On poetry

Making our marks on paper or snow

we travel, gambling with eternity.

We make a contract with the enemy

in the moving illusion of now.

We leave our tracks, our footstep trail.

We will die trying. It seems a pity

in our statement, our poetry

that, ultimately, we always fail.

We move on, we travel hopefully

towards a vanishing infinity.

We record our visions with rhyme

in black on white, a sacred polarity.

We conduct an argument with mortality.

We try again. The enemy is time

I really like Glyn Maxwell s book, which I’m reading, which inspired this poem. I particularly like his take on the relationship between opposites and what he says about poetry and time. The book tackles the subject obliquely, poetically in fact. It's not at all what you would expect. From Amazon: ‘On Poetry is a collection of short essays and reflections on poetry from the poet Glyn Maxwell. These essays illustrates Maxwell's poetic philosophy, that thegreatest verse arises from a harmony of mind and body, and that poetic formsoriginate in human necessities breath, heartbeat, footstep, posture. He speaksof his inspirations, his models, and takes us inside the strange world of theCreative Writing Class.’

Vanishing point

Each day I walk past a cemetery

a neat white sign over a log cabin

R. Gray and Son Monumental Mason –

stacked stones waiting for judgment day. 

While I sit in the shelter at the bus stop

my feet are washed by cemetery run-off

and, as if this wasn’t bad enough
they have eviscerated the chip shop.
They have spilled its guts across the pavement –
old brown carpets and chewed-up clay

in a lonely spot at the edge of town

without ritual or sacrament.
I had to stand there today

slowly, the elements are breaking down.

Braveheart

Let’s be honest; you don’t like us

We imposed on you our useless royalty

And we’ve done nothing to earn your trust

Frankly, we do not deserve your loyalty

We drank your whisky; we shot your grouse

We gave you our Victorian Christmas

You gave us Balmoral: the big house

But, let’s be honest, you made fun of us

Each year, we watched your cheesy Hogmanay

We paid for you; you cost us zillions

You gave us Baxter and Connolly

You died for us, in your millions

You don’t like us and we feel guilty

We won’t be sad if you go away

Of irony and cool English pop

Past the new coffee place, a chilled refectory

close to the station and the chip shop

a cool black hulk, it invites you to stop

with its flyers for music and poetry.

In transit, from doorway to doorway

I observe them - the wraiths

the cold air silvers their breath –

the coming up and the going away.

It looms through the mist, like a ghost ship.

They are talking of music and Jean Genet

of irony and cool English pop.

Close to the station and the chip shop

in this Bohemia, this cabaret

thin young men are doing stand-up.

A memory

A new year. Enjoying the miracle of light

I take out your remains carefully

from the house where I slept last night:
I feel reassured by its solidity.

Like a model crammed into last year’s shoes

you presided over our festivities.

We lit you. You looked over our rituals

around you we laughed and sang, argued.

We had taken you from a hillside

plucked you from some lonely world

to remind us of life outside.

The light came back. It seemed to have died.

Your skeleton is a memory of Christmas.

Perhaps you will live, perhaps you died for us.