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.
There is no past Remembered Or future Imagined. Just the present.
Tense.
A singularity.
You live in the moment. Very on point as they say. Content (or so I hope) sucking tea from a sippy cup Or shredding tissues in your lap
While I am walking an imaginary dog (the one I was convinced would persuade you to let me have a real one for my 13th birthday) Searching for something Like a long forgotten book Cursing that it’s always in the last place you look And hearing you laughing In that slightly hurtful grown up way of yours: Of course it is! Because when you find it You stop searching.
Finding something, I say: Remember that time… …before trailing off. Both of us lost to thought.
Though August’s barely halfway through The copse is clad in autumn’s hue Its summer greens now fading fast And taking on a rusty cast.
Embroidered by the evening sun The trees from threads of gold were spun But in the furnace split and cracken And dieback tips of ash twigs blacken.
Limp limbs hang from peels of bark The heartwood dry and much too dark. Blackthorn sloes - peas - shrivelled slim Won’t stiffen up the Christmas gin.
And conkers spilt from cankered cases Too small for boys to string on laces. Once shiny pebbles dulled by dust The stream bed still, the silt now crust.
Yet though the drouth fires rage infernal A shoot of green, spring hopes eternal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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*Sic transit gloria mundi is Latin for thus passes the glory of this world.
