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.