THE BLUE TATTOO (1942)

The rhythm of her breathing
Shapes a vision
Of trains leaving cities,
On time and out of time,
Trailing steam
Above hypnotic rails,
Over sleepers
And through tunnels
Of reveries and memories,
Old and new,
Steam-grey, smoke-blue.

‘Move along, move along,’
The guards sneer sing-a-song,
‘It is not your number,
No, not your number,
But vice versa, yes, vice versa.’

History is merely new versions
Of shaven skulls and striped overalls;
Of the showers and the shovels,
And events occurring on another level,
Ash-grey, smoke-blue.

She sleeps shapely
While I lie sick and still,
Awake and at mercy, until
A cry escapes the nursery
Where the infant lies curled
From that other world,
In which dreams never come true,
But nightmares always do,
And the blue tattoo
Runs us all through
And through.


(1980)

Having a baby interfered with my sleep in more than the obvious way.

The sheer scale of the Second World War has always fascinated me. It feels like an age away now and to younger people it probably seems about as meaningful as The War Of The Roses, but when I was a teenager, for instance, it was only a couple of decades past. I count myself very fortunate to have missed that war, but I often wonder what it must have been like to have lived through such times. There have been other holocausts before and after, but the Nazi’s industrial slaughter of the Jews was particularly horrific. As I suggest elsewhere, the fear of a future nuclear Armageddon cast a shadow over parenthood for me, but so did recurrent sleeping and waking dreams of being a family caught up in The Final Solution.

This poem has long been waiting for a picture and last week in Liverpool it finally arrived - more by luck than judgement. We were waiting for a train at the James Street station and I was fascinated by the ‘Dream Passage’ wall sculptures over the track. It was only after taking the picture that I realised it would go perfectly with this poem.

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.