Thursday 29 November 2012

Nothing is pointless











To Peter



The sky is like an inverted bowl
A cup of darkness pushing us down
A grey blanket that presses our soul
We stumble along, frail and alone.
Being human we look up, hopefully
We count the stars and measure the rain
Carefully, we construct an ontology
We wait for the light to come back again.
Nothing is pointless you said
We can find meaning in philosophy
We owe it to the living and the dead.
Our vegetable soul seeks harmony
We love others; people love us
We look up. The sky is numinous.

Sunday 25 November 2012

Thursday 15 November 2012

Ziggurat


We glance upwards as we wander by
At its vertiginous engineering –
Flimsy cranes pinning blocks to the sky
The great columns and slabs cloud spearing.
We are bewitched by its clumsy lurch
Into space because we are earthbound.
It dwarfs the handsome planes and the church
Echoing the hollow vaults underground
Its shafts are like vast sarcophagi.
They are allusions to our vanity
Crude attempts to defy gravity
Like monuments to some cruel deity.
We glance upwards as we wander by
We cannot climb to heaven, but we try.

They are building this monstrous monument to greed close to my office

Ziggurats (/ˈzɪɡʊˌræt/, Akkadian ziqqurat, D-stem of zaqāru "to build on a raised area") were massive structures built in the ancient Mesopotamian valley and western Iranian plateau, having the form of a terraced step pyramid of successively receding stories or levels.

Friday 9 November 2012

Halcyon
















 
By the gas works and the giant Sainsbury’s
blocking the winter sky like a shroud
the boxed hatchbacks swarm like larvae.
Though smothered, she was not dead
she was merely exiled beneath the ground –
sleeping fields that have never seen a lark
acres of concrete spreading like a wound.
She springs from the earth near the car park.
For an age, she waited, like a rumour.
Glimpsed in the flash of a kingfisher
she is the queen of  hawthorn and alder
the goddess – here, you can almost touch her.
She threads through ash and willow weeping.
She was not dead. She was merely sleeping.

Photo shows the subject of this poem, the River Pool in Lewisham. Went to buy a telly, wrote a poem - well, not immediately. London has many rivers as well as the Thames  (eg the Fleet, the Wandle, the Effra, the Ravensbourne, the Pool, the Quaggy) - rivers that are recorded in the Domesday book and were known by the Romans and Saxons and before. Often they are buried in culverts and used as storm drains but in some cases, as here, they are allowed to resurface.

Friday 2 November 2012

Tony



In a photographer's studio you pose.
They must have taken you to the sea 
a small boy in cut-down fireman's clothes.
Your stillness echoes their formality –
the mayor and his wife on holiday
walks on the esplanade, the golden mile
in Weston-super-Mare or Torquay
Something is absent from your face – a smile.
You were never a child. They were Victorian 

You played with lead soldiers and painted wood 
but you were never a cowboy or Red Indian.
You stole your innocence where you could.
Did you love them? There was no childhood then.
Little sailors were miniature men.


This is about my dad, Tony.