Tuesday 23 August 2011

The departed

















To my mother

They watch us, coolly, from their beds of slate.
They regard us, with their sepia eyes –
The obscure and those who are merely great.
Their pale image offers no surprise.
They have left us, into eternal night,
Slipped into the darkness, like rusty ships.
They do not smile. They are in black and white.
Our warm faces will never touch their lips.
All has been evened out, even their sin.
They have dissolved, into the great shade.
Only the newly-gone can prick our skin
Although a colour photograph can fade.
She drew me to her breast on happy days.
Now she has gone away, her picture stays.


Note: the photograph was taken in a studio in Cairo – my mum was in the the women's army, the  ATS – in 1942 or ’43. She would have been about 17, having run away from home in Coventry at 15 and lied about her age to join the service.

Sunday 21 August 2011

The eternal present



















Beneath the oak trees, now dark, now bright
Their shapes shifting continually
A startling galaxy, the points of light
Are ruffled soul mates of eternity.
As the gentle river mirrors the sky
Water is moved by particles of air
Its form is in flux, how can I
Describe what is no longer there
In a perpetual dance of matter?
As it shears through time smoothly, my prow
Splits future and past, air and water
Shows where I have been, where yet to go
The lapping water is a benediction
A hopeful promise, a valediction


Note: never look back in a canoe, or you risk falling in

Wednesday 10 August 2011

The Riots



The Independent, 15 September, 2010



Max Hastings, Daily Mail, August 2011


They made the Royal Family frown
In Manchester and Canning Town
In shopping malls and retail huts
Reacting to the budget cuts
Kids reached through shattered glass and ran
In Tottenham and Lewisham
Like crazed bankers at bonus time
But City greed is not a crime
It’s natural justice, common sense
That the poor show deference
Why should money be their glitch?
It only motivates the rich!

Tabloid and broadsheet lust for blood
Against the wearers of the hood
Liberal policemen, they avow
Have slaughtered England’s sacred cow
It is a holy trinity
Business, greed and property
Buttressed by hypocrisy
A pretend aristocracy
They see the world through thatch and fields
As riot police with Perspex shields –
A Praetorian guard who shove and bray –
Keep the urban poor at bay

Hastings with his marbled nose
Rolls out a length of purple prose
My dogs have more respect, he writes
Than these unfathered urbanites
Making an unholy row
Even the girls are it now!
How dare they clamour to be free
For self-expression, liberty
Only war will make them manly
A healthy slaughter, like Port Stanley
The town hall flag has turned bright red
The age of deference is dead

Politicians cuss and rave
The camera follows Eton Dave
How have the latest cuts gone down
At the poorer end of town?
Tanned from a Tuscan holiday
He speaks of criminality
Through smouldering ruins now he sees
A broken Big Society
Spoiled by benefits and health
The weak have tried to share his wealth
Only the rich can shout and smash
Abuse the meek and splash their cash

Tuesday 9 August 2011

Coast


















The sky is a scribbled-on slate
A careful study in grey
Like a dull ache, day follows day
At night the town glows softly
Like an elaborate goodbye

The wind crosses the tidal flats
It teases samphire and rocket
And pushes a stiff-winged tern
Slowly, over the shell bank
This is where I began.





Note: Bradwell-on-Sea which gave rise to this is small village at mouth of the Blackwater Estuary in Essex. It has one of Britain's most ancient churches , built by Saxons from the ruins of a Roman fort; also an airfield used in World War two and a pub, The Cricketers, which used to have the signatures of doomed airmen inscribed on its ceiling. Oh and an nuclear power station. It's a haunting place, a couple of hours drive from London.








Wednesday 3 August 2011

I show a prospective tenant around my house. It goes terribly wrong


















Walking through the estate, you were whistled at
Then he sucked his teeth at you, some bloke
Because you're blonde. I said, ‘you should wear a hat’
I live next to the estate. It's not bad. It was a joke

A joke! Women are abused daily. Don't you see!
I do see. I was born in ’58, before the schism
It put us on barricades, men like me
We conceded the ground – we were wrong – to feminism

The hat thing – it was just irony, but you
Saw the dust on the stairs, page three in the Sun
You re-built the barricade. You withdrew
Suddenly, I was Jeremy Clarkson

My humour was misplaced. It's fair enough
But now it's all lads' mags and fake tan
I just don't get it, the new stuff
Compared to that I'm a new man