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.