Staring out at me over a gulf of sixty years,

Your glassy-eyed optimism, born of NHS specs

Your staid gaiety in checked dresses

Bunting fashioned from austerity

Displayed in glorious mono, black and white

Jostling just to have self-created fun

And celebrate a distant Queen you’ll never see.

How perfectly the instant caught you

Spots on the negative though

“Mam! Ther...

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Woods in May are made
For straying with sweethearts on
Winding paths with flowers between trees
Blue sky singing through branches overhead
And small clouds like birds perched on the canopy
Of leaves, green, deep light; and to come out
And look over evening fields towards home

Woods were never intended
For the death song of machine-guns
Whine and ping of bullets
Barbed wire like bramble...

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Thinking the unthinkable is easy;

Just ask any politician – in fact, don’t even bother –

I can think the unthinkable, right here, right now:

I can imagine, for instance, an elephant

In pink polka-dot boxer shorts,

Its vast, grey, crinkly arse, looming and ridiculous.

It’s unthinking the unthinkable that’s the problem;

Once you’ve thought it, it’s like shedding ...

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Which came first, mist or mountain?

No-one knows, no man alive, nor in the tombed enclosure

By the old Baryite mines: not even the dotted sheep, generations

Grazing on tumbled cairns, stone circles, chambered tombs

Or huts now dents in fields. No-one knows if one day

The mists thickened, or parted like veils

To reveal a maiden’s breast, or a jagged comb;

Or if one da...

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Mister Popinjay, up on his branch

Considers all the angles

Before committing;

Head on one side,

Matching the slant of light through branches

Jaunty but wary

Like a young lad, out upon the town,

Entering an unfamiliar bar.

Mister Popinjay

Brought me the summer

- a gift for which I’m grateful -

By decking his house with green

And wearing gaudy...

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Rooks, building high this year, aloft,
Flap from their airy, twig-perched palaces
Coarse, comic, voices - cawing in the cold,
Like pealing of cracked bells; these country fallacies
Say when their nests are high, the sun will hold
A honeyed glaze on sky farm field and croft:

So, let this moaning wind in telephone wires,
For want of choices, on this bitter day
When shadows cree...

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Touch my head,

Touch my toes,

Never go

In one of those;

My warding-off rhyme, as a snotnosed kid

Fear tightenng my chest

Whenever I saw their white shape weaving

Through traffic; or heard their urgent bells on the main road.

Always, it meant trouble - someone gasping on a carpet:

“Meat wagons”, my dad would call them, dredging up

Words from his war,...

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There will be two comets this year, they say;
Neither of which we’ll ever see again
Or so they theorise - nothing is certain,
After all. Things come around again.

The earth itself, cold as a comet today,
And the snow trails drifting out there
From upright rocks around the pond
Ice glazed as it rotates around its poles

Snow drifting across the garden in the wind
Like the ...

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