Category: Poetry
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Presidential Election Night November 2016
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All night, the great tree raged outside our windows. It wanted to give way to the wind, but could not. It wanted to fly over the hill on the wind’s crest lashing our house as it passed, smashing the roof, bursting each window. What agony to be pinned like this, bound by the feet, earth-bound…
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Dorset in View
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From above, this region is a quilt of all colours, covering a vast and restless sleeper ; each week the colours have shifted, wrapped in season. No pause here. No holding still. The tractor driver spends all the daylight hours and more, lonely in his cab, changing a field’s colour inch by inch, precisely row…
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Autumn UK 2016
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Today our skies evicted the swallow and the swift was banished weeks ago and in Dorset the house martin whose tiny mud globes once crammed the eaves was simply absent all year. And last week Putin, unrestrained, bombed hospitals in Aleppo and Trump continued his debasing of America and Theresa May declared the…
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Sayings
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Reaching for words is like searching the earth for stones and then shaping them one after another into a path. Your words took my breath away. They killed me with their song. They made my womb turn over. Sing to me again. The words I must speak will sentence me to death.…
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Report
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I wish to report a strange man of average height, indeterminate skin colour but a knowing look who sidled into town today wearing an immaculate top hat and shoddy trainers. He said he was searching for a convenient park popular with the townspeople where he could set himself up to sell his famous elixir. …
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Six Truth Works Three Tattoos
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Here in the UK, recent elections and this Summer’s cataclysmic EU referendum have been opportunities for liars, demagogues and PR specialists to practice their skills on the population, in order to sway it to their will. The phenomenon is not unique to the UK, nor of course is it unprecedented. But the pervasive dishonesty, recklessness…
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Three Poems post-Brexit
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Last Stand The hyphen between I and Thou is our last stand and foothold. There’s nowhere else to retreat to. No set answer no fixed place. Centuries back the desert fathers came here and left strange word behind among skull and thigh bone and the odd green shoot forced into life through ardent…
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Riding the Hyphen between I and Thou
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With our present tumult and travails in mind, I have remembered a series of poems I wrote in the mid-nineties called “I Hyphen Thou.” I thought they might be relevant then, but they seem even more so now. Below are two short extracts. The idea of the hyphen is based on a book called “I…