after Humphrey Spender’s ‘Scout Parade’ Each day has its care, but each care has its day a proverb proclaims from a church billboard as a scout parade files through its archway. Half these young men look solemn, half bored, caught between the effort and the reward of endeavour; the same way today they’d seek out
When scholars were magicians, They learned to sing And then began to fly, for it was Spring then, And even the intelligent were chockful of passions. So, at night when they were high over the town or wood, They left behind The need to be both diligent and good And surveyed the land below
An island is one great eye gazing out the poet once said, an image I like for its stubbornness, solitude’s drought holding firm before the garrulous strike of water’s insistence. Say you hike the fell of yourself to this clear summit, become its focused pupil, childlike to rediscover the wholly private needn’t mean the selfish
Good job these poets aren’t tightrope walkers she said, else half the fakers would be dead –- another tumble from a tone-deaf shocker. But for a few still dexterous in their tread this formal panache isn’t just possible, it’s song as comprehension in itself: how meaning’s strung out between two shelves. True balance makes this
A friend of mine from college days once told me his greatest pleasure was cooking a meal and then dropping it on the floor. He’d dropped every kind of dish in his time from lasagna and stew to a full roast. What seemed to excite him most was the moment before the plate of food
It’s an early, cold Easter and on Good Friday Jean Munro and I go to a small Greek restaurant on Charlotte Street for our very first ever lunch together. She eats with messy, dripping gusto, Ably assisted by two 75 ml carafes of Retsina. Over Turkish coffee and Turkish Delight I explain that my ambition
When you are sad, and imminently grey, Will you take down my poems and say ‘That bastard took and took and took From me, for the sake of his lousy book’ —And have me, who am truly old and grey Terribly in handcuffs taken away?
scaturiginichthys vermeilipinnis One day do IMeet the Red-finned Blue-eye?Everybody said IMet the White-finned Red-eyeAnd folks say in town IWooed the Blue-finned Brown-eyeBut did I or do IMeet the Red-finned Blue-eye? In another place and time IKnew the Jade-finned Lime-eyeAnd dark rumours hold ISought the Black-finned Gold-eye,I’m willing to suppose ISquired the Green-finned Rose-eye,But, anybody, do
His eyes brim with the patience of his vigil. Time hangs like heavy pendants from his ears. His dewlap spreads like some contorted hill Of larva, frozen for a thousand years. He will lie here quite motionless until The door is opened, and the man appears. And when the man appears, the waiting dog Will
Beneath the towering oils of holy deaths — Cascading thunderstorms of crucifixion, Hands tortured into final benediction, Forgiveness in so many final breaths — They stand, a little dull, a little pale, A little worn by all the years of prayer, As if the hopes still hanging in the air Had left them strangely tired
not just in the stretched sunsets and ticking clocks of poets but in the microwave – those four insistent bleeps Pachelbel’s Canon the word ‘lachrymose’ having to google the word lachrymose and the breathless stop when you spot what could be a new mole on your back or hear the guy who voiced your
Among late summer’s casualties, their dry retreats, their whispering in falls and drifting piles of leaves, her going went the worst for him with foxgloves where wire fencing sags, a sozzled hollyhock’s nosedive, the foxes’ feast of ripped bin bags anemones somehow survive; entangled heaps of splintered canes, their broken-backed tomato plants and, rattled by
zaglossus attenboroughi ‘a single echidna specimen collected in 1961… near the top of Mount Rara, in the Cyclops Mountains of Northern Dutch New Guinea [now Indonesia] was named in recognition of Attenborough’s contribution to increased public appreciation of New Guinean flora and fauna through his documentary work…’ – Wikipedia A world from there but roughly
I like to think I’m special to you, although I know you have so many special friends here, in the dark heart of the year when even the neighbour’s rowan scrapes against the window, plaintive, with that sound everyone hated as a child. What days I have seem shorter than ever and all my jackets
at arm’s reach, side by side, more than twenty-five feet up our treble extension ladders, shuddered by artics and buses thundering up and down Newcastle Street. But Stanway won’t lend me his scraper. It would take seconds, less than a minute, to run it around the window frame where wood meets glass, scrape off the
The cocktail umbrella surprises me. Its scalloped orange and blue pierces the lemon slice angled on the glass. The barman pulling pints smiles. Everyone’s making an effort tonight. Enter the women in glitter tops, it’s legs out although summer, if it ever was, has gone. Autumn doesn’t only happen in New York. We shimmer here
Her flat is on the fourteenth floor. String handles make his fingers burn. Both lifts are out again. Sod’s law. He stops half way. A giddy turn. More staggered flights. Encaustic tiles. Glass cladding visible for miles. She’s in of course. Unsnibs the Yale, shrinks back into her chilly hall then, shushing him, don’t tell
Low little thick-walled stone cottage on the dwindling, forest encroached old Usk road. You’d catch it at your eyeline, squat above the hedgerows, like a cup on its saucer; whitewashed, dim windowed, slightly sad outer face. Dad’s last home. His, more than hers, ‘a refuge place.’ After he’d died, Mum toiled in the garden that
All night I listen out for you, stalled in my terrace window like Pegasus in a field of stars. A clothes horse between semesters, draped in your colours, a bra for blinkers … I wait, still
Nice to get rid of yourself in a few words,Not to think any further or say any more.Nice to conceal in a strange town, To say, I am this, I am that, to use wordsThat are fixed and ripe to ignore.Nice to dispose in a few words. Who wants to live in the woods where