Category: Poetry

If music be the food of love then poetry may just be the language of emotion. Home for my own words and those of others who in some way inspire, inform, entertain or educate me.

Lorca’s Pencil

Federico García Lorca was one of Spain’s finest poets. Assassinated by Fascists in August 1936 soon after the start of the Spanish Civil War his death should remind us of the dangers of fascism as it rises once again, not just in Spain where I’m writing this but across the world.

So here is a poem for World Poetry Day.

Lorca’s resting place has never been found. But the graves of many who lost their lives under Franco have been and their remains returned to their families. I was struck that among the possessions retrieved from the most recently found bodies was a pencil. So I used that as my starting point for this work of imagination. What last words would Lorca’s pencil have written in the hours – at most days – between his detention and his death?

Lorca’s Pencil

Vete a la mierda, Lorca
Fuck you Lorca
Fuck your words
Fuck your poesia
And fuck your queer ways

The pencil cracked more softly than the bullet though hurt me more. The broken end thrust thus in my poet’s eye.

Yet stabbed and shot
To die I worry not
As I had not worried to be born.
This unmarked grave like my fly-leaved crib
Hojas en blanco continuará
Blank sheets to be filled.
Poetry cannot be stilled.
This pencil unearthed will pick up its path:

In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country.
And I am more alive than ever
My words illuminate the darkness.
My pencil points the way.

Lee mis palabras
Read my words
Remember my words
Recite my words
But never reject them

My unconcealed weapon is truly mightier than the sword (it’s what scared them so and put me here)
Behold this arch-enchanter’s wand
Itself a nothing (to borrow Bulwer-Lytton)
But taking sorcery from my master hand (as he has written)
To paralyse my seizers.
And to strike them breathless
Take away the sword
Freedom can be saved without it!

El futuro es tuyo para escribirlo
The future is yours to write, so
Escribelo bien
Write it well.

Rhayader Reveille

Midnight strikes on the memorial clock
A flame throwing dragon is guarding the flock
While a gunpowder fog glistens and glosses 
The uniform slates and the uniform mosses. 

For God and for Country. Lest we forget. 

A window on North Street turned aquarium green
Where a Six Nations turf war bled out on the screen
And all the beers downed are now suds on the glass
As a solider called Taffy’s kicked out on his arse.

The Castle Hotel on a Saturday night.
Over the top lads. One hell of a fight.  
Jones is shot through, guts spilled at ten paces
One hundred years from the pals without faces.

Retching and heaving by the stone-carved platoon
Blood at the feet of the boys gone too soon. 

For God and for Country. Lest we forget. 

Nisha, meanwhile, she will not remember
This hen night scene from sometime in… November?
And is missing in action out in no man’s land 
Too many Jägerbombs, four in each hand. 

At the sound of a whistle, she went over the top  
And is now taking cover in Lloyd Morgan’s shop
Pinned down on East Street by the rat a tat tat
Of a security shutter and the hiss of a cat.

And sniping from windows and ricochet words
The bayonet beaks of the flesh-eating birds
A battle dress ribbon, a medal for valour
An ecstasy of fumbling*, no masks boys it’s Calor. 

For God and for Country. Lest we forget. 

By dawn the guns are silent 
And a smoke of red kites rises above the carrion
As an Ivor Williams trailer bleats past
Welsh lambs for the slaughter.

These lines were written laying in bed next to an Evans in my hotel room after watching the poet, Atilla the Stockbroker, perform in Rhayader’s wonderful Lost Arc arts venue.

*The expression “an ecastasy of fumbling” is lifted directly from the war poet Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est. I thank him, Atilla and my constant muse, Dylan Thomas, for the inspiration and my poetry teacher, Pele Cox, for her gentle and expert encouragement.

The memorial clock tower Rhayader from my bedroom above Ty Morgan’s cafe. It was erected by subscription in 1924 for the men of the area who lost their lives in the Great War. The names of those who died in WW2 were added later. The Castle Hotel’s “aquarium” disco is round the corner in North Street. The Calor gas sign close to where Nisha took shelter is just to the right in East Street.

Swift

First south and west, then north and east, I quarter up the sky.
I’m watching for your sickle wings to scythe across my eye.

I look, I look, then look again and listen for your scream.
But bar the clap of pigeon wings there’s nothing to be seen.

The mewl of buzzards overhead, spirals on upward air.
An aerial feat, though quite a treat, no answer to my prayers.

And still they go unanswered though the grass is growing long.
And the swallows and the martins have joined the heavenly throng.

I love their eaves-slung mudhuts and their lineups on the wire.
But you dear swift, my absent friend, you set my heart on fire.

So I look and look again for gracious airborne crescents.
Vesper flights in evening light please grace us with your presence.

And then you’re here and I thank god for sending you to me
Although I never crooked my neck the vicar’d church to see.

You are my priest of summertime. Your pulpit is the skies.
And when you leave and head back home a bit inside me dies.

The cock cranks north, the wind is cold, your ministry I need.
My neck cranes south beyond the spire I’m wishing you Godspeed.

They’re back! So to mark their return to the skies over Shropshire here’s a poem about one of my favourite birds first written and performed in Ludlow in August 2023.

From journalist to poet

The “words on a line” world premiere

Yup, calling it a world premiere may sound hyperbolic. But, technically at least, it happens to be true…

So here I am in full flow (rapture the photographer, Fabio Barry, called it) belting out one of the poems I read to a packed house (more hyperbole) in the Secret Garden behind the Castle Bookshop in Ludlow on August 5th.

Links to each poem below.

I am indebted to my poetry coach Pele Cox for getting me this far. The journey has only just begun.

Rehearsals with Pele at the home of Stephen Cox RA.
When you can’t find a lectern during rehearsals use a squirrel trap. Simps!

The hare

A little loose. Like a soft toy
sewn on where it’s lost it’s stuffing. 
Magpies showing 
zero respect

You sketched our field
with straight line speed.
Sent my blood coursing,
bounding. The hearts’ pounding
now stopped. In a beat.

A car I think. 
A scrape in the verge.
Your final form neverlasting. 

All this at Easter. No resurrection. 
No headstone. No graveside grieving. 
But a single tulip, this reedy
stem outstripping the long grass to
a mouth wide open.
Screaming. 

Before the petals 
dropped. 
And the black and white leaves fell from the lung trees 
clacking and hopping.
The lung trees over the rhubarb patch at the bottom of our garden.

Words on a line

One way or another I’ve been writing for a living for more than 40 years – first as a cub newspaper reporter on the Reading Chronicle; then as a journalist and broadcaster for the BBC; and now as a budding poet taught for the past two very intense years by the poetry coach Pele Cox, a former poet in residence at the Tate and the Royal Academy.

But you can’t call yourself a proper poet until you’ve stood up and read your work in front of an audience. So I thought it was about time I did just that! And on Saturday August 5th in the intimate little space that is the Secret Garden behind Castle Bookshop in Ludlow you’ll be able to judge whether it was a sensible decision.

With readings from a small selection of my poems, anecdotes about the process of ‘becoming a poet’ and with the help of literary giants such as Dylan Thomas and Michael Donaghy, I’ll be exploring the literal landscape of the Shropshire countryside together with the emotional landscapes of memory and loss.

Tickets are available direct from the bookshop.

Coronation

Union flags and bunting.
The Kings Head.
A telly on the wall
And a row of mugs
Raising glasses.

Bottoms up, no shilling (coronation bitter £4 a pint)
But press ganged by the Daily Mail
All the same. Toasting two crowns.
Heads of state wearing uneasy smiles. And ermine gowns 
That would look better on stoats.

Buttoned up to their necks in it
Plastic caped crowds dripping long to rain over us 
The gloss taken off by a guilt-edged prince. 
No sweat, he’s hidden behind his sister
Feather hats off to the seating plan. 

Placards in the back of an old van. 
A sick Transit (gloria mundi).*
Serried ranks of #NotMyKing unsaluted. 
And ties that bind
Us to a past locked on tradition. 

Traitors mate. Sedition. 
Pageantry. It’s what we do. Britain at it’s best. 

Captured for posterity on countless mobile phones 
by the I-was-theres swearing oaths
Of obsequence. 
While the megaphones are silenced
By the defenders of the faith in blue
Uniform thoughts
Blue blood

And all of this because 
An accident of birth. 

Zadok the Priest.
Welcome to the King’s Head, Judas. Your shout! 
But you can’t handle another round and shuffle out. 

Dragooned.

Outside now. Uncrowned. Bare skinned for the flypast. 
A robin wearing military red. Two medal-ribboned goldfinches.
A wagtail conducting this anthem in an outdoor abbey
Not just for today but everyday. 
A pigeon clapping wings
And somewhere in the distance a peacock on his throne. 

________________________________

*Sic transit gloria mundi is Latin for thus passes the glory of this world.

I was interested to read An Unexpected Guest, a poem by the poet laureate Simon Armitage to mark the coronation of His Majesty King Charles III. This is my poetic response in the spirit of the anti-laureate (a role I think should be established)!

After the plough

Ring rolling in a Bedfordshire field. 
Breaking up the heavy clods
And leverets. Blind to the danger. 

I stopped at first. Got down from the tractor
To shoo and scatter. 
At first. Too many of the sods 

Harrowing. The clatter
Flint on iron drowning out the sound. 
What now in the bottom corner

On the heaviest ground?
Fur gloves with missing hands 
And broken fingers. Pointing.

Too few the gods
Seed on the land
Grown houses. 

Two smiles

Tying up loose ends, you said
All crow’s feet and beak. A confiding bird
Perched by your desk pecking
At the keyboard when I walked in.

That smile still startles I swear it’s you
Spin sad to find myself window shopping for one not two.

The harvest of a lifetime. Paper bales laced up tight
Treasury tags. Twin bars bright
Conjoined. Green twine. The ties that bind.

It’s all here, you said. Hand atop the sheaf
Palm down, an oath. No testament, your will:

Accounts.
Policies.
Pensions.
And a note for your mum so she’ll know what to do.

Thank heavens for paperclips and staples, you said.
Coming round. Post stroke words.
The cubicle reflating. Breath held now out
Laughing as you confuse a comb for half a crown.

Ends frayed but held.
Your brain rewired. Wild hair combed.
Forward to post decimalisation.

Ten more years. I wondered how many times you subbed your copy.
Newspaperman to newspaperman
Before I wrote your obituary perched at your desk
In your study. Your hand writing.

The letter to mum. For Sheila: to be opened when I’m gone.
And two smiles becoming one.

The elephants in the room

It was billed as an evening of music and words. And because it was being held at the Chang Thai bar in Ludlow with its Buddhist kitsch decor, was called The Elephant in the Room.

What the organisers hadn’t reckoned on was a bunch of boozy builders on a pre Christmas night out rolling in just before the first poetry reading. Elephants in the room. Plural.

I don’t think the landlord was down as a performer. But he got the first line: “Don’t be a prick in my pub” he said whilst simultaneously pulling a pint.

The second line fell to the poet, Gareth Owen, reading his piece about a Western gunslinger with a Virgilian theme. He may have said Virginian theme. Sixties television, Shiloh Ranch and all that. But we couldn’t be sure as the shushes and the shut-that-doors ricocheted off the walls when some of the posse went out for a smoke and others came back in.

And then something magical happened. The words began to register. Maybe it was the meter. The narrative. Or all three. As one by one the lads fell silent and listened. By the end they were captivated. Shot through the heart with a silver bullet as it were.

Poetry can do that. Move everyone and anyone in unexpected ways.

They didn’t stay after that first reading. But I like to think the words stayed with them.

Thank you to my poetry coach Pele Cox for being there to witness the magic.