Where the clover whitens
Moments of the past, do not last
memories kicked into the long grass:
a warm early-summer’s day
golden petals, white clover.
Stormy-autumn comes
with flurries of snow
the dead of winter
catches body heat
in frozen snow
tumbling into slushy heaps of red, gold, brown
no crisp-crackle underfoot
old ghosts lose their threads
pot-heads weave into fragile, thin
paper-like skin
echoes t...
Saturday 30th December 2023 7:16 pm
ONLY CONNECT
The sting of the wind
On this cold december day
Reminds me of my
Ancestors who rode
This same wind
As they trudged to work
On early shift.
This connection, now, is
Deep, sunk in the blood,
In all that I mean
When I say these words
In tones that rhyme.
Words that would’ve
Carried meaning still
In those cold, hungry days
When this same old
Northern sky
Still pleased the eye ...
Thursday 28th December 2023 6:49 pm
Nothing more
Calling time on the cinema queue
instead, we let our dreams come true
in the pub
it was the evening of the day
fervourless
and blue....
I still had you
we gave up on our one chance
of silence, it is true
who knows where the time went to?
Time enhances you.
so, we wound up
like we always knew we’d do:
bruised black and bruised blue
carving out a place a-new.
https://youtu.b...
Tuesday 26th December 2023 9:19 pm
The Bridge
Photo by David Kovalenko on Unsplash
The regiment of day
cannot drift away,
back to the cancer hospital
back to the chemo and the radio
and injections in vain,
nothing in my brain.
It’s your loved
pnes take the strain
I recall Emile, yes,
named after Rousseau’s
eponymous hero. He hoped
it had not spread.
Married at the weekend, his Caribbean
lilt still echoes in my ...
Tuesday 26th December 2023 9:07 pm
Born in Gaza
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain? Pink Floyd
In Gaza's ancient town, a tale unfolds,
A journey of love, as the prophecy foretold,
Yusuf, faithful and true, with Maryam by his side,
Embarked on a quest, filled with hope and pride.
To be registered they went, with hearts full of grace,
Maryam, carrying a child, love glowing on her face,
Amidst the...
Wednesday 20th December 2023 1:39 pm
Song for the old year
Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash
Redemption comes at such a cost
Freezing winds off the Irish sea
Blow me away from hearth and home
At such a cost — loss pressing on loss —
Yet still the winter-birds sing,
Seemingly so carelessly,
And we know it costs them their whole life
To fly this way and sing and eat and build and build.
Yet still this merel...
Tuesday 19th December 2023 8:22 pm
SUBSCRIBE
‘to a meadow only to a meadow’
Photo by Kristine Cinate on Unsplash
I wish that I knew from the very start
Which mountain the sun came from
For your eyes can be deceiving in rain
Fountains are rain corralled and I’m tempted
Into sleeping on your neck. A servitude of roses.
In which green bay the rolling sea spy on me
That’s deep, but it aint at all clear. Like seawater,
Lagoons on...
Monday 18th December 2023 11:05 pm
A late flowering
On this day of flowers, the animals follow
The usual path of the sun
Ripples coagulate like blood,
All manner of things mirror our big brother sun
On this shining Ἀρκαδία of August 1941.
Sweet airs fill the breezes
Forgotten summer scents,
O! The billowing of intent
Reed and oak and beech
This beautiful canopy of the living green,
Shimmering in this too bright light.
Thunder c...
Sunday 17th December 2023 7:21 pm
For when I am weak, then am I strong
I lack the muse's command of cadences and tones,
Sometimes words tumble from my mouth like grain,
At other times words need to be pulled like teeth.
When I sit down by the Manchester Ship canal,
On a cold grey December day,
I weep because of the curse I carry,
The curse of a glint of a light from Elysium
Or Zion or heaven-knows-what-you-will.
I cannot sing the songs of the Lor...
Friday 15th December 2023 7:06 pm
Careless love
The power of purpose, it weaves through the air,
With intention, its design is a snare,
The careful and tidy, their minds are so dull,
They forget to remember the graveyards are full.
Oh, just how does purpose weave its magic today?
It strikes with intention, it wont fade away.
For even the most careless, wandering tinker,
Knows in his heart, life’s a real stinker.
The actor, care...
Sunday 10th December 2023 8:38 pm
The speed of the sound of self-isolation
The sky is clear today with streaks of blue
the supermoon with all its lunar perigee
swirls in the sky reflecting sombre horizons;
Behind my back cumulus clouds mass
over the hills, conspiring in their usual
ragged silence. In front of me are dreary
trees laid bare, a mist of water in the air.
Streets deserted, folk driven inside by covid
I’m not yet caught cough, cough, coughing —
m...
Saturday 9th December 2023 8:53 pm
Seeing Things
Moments of Vision fade away
But a magical moment is, here, today;
And all it will cost you,
Is all of your life.
Cast over the sea
And cast over the moon
She'll be reading the stars
While you're reading the runes.
Green shades, dappled sunlight,
The landscapes of the eye,
As moment follows moment,
A life passing by.
The primal scream of silence
Modulated, nuanced, on t...
Friday 8th December 2023 9:32 pm
A pantheist's yuletide
Brother Sun and Sister Moon
Shine on the people of this world.
Let them recall the smells of spring
On cold and drear December days.
And let them hear the baby’s cry,
That all the hounds of hell defy,
And give them all the boons of love –
For love is really all we are –
The tiny gestures – the glance, the word –
That will in memory reoccur.
And deep amidst the fears of nigh...
Wednesday 6th December 2023 6:24 pm
Written at a time of great cruelty and deceit
a gift from the multitude of stars
blessed with both heart and soul:
you shall not grow old.
Not I.
Love is too often hoarded, accumulated, squirreled away:
like money, jewels, power, prestige.
Cruelty persists.
at night I can be at pea...
Tuesday 5th December 2023 5:01 pm
Thunder storm
Crack thunder over head
flash crackle of lightning
nothing the gods said:
Stretch your words across the sky
illuminate the stark, skeletal
trees of a northern winter
Rumble roar-nothing-fled
echo, reverberate,
all around my desperate head,
Hidden clouds drop hail-rain
like frozen tears pelting down
on a world turning dead and lonely
With a clownish frown
on a world tumblin...
Saturday 2nd December 2023 5:04 pm
Late November
Let’s away to the mountains
to the music of loss when elegy-tossed
the sun above us burns mists away
as we walk back to the valley of youth.
Today, I walk the blue moutains of forgetting,
just above the far-horizons of sight,
no closer after five days of tramping the fields;
I keep going and going whilst knowing futility
in every pore, I just keep heading
for the rising sun or the waning...
Tuesday 28th November 2023 7:17 pm
SUMMER TIME
a hot, still July afternoon
silence unbroken.
through a cordon of dusty nettles
you plunge into a rank glade,
wicked with the scent of elder
and warm, ripe grass
heavy with anticipation of something not quite definable
it is high summer, just on the turn
as the last red campion falls to usurping rosebay
and autumn, though still distant,
slips into consciousness in the earl...
Sunday 26th November 2023 2:31 pm
These streets aren’t meant for dreaming
slides off the Pennines
soaks me through
as I look at you
in the tower block estates
and in the few battered terraces left
in this our dirty old town.
in floral pinnies, with hair nets on,
as they scrub at their front step
before leaving to clean
the houses of the rich
up on Eccles old road.
spreads li...
Saturday 25th November 2023 7:17 pm
Love Untethered
Is it better to feel pain
Than nothing at all?
My son has followed
Me now for thiry-four years
Up hill, down dale.
He’s been AWOL
From this world
For all except his mother
& his family
& I who still cry
For him. On one black
December night
I carried his medicine-
bruised body
through the ward —
dodging the sight lines
of terrified parents —
into the mortuary
where I kissed
h...
Tuesday 21st November 2023 7:38 pm
Meanderings
— Like the morning sun you come
And like the wind you go —
I never tried too hard at scholarship:
it seemed a pursuit for those in suits:
pedants, careerists, autodidacts, of all sorts,
accumulators of facts, the stay-at-homers,
the dog-with-a-boners, worrying the hell
out of themselves and acquiring prestige.
i preferred to confront the vast unknown —
that which is so hard to ...
Sunday 19th November 2023 9:37 pm
No retreat, no surrender
people from across the world
now share my home:
Huguenots and Flemish weavers remembered in the names of pubs,
the Irish fleeing famine: the O'Donnells and the O'Neills,
Ashkenazi Jews escaping the Czarist pogroms: the Cohens and the Rabinowitz.
Later...
Wednesday 15th November 2023 9:33 pm
11th November 1918
In serried ranks they come to me:
Tom, Will, Harry, George, Bill, Alf
rows of squaddies heading south,
dust and dirt and gas and screams
hot metal designed to do its worst
tearing savagely at human flesh.
Lads from farms & factories
Lads from mills & mines
sacrificing their most precious time -
Jack Prince, a machine gunner
in the Cheshires, served right through,
from 28 Jul 19...
Sunday 12th November 2023 4:40 pm
The house of the rising sun
Let’s away to the blue mountains,
To the elegaic music of loss,
the sun above us burns the mists away
as we walk to the valley of youth..
Today, I will walk the blue moutains of forgetting,
just a ragged wall above the far-horizons of sight,
they’re no closer after five days of tramping;
for five days I continued whilst knowing futility
in every pore, I just kept going and goin...
Saturday 11th November 2023 9:45 pm
Trilobite
Beneath this beach of sand, shells
I see the image of the rolling sea.
Such new-found-land frames and hides
These wider horizons; I walk along the cliff:
Sheer drop upon the windward side,
Embedded trilob...
Wednesday 8th November 2023 3:15 pm
Moon, moon
Moon came to an old Cheshire mere,
In all her shadowy finery.
This boy cannot stop looking
And looking at pretty Missy Moon.
Thunder growls on this high summer eve
Missy Moon shows off her talents
Her rounded suppleness of form
Shows us all her shades and shadows and crevices
Toing-and-froing the moon swings like a nursery rhyme
Moonlight flows and the boy is now an old man
Sleeping ...
Tuesday 7th November 2023 7:15 pm
silhouettes streak the sky
passing clouds
you don’t remember,
wind rising in the sky,
you, bereft of fortitude,
me, just strolling by
trees flare into flames; my friend,
a pettiness of heat.
the past at last unchanging
no memories so replete:
golden sands, and crystal brooks,
silken threads and silver hooks.
glimpsing what’s already there
blue shadows, orange flares
she's screaming on the stairs
...
Tuesday 7th November 2023 6:37 pm
Written near water
Ordinary life creates
empty spaces
inside of me
composed of God-knows-what:
Pale-blue eyes
on a snow drop face
seen-through lace,
seen-through lace.
These empty waiting rooms of the heart,
set to tear us apart,
like ventricles of the brain, never seen again.
Birdsong flung
into fond recall
a dry-stone wall,
a dry-stone wall.
The smoky-smell of coal and steam
an eve...
Friday 3rd November 2023 7:46 pm
Well-mannered thug
War's no place to be
Yeah, I were a soldier me,
constantly, for years,
still am now I’m on me arse,
listening to all these gobshites
with their feckin poppies.
I see watermelon smiles
— to the ears, not the eyes --
me on me knees
unexploded ieds —
women-with tanned, muscular arms
walking for miles
for water
men with children on their backs …
jumping into the sea to esc...
Tuesday 31st October 2023 6:47 pm
The tiger sniffs the rose
"Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows."
Siegfried Sassoon
Circumstances compel speech,
Ye gods and little fishes,
From the first day of the world
Down to the horror in our own time
Peace is forever out of reach.
Don’t frown, don’t shake your head,
Listen to this elegy for the dead
A soldier-poet silenced, banned, expelled
Misery a...
Monday 30th October 2023 9:42 pm
Sonnet
https://www.mecaforpeace.org/close-to-home-gaza-knows-suffering-too-well/
Suffering comes to our unguarded selves
Unbidden. Suicide slammed into my hidden
Self. The slaughter of the innocents all
Around us. Buddhism teaches some suffer
Too much, others too little. Suffering follows
Us through our lives, like a shadow. We must
Unburden our minds, seek compassion
For all those sufferi...
Sunday 29th October 2023 7:36 pm
Something Found
The ease and simple grace
Of this man who’s died
Cannot be lied about
Cannot be denied.
His echoing presence
Still sings in my head
Still stays in my heart
We’re never alone, never apart
Like the mocking bird’s song:
These mimus polyglottos,
Speakers of a hidden art,
Which sings and recreates
Moments that survive
When we were all alive.
.
Oh! it’s a sin to kill a mocking bird
And...
Thursday 26th October 2023 10:54 pm
Fallen angel
The door behind my mind
Opens and I find
Every day a new beginning
I rise at the crack of dawn
Feel the air against my skin
Walk with the aid of a stick
Listen to the dawn chorus.
Thrillingly it’s late March,
A year since the sepsis,
When madness danced with the spectre of death,
I emerged stronger, cherishing every breath.
As I walk, I hear a symphony of sound,
The dawn chorus, nature...
Wednesday 25th October 2023 8:21 pm
First Light
The high, Lapis Lazuli skies of flaming June
Are in absentia in damp and cold October
For the patterns in the grass do not last.
And so we take the winding stairway
Into the high tower above this land of forgetfulness
Where once upon a golden dawn good faeries
Danced a circle of rare delight within the sight
Of one John Mulligan esq, who, on the last day of August
1938, according to the L...
Monday 23rd October 2023 9:09 pm
The lost boys
In the depths of my daily abyss,
obsessive words, songs & stories,
coiled and twisted words, selfish and cruel,
through their darkness, I finally find my feet:
a mere nothing is never complete.
Like curdled thoughts, they merge and entwine,
in restless minds, where shadows define
this chaos, a light gleams,
October's moon, a friendly old lunatic,
like me
stalks this poor man's sky,...
Sunday 22nd October 2023 1:05 am
THE RUINS OF NINEVEH
These rich metaphors drawn from the sky and sea
Rich funereal language, baptism and burial and birth,
Blossom and harvest, Wise women, Witan’s children.
From the lips of children we must learn that clinging
To life is not enough.
Smoke over Mosul. Mosul’s churches where once
The Jacobite heart of Christian belief was celebrated
Amongst the ruins of Nineveh along the same back paths
And a...
Saturday 21st October 2023 1:04 am
CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE
“We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”
― Primo Levi
Wednesday 18th October 2023 4:20 pm
Enmeshed
County Lines spread evil
all of the time
a cross all the living and the dead
their lines sink into our time:
we need them gone.
A spring day in late May,
she can no longer stand
she must fall:
tall, crumpled, bent, dead.
She has lost the lines that link
her to her family, friends.
lines now link only random things:
road, rail, red phone box,
needle, plunger, sink
sink into...
Monday 16th October 2023 12:12 pm
A WISE FOOL
Bewildered, by all the things left unsaid
Serendipity, chances lost, cut dead:
Are you wise enough to play the fool?
Or, does this vicious wind of a deep set night
Put out the light and then put out the light?
Memory cuts through: taut, damp cold
Slices through my meagre clothes like a knife
Signs previously hidden by an iron fog suddenly beckon:
Is yours a life lived in vain......
Friday 13th October 2023 5:54 pm
WITHERED
Shrivelled, exposed, cold,
warps, wefts waste away
the body afflicted with decay
O!, I say, the hey-ho way of the live-long-day..
Whatever has lived will wither, languish, and decay.
time pines us all away
aghast in a quagmire of guilt, regret
spilt water, wine? I forget..
No transubstantiation this,
no move into immortal bliss:
this work of resistance is an inception in art
of...
Tuesday 10th October 2023 10:16 pm
Beggar
As we draw closer to Remembrance Sunday in black November and all that false praising of the armed services by 'the great and the good' I wrote this poem to show how we really treat those who risk their lives to protect us.
An ex-serviceman, me, still with an upright back.
Thing is: I never really arrived home. Did I?.
Not a real hom...
Sunday 8th October 2023 5:31 pm
Music to eat by
Yes. Music to eat by
flavours of sweetness
spices of yet another life,
another place, another time
the innocent taste of rhyme
tangles me on the palette,
mingles me in the air,
no longer abiding in the cynic’s lair,
for she’s not there.
Crossses, forks, knives, staying alive,
we thrive with three eyes,
a pasty present for the future
we done us best when we wus let,
...
Thursday 5th October 2023 6:53 pm
A Recreation
The majesty of dogs impresses us –
their solitary solidarity –
above their grey horizons
there is the promise, lingering…
of continuing.
These days an ending is assumed
that glorifies the story of our lives:
making children, seeing things,
listening to waves wash the pebbles.
overhearing our hearts’ desires.
Yesterday the sky darkened at noon
seas spewed forth strange shapes
cl...
Monday 2nd October 2023 2:58 pm
.....as blue as robins' eggs
though time’s chasm opens before my very sight,
and the vertigo returns with the Lapis Lazuli.
of the Byzantimes, Persians, Armenians, Assyrians.
each civilization alloted supreme value to the blue of lapis lazuli.
Saturday 30th September 2023 6:55 pm
.......early onset
The blue is missing from the sky today
the trees still have leaves
outside it is cold
the wind is cruel.
There is a person
in front of me
i don’t know who it is.
I remember playing out
with my sister
on a skipping rope.
It is cold inside,
that lady told me it is morning,
that is why I stretch and yawn.
The lady said I had a visitor
i was frightened to ask:
‘What is a vi...
Saturday 30th September 2023 6:37 pm
AN OPAL LUMINOSITY
Evening dark, damp, cold
Retreat into electric caves
Try not to think about you
In your grave. Your soul
Meandering. Suicides in GB
Buried in unconsecrated
Ground, until a MP topped
Himself and was buried
In Westminster Abbey 1822:
Viscount Castlereagh. I think.
Easier to digress than to confess
How flummoxed am I
With the whole unholy business
Of not saying good...
Thursday 28th September 2023 11:58 am
Wisława Szymborska Polish poet
The innocence of nature
Mocked by the depravity of humanity
You chose to spotlight the genocide
Of the Tarsier, a primate, DNA like ours,
With enormous seeing eyes.
You made the humble Tarsier
A metaphor for the innocence of nature
Exploited, ripped apart, killed for meat
Mocked for fun. No empathy between
Tarsier and Human. Man the killer
Species. You used bitter irony
To deny hu...
Monday 25th September 2023 8:45 pm
WE, THE ENGLISH
‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’ George Orwell
Wat Tyler and the revolting peasants had paved the way
In the summer of 1381 Wat Tyler, as leader of the so-called “Peasants” Revolt,
Stepped out of the shadows, and when he did he was to rock the Anglo-Norma...
Sunday 24th September 2023 8:46 pm
SHEER LUNACY
In the red water the woman's head was immersed. As they drove the iron through the skull, a technique called trephination.She let out the roar of the damned, thus confirming trephination's efficacy and the doctors' suspicions.
Yellow bile for mania, black bile for depression, we need to teach her a lesson.
This innocent touched by angels, blessed by God, left to scream and scream and sleep...
Wednesday 20th September 2023 8:15 pm
16th June, 1904
I make the sign of the cross, today,
the last Saturday in August,
for Jack who died tod...
Tuesday 19th September 2023 11:39 pm
BLUE REMEMBERED HILLS
My son, my brother and my dog
Are shades I follow in my dreams.
They offer me swift glancing gleams,
Of all that is, not all that seems.
That hidden fountain of delight
That shines again, just out of sight,
That promised land, of sweet content,
That land where time is safely spent
Beneath the skies and stars of heaven,
Where every blemish is forgiven,
Where children play all night, a...
Friday 15th September 2023 7:41 pm
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