Zoo recently – the first time we’d been to a zoo together. We both have ambivalent feelings about the places but were generally impressed with the size and layout of the enclosures at Chester. I had a less favourable impression of the zoo featured in this poem (Whipsnade, I think).

The gorilla became something of an animal celebrity and lived to a ripe old age so maybe he wasn’t quite as fed up as he looked. Alison and I had taken Ramona, who was about four at the time, on the trip. I remember we stood with a gaggle of other visitors at the glass window of the tiger’s enclosure, a long run which it was cantering up and down. Suddenly it stopped on the other side of the glass and pissed voluminously all over it and, metaphorically, all over us too, I suppose, as far as he was concerned. An eloquent moment. Never quite managed to put that one in a poem, though…

Ted Hughes wrote great poems about animals that were in captivity and in the wild and I’m aware that his work casts a long shadow. This poem wasn’t an imitation of him but I guess there may be some similarities. Never mind, eh?

THE MASQUERADERS

Brilliant ghosts make stately progress
Over the bridges of Venice
In the chill, coppersmoke sunset
That settles on the waterfront
And inches up the Piazza San Marco.

But who are these butterfly visions
Gliding silently through wintry crowds?
Are they old or ugly, perhaps?
Famous or just plain nondescript
Beneath their anachronistic outfits?

Part of the architecture,
They gaze imperious
Through the frozen glamour
Of their chosen faces,
At a world, which –
If only for now –
Has them as its focus;
And it is we –
With our digital cameras –
Who seem out of place.

When they leave
The milling Carnevale of the square,
They pause along the way
To pose statuesque
On crests of bridges
With plumed and hooded heads
Inclined regally to one last lens.

Back in tired hotel rooms
Will they avoid mirrors
As their false faces
And flowing hired finery
Fall to the floor,
Showing listless moths
In dusty drapery
Who they really are?


(2002)



The Carnevale in Venice takes place every February as it has done for centuries. The masqueraders provide a surreal spectacle around the tourist hotspots and are even more dramatic if you encounter them sweeping around a corner in the back-streets away from the crowds.

Even in winter, Venice, although cold, is very bright and the quality of the light is like nowhere else. At night, it is very quiet and I was forever experiencing flashbacks to one of my favourite films, ‘Don’t Look Now’ (the only film to ever give me nightmares as an adult – thankfully we didn’t see any serial-killer dwarves in red hooded coats during our visits).

The light wasn't too great however, when I took this picture of a couple of those masqueraders on a bridge in Venice during our visit in 2002. It is kind of darkly atmospheric though...

FUERTEVENTURA

Afterwards,
As the wind rushes through the palms,
We sleep in each other’s warm arms
With your cooling breath on my face,
Far from home, in this island place;
And away
We slip into night’s strange fictions,
Beyond the hot, blue day’s actions,
Yielding to the Moon’s shifting sands,
Before tomorrow’s high commands
Are issued long before the noon;
So soon above wave, sky and dune.


(2011)


Fuerteventura – literally, the island of ‘strong winds’ – has wonderful white, sweeping beaches and bright blue sea much beloved by surfers. With its roiling riptides, it can however, be a perilous place and I nearly drowned there a few years ago. Nevertheless, we’ve just returned from another visit.

Those winds move the weather around quite dramatically and I took the picture on Corralejo beach after a sweltering day had changed in a trice to a dark, cloud-wracked evening.

DUSTY AND THE DOVER CASTLE CATS

‘I just can’t think what to do with my time.’

But, a cat for curiosity,
I measure the light in darkness
And look for the darkness in light,
As I prowl round Friday night bars
And reach a place known well
To its theatrical clientele.

As in every pub, heads turn
To clock the new arrival,
But in here, the heads stay turned
And you can almost feel the eyes
Point like hands to the new number.

Dusty Springfield on the jukebox…
Mascara winks and takes Me back
Down the years to ‘Ready Steady Go’
Promising ‘The Weekend Starts Here’

‘I just don’t know what to do with myself.’

The place is just swarming with cats,
Though, cornered in their queenly midst,
Are a few cropped, dumpy bitches
Hunched over flat pints of lager,
Sealing roll-ups on thin, pale lips.

‘Going to a movie only makes me sad,
Parties make me feel as bad.’

I feel like some gauche wildebeest
Stranded on the Serengeti
As drooling hyenas cackle
And lions enlivened close in.

‘I’m so used to doing everything with you.’

Oh, man, look up, down, anywhere!
Beware those fluffy Chinchillas
Fluttering long black eyelashes
And the fat, epicene Burmese
Who’ve seen everything before;
Angular, urbane Siamese
Swirling neat whiskey on the rocks;
A few mangy old alley cats,
Lean and cynical at the bar
And the sad domestic tabbies
Hungry, furtive and fugitive
From marriages heading for the rocks.

‘When I’m not with you, I just don’t know what to do.’

Glassy cats’ eyes torch through smoke
With their challenge of fire and ice
To the dark kennel of the skull
Where lies buried a hard bone of vice.


(1979)


There’s a double sense of dislocation going on here. I wasn’t feeling comfortable at home around this time so I would drift around places where I knew I’d feel OK – namely, pubs. This one however, didn’t work for me.

P.S. Isn't Dusty Springfield the greatest female singer of all time?

THE ELEMENTARY TOWN

The road there is uphill
And, carrying our bag of hardy plants,
We pass on one side a new estate and supermarket
And, on the other, anachronistic, dying allotments.

We enter through the old quarter,
Where solemn municipal symmetry
Has slipped into a kind of natural sprawl,
Like a larger version of an old village churchyard.

Grey squirrels dart amidst shadows and weeds
And blurred gravestones that sink and tilt
Like rocks beneath the birdsung trees.
As we wander the sun-dappled avenues,
We glance at dedications with spaces left
For late arrivals on family masonry,
And glimpse ourselves momentarily reflected
In the sleek, flashing bodywork and glass
Of a black limousine that hums past,
Towards the Chapel, at the heart of the cemetery.

By the Garden and Book of Remembrance
With its pages turned to mark the passing of days;
By plots housing the gated mansions of the rich,
Statued with seraphs and Redeemers and Madonnas –
No less vulgar and no less sincere
Than the boxwood crosses of the poor –
We reach the claustrophobic terraces
Which mark the streets of the recently cremated.

Conscientious generations of mourners
Have made these narrow walks of marble resplendent,
And we place our little pots and bunches of brief colour
Where we should, then add our own few minutes
Of living silence to the endless quietus of loss.

The way back home is downhill
And the traffic always strikes so loud,
Deafening, or perhaps reminding us
Of the hard truth, that all roads will lead us
Back, in time, to this last home on the hill.


(2001)




I’ve always liked graveyards, be they large or small, urban or rural. These days, when I visit the section of the cemetery where my mum’s headstone stands, the memento mori aspect intensifies every time, because the ‘claustrophobic terraces’ of what amounted to a small town back in 1996 when Mum died, have now, of course, multiplied and resemble a veritable necropolis.

I borrowed the title, by the way, from one of Dylan Thomas’s birthday poems, ‘Twenty-Four Years’:-

‘In the final direction of the elementary town,
I advance for as long as forever is.’

The picture is a sketch I did from a very eloquent photograph of DT which, I think, must have been taken towards the end of his short life. The cemetery may well be the one at Laugharne in Wales, where he’s buried. The sketch is dated 1976. I visited Laugharne about fifteen years later and had a wander around the graves. It was a lovely sun-dappled afternoon and I took some atmospheric pictures of DT’s simple white wooden cross and the town and the estuary – at least, I thought I did. It turned out that the camera had developed a fault, the whole film was over-exposed, and – in those pre-digital days – that was that. Maybe I’ll get back there one day and try again…

EARLY SPRINGTIME IN THE CASTLE GARDENS

On a morning such as this,
A mint-fresh March morning
Of melted frost and clean, cold sunshine,
I walk out with my camera
To catch the crocuses in Castle Gardens.

Crossing the busy bridge
Where, half a millennium ago,
King Richard rode on to Bosworth Field,
I enter the little park by his statue that stands
Frozen in a last flourish of sword and crown.

And there on the green slope,
Brilliant in purple, yellow and white,
Bloom once more the brief crocuses
Beneath the site of the Siege of Leicester
And the spire of St. Martins in the clear blue sky.

I’m drawn by a palaver of gulls
On to the new bridge where someone
Is feeding a scrimmage of swans
In the shadow of the university
Apartments across the Grand Union Canal.

I turn round and notice upstream
An old woman and her white terrier
On the prow of a green barge where
She is tending window boxes whilst the dog,
With ears and tail up, stands sentry on hind legs.

Back on the park, I follow the path
Past the green pond and wooden benches
With brass plaques towards the other iron gate,
When two young men enter, talking in Adriatic accents
And suddenly, one of them breaks away twirling

Around, his arms raised in hosanna
And he exclaims, ‘What a beyoutiful garaden!
Oh Gard!’ he cries out, turning to the cathedral spire,
‘Thenk you, Gard. I larv you, Gard, so mach!’
Before reeling back to rejoin his friend.

Grown out of Wars of Roses and Civil strife,
Surrounded by business and traffic and bustle,
Near to a church, but not of it - though still, perhaps, holy,
This park is a place of peace for people to rest, read,
Eat their lunch, take pictures maybe, or make a short cut

On their way through time and space
In a blind rush - though many will always pause
And some even sing out their praises loud and clear;
And thus it is that, in joyful simplicity, the spirit lifts
On a morning such as this.

(2011)

A true little story of time, incident and place. I hope the way that I’ve represented the young man’s words in the seventh verse don’t come across as ridicule because that’s not my intention – I just wanted to capture exactly what he said and the way it sounded.

VALENTINE

See this blush symbol of Saint Valentine:
Trace the symmetry of two perfect halves
Fused flush into one, evoking Love’s shrine;
It beats out the rhythm of the romance dance
Where trees lean together and branches entwine
Over lovers entranced, taking a chance…

Winter looks over his shoulder, sees sunshine
Waiting to stream forth from the eye of Spring –
Who neither Time nor tide can undermine
As she sets the future growing with hopes
Of fresh new lives - maybe yours, love, and maybe mine,
Deep beneath the heartland, all across the skyline.


(1998)


I wrote this in the last Valentine card I sent to Lise before our wedding later that year.

This posting is a little late and should have gone on last week when the chocolate box from Thorntons was still full and the flowers from Aldi were still fresh.

MEMENTO MORI

Illuminated by the high, hot sun
Of the Algarve, she pauses
At the walled foot of the hill,
Framed by the arched gateway
To the old cathedral town of Faro,
From which she has come.
She holds my eye calmly whilst
Adjusting the cowl of her black robe
With her one good hand,
But not, I think, to hide the leprosy.
Perhaps she has become indifferent
To the appalled expressions
On ordinary faces
Which only distort temporarily.
Then she turns away the ghost
Of what was once, quite clearly,
A handsome, proud face and slowly,
But with a straight back and a clear eye,
She moves over the cobbles,
A ruined hand hanging at her side,
And crosses the busy road
Into the city beyond the old town,
As if from another age,
But looking life full in the face.


* * * *


We have climbed to the top
Of the medieval cathedral,
The sunlight casting abstract
Reflections from the stained glass
On its cold, silent stones,
And we have wandered the walls,
Taking in the estuary views
With our eyes and cameras.
Then, later, on a hill in the city,
We find a plaza with a church
At each end, amidst noisy streets,
Where we stand now in sepia light,
Inside an arched and vaulted room
Across a courtyard in the grander
Of the churches, the Igreja De Carmo.
This is the Bone Chapel,
Its altar, walls and ceiling made entirely –
Save for the mirror above the altar –
From the bones and skulls of ancient monks.
Its barred windows are reflected
Perfectly in brilliant shadows on the ground.
I gaze in the glass and around and around,
With death looking me full in the face.


(2010)

We were on a summer holiday in Albufeira in Portugal and had taken a train to Faro, the ancient capital of the Algarve. Having recently read Victoria Hislop’s novel, ‘The Island’ about the leper colony on the isle of Spinnalonga, just off the coast of Cyprus, I had assumed that terrible disease had been eradicated. The woman we saw in Faro suggested that was not the case.

Lise took the picture of me in the Bone Chapel at my insistence. She didn’t like the place and doesn’t like the picture but it had to be taken and is the obvious image to accompany this poem. So there.

OLD RAY

As a cold and frosty morning
Turns into a sunny afternoon,
Old Ray wanders round old London town
With, as usual, too much on his mind.
Murmuring songs from way back when
His voice was always on the radio,
He hunches his shoulders
And digs his hands deep down
The pockets of an old overcoat.
A bit barmy and battered,
But still a well respected man,
Old Ray rambles the old familiar way,
His forehead growing higher now
Under one of Max Miller’s old hats,
With one of Eric Morecambe’s old ties
Under an untidy scarf half-hiding
That gap-toothed grin on the sardonic face,
Which some passers-by fancy
They half-recognise from the telly long ago.

Young Ray bought a big house in the country
Once, but he soon came back to where he belonged.
He couldn’t get away because it was always
Calling him to come on home,
Back to the river and the big black Smoke.
It may all be cleaner now, but Old Ray
Hurries head down, muttering past
The shining new towers of the City of London,
New songs humming in his old head
With memories of family and friends
And the way love used to be
And the sacred days all scattered to the fields.
But though they’re gone
They’re still with him every single day
And he’s going home, so what does it matter?
Over the bridge and along the Camden canal,
By the old school and dance hall and pubs,
Through the Heath and villages and up the hills
Of Muswell, Parliament and Primrose,
In the blessed, chilly evening light
To sit on a bench and watch the sunset,
Way across the dirty old river.
Flowing into the night


(2011)

This is my first poem of 2011.

I wrote this after watching what struck me as a very eloquent TV documentary about Ray Davies last year (one of the ‘Imagine’ programmes on BBC 1). As I write, Ray is, I think, 66 years old, which in 21st century terms is no longer thought of as ‘old’, but back in the heyday of The Kinks during the last century, it really did seem ancient…

Fans of The Kinks will, of course, detect many bits and pieces from the band’s wonderful back catalogue woven into this poem.

The lovely picture of Ray was taken when he was 50 and, actually, he hasn’t really changed much at all since then. So – not so old.

THE YOOF OF TODAY

Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen,
They should – as every parent and teacher will tell you –
Never ever be heard, let alone be seen.
‘Kids! Who’d have ‘em? I rue the day they were born.’
They’re ignorant, arrogant and insolent,
Addicted to vulgarity, vice and vandalism;
Lazy, loitering litterbugs – that’s what they are –
Ill-mannered, leering, sub-literate liars
Who’d sell their grannies and little sisters for fivers.
They’re foul-mouthed, fickle and unfair;
Selfish, spiteful and obsessed with sex, sport and soap-opera;
And they grin and gossip gormlessly
As they barge and bully and brawl;
We say, ‘It’s just a phase they all go through.’
The phase their parents dread most of all.

Between the ages of dirty thirteen and sex-mad sixteen,
They live on crisps, cola, chocolate and chips
And when they’re not idiotically giggling, they’re venting their vicious spleen.
Moody, mardy malcontents all,
Who sulk and pout and flounce;
Cool fools, louche louts, fashion-fascists,
Snobs and yobs brave only in mobs.
Rebels without a cause, indeed,
Without ideas or ideals,
Prejudiced and unprincipled,
Knowing the price of everything
And the value of nothing;
Respecting neither the old nor the past.
‘Please God,’ their parents pray through
This phase they too all went through,
‘Please God, it won’t last!’


(1997)


Having worked as a teacher for longer than I care to remember, as well as being a parent, I do know of what I speak here. It was written during a timed assessment which took place in blessed silence with a class of 14 and 15 year-olds who had, over the course of the school year, made me a fervent believer in retrospective abortion…

I do hope, however, that no-one reading this poem – no matter what their age – will be left with the impression of it being merely an exercise in denunciation and wordplay.

VERSE NOIR (Here’s Looking At You, Kid)

Tell me, have I got this story right –
You know that serpentine story in black and white?
Is there a Big Wheel in moonlight turning
And black midnight oil burning, burning?
Is there a telephone always ringing
And a detective in a tilted hat singing?
Will there be a gunfight
And blood in the night?
I want you to tell me –
Am I right or am I right?

In Club Chicago, the band strike up that play-it-again song.
A girl there wears her gold hair short and her black dress long,
Her eyes sparkle through the smoke;
She rattles the ice in her vodka and coke
And watches a third man coming up behind an old has-been,
In the familiar shadowplay of that played-out scene.
(Well, she already dumped one sap for you, Jack,
Gonna leave you too, she’s a gal don’t look back
And this young dude collects blondes in bottles too.
Hey, your golden girl – she thinks he’s cute).
Outside in the rain, the private eye sees them leave,
His finger on the trigger at the end of his sleeve.
They melt into a cab as the lights go green –
Ain’t this that same old movie, same old scene?
Upstairs, later in a house on West Tenth and Vine
There’s two silhouettes in lamplight, closing the blind.
So, forgive me baby, if I don’t seem too bright
And excuse me while I stroke this ear on the right;
Won’t you tell me, sugar –
Am I right or am I right?

Now a saxophone plays in a monochrome haze
And neon nights dissolve into twilight days.
Over the street, a falcon circles the steeple
While he wonders if the problems of two little people
Amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,
Where she says she’s still his girl,
Asks him if he’s OK and he says ‘Top of the world’.
He thinks of the shots in the envelope and the piece cold at his side
And he wants to leave with her but he stays frozen inside.
In Technicolor, she whispers, ‘I love you’, he says ‘Ditto’,
And begs her to stay when she says she’s gotta go.
She says she’ll be back but then it’s time for time to fly
And wish each other good luck and goodbye.
But this movie, lady, is shot in black and white
And the screenplay is vague but the timing is tight.
Now, tell me, sweetheart –
Am I right or am I right?

In the fog, the plane engines hum and choke
And he has to get out now or just go for broke.
Though time and distance will drag them apart,
He figures that falcon may yet have a nightingale heart.
She has a lotta class but he don’t know how far she’ll go;
He shrugs, lights a cigarette, guesses he’ll never know.
He catches her wrist and says, ‘You’ll forget where we were, won’tcha,
But you know how to whistle, baby, don’tcha?’
And he don’t think she will but he hopes she just might…
You tell me, kid –
Am I right or am I right?


(1997)


This is one of my personal favourites and needs to be heard in the reader’s head as if Humphrey Bogart is narrating it. I’ve always loved 1940s Film Noir and we’re both fans of Dennis Potter’s TV plays. It did occur to me to add a filmography to this note but I think it will be more fun for people to try and spot the references for themselves.

THE BIRDMAN OF ABBEY PARK

More wanderer than beggar,
The Birdman of Abbey Park
Is a solitary mister
Like Dylan’s lonely hunchback,
He rests between trees and water
And listens to the birds talk.

Beyond the island and the weir,
Under windcheater and rucksack,
He appears mainly in dry weather
To loll on sloping grass the better
And wait for swan, goose and duck
To swoop and splash and honk and quack.

For unto him they will surely gather,
Though often in a blitz when he will chuck
Thick sandwiches at them like flak
Until the sirens of their beaks tire
And they wait, then merely loiter
As the Birdman sprawls supine and slack

Before stretching his long legs to kick
At the sky, or arching that lean back
Like the stone bridge that spans the river
Green with algae, lily-pads and weed-wrack
At the end of the time-flown summer
To await the winter’s cold, grey dredger.

Watch him on his gangling walk:
Shunning eye-contact, head thrown back,
The birdman has no eyes for ruins or lake
Nor for flowers or Pets Corner,
No eyes for book or newspaper,
No eyes for you and none for me neither.

About my age but angular, taller,
Imperious as a hawk,
Silent as the heron on the weir,
He heads straight down to the river
For his distant, never changing mark
Where he stays till he slips away in the dark.


(2009)




The Dylan mentioned in the opening stanza is our old friend Dylan Thomas again and I am reminded of his poem, ‘The Hunchback In The Park’ every time I see the Birdman. The rhyme-scheme is an echo of that in the DT poem although mine sustains the same two rhyme-sounds throughout.

One of the park-keepers told me that he’d been trying to engage the Birdman in conversation for many years but had never been so much as looked in the eye by him, let alone had a word back. I once took some pictures of the Birdman doing his weird calisthenic-type exercises but they mysteriously disappeared. Hopefully, I’ll catch him again and include a shot here just to prove that he really does exist.

I took the shot above in the snow just before Christmas when I saw him there in his usual place before the birds came to him. By the time I came back round, they had, as you can see, ‘gathered unto him.’

We’re very fortunate to have this beautiful park almost on our doorstep. It’s every bit the equal of London’s famous green spaces.