Barn owls are unearthly.

On moonlit nights they coast

above the fields in silence,

floating white as ghosts.

They bring me out in goosebumps

and were I mouse or vole,

when barn owls came along the street

and knocked on doors for "trick or treat"

I wouldn't pamper them with sweets,

I'd scurry down my hole!

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It’s said that one alone don’t make a Summer

but when there’s none at all, is that when Summer’s gone?

And when there’s nothing up there but a shimmer

of dust from the desert superheated by the sun;

and when the sheds and barns remain in silence

from April to October; when radiance that shone 

on midge-full fields no longer flicks on mindless 

scything wings and sideslippings ...

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What now, what is evil?

I’m sure we can agree

if killing just one child is awful,

thousands more must be

evil’s outright apogee.

No problem pegging evil.

But how to deal with evil?

Find the men (we know

it’s mainly men). Pronounce those people

lowest of the low.

Blazon what they did, and show

those men to be pure evil.

Now, certain who is evil,

you’...

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“Look to! Treble’s going…she’s gone.”

I’d cry the time-honoured words when I was young,

my voice a boyish chirrup. Everyone

around me on the belfry floor where hung

the bell-ropes were grown-ups, so it was grand

to lead-off when the peal of church bells swung

to clattering action with the six-strong band

following after, letting fly our ropes,

those woolly sallies...

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“The birds will wake you up!” they said.

I’d doubted that, but yes, it’s true -

no sooner have the stars all fled

than osprey cries come piercing through

the speaker in the wooden shed

that guards the tree where they have bred

for many years, successfully bred.

This week I’ve more than filled my quota

of opening up the eyes of tourists.

Last night was my slot on the...

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What to do with the silver plated teapot?

A battered Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll survivor,

its etchings oxidised and pocked with milk spots.

I’ve checked eBay - be blessed if it fetched a fiver.

I leaf Mum’s wedding photos, thumbed and musted.

Here’s her and Dad - their faces, split with pleasure, 

are mirrored in this gift’s felicitous lustre

as if they’ve just unwrapped some genie’...

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What is the price of coal?

The web has sites that quote 

a market rate, but if you scroll

all through the list you won’t

see figures with the least, remote

affinity to price of coal.

What is the price of coal?

A mine roof caving in?

The dread Black Lung Disease that stole

the lives of countless men?

The destitution of their kin?

Is that the price of coal?

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How long will we have to wait?

We line the cliff top path.

Below, the breakers resonate   

and jubilant kittiwakes laugh.

We question one of the volunteer staff, 

“How long will we have to wait?”

“How long will you have to wait?”

She smiles and makes it clear:

yesterday it was ten to eight,

Thursday, not here -

or so they think - it didn’t appear!

“How long ca...

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I’m baffled how world leaders find the nerve 

to sign a pledge, then right before our eyes

fail the people they pretend to serve.

They know the price of oil but never swerve

from drilling more while greenhouse gases rise.

I’m baffled how world leaders find that nerve!

They buy the myth of endless growth, the oeuvre 

of economic frauds who feed them lies,

and fail ...

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I’m putting out some food on my fantasy bird table 

hoping to attract my all-time favourite birds.

The first to arrive are the ones that used my first table:

robins, tits, and blackbirds that nested in the woods.

The flock that follows them are the best I’ve seen in Britain:

a ptarmigan, an osprey, a dotterel and a smew,

a bearded tit, a peregrine, a puffin and a bittern 

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Beneath the skin of the city

its vital organs function:

not the ones you think I mean,

the staff whose manual actions

keep human beings hearty -

supplying power and food,

sweeping roads and pavements clean,

arresting fire or flood -

no, not those, I speak 

of parks and lawns and leaves,

of blossom flossed on trees like frost

that licence us to breathe:

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Flags and placards round Big Ben

say 

PAUSE! PAUSE!

Shouts and chants of Waddawewant?

a 

PAUSE! PAUSE!

We call a pause on oil and then

we all lie down. We stand up again.

We shout demands at Parliament 

to 

PAUSE! PAUSE!

No new gas! No new oil!

PAUSE! PAUSE!

One point five degrees soon gone.

PAUSE! PAUSE!

Arctic in meltdown, blood on the boil,

w...

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Rolling down to london on a train,

the taught and shining buds

of Spring are bursting on the trees.

Wharfedale’s misted in a bluish haze,

but heaps of plastic refuse in the woods

on the drab periphery of Leeds

descend my mood from buoyancy to pain.

Rolling forwards now, the rape fields blaze

and blackthorns bloom with pearls,

resplendent in the boundary hedges

we...

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There was a man lived down my street

who felt unease about pollution.

Ashamed to see his car excrete

bad air, he found an odd solution.

Others who had thought thus far 

used bicycles, or electric cars

but my neighbour’s mate was the man who sold

the fuel his thirsty motor drank.

He was fearful this friend’s business might fold 

if he stopped putting petrol in the ta...

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It looked a very sporty piece of kit

and useful, when I bought my hybrid bike

to get me where I’m going and keep me fit,

but that was years ago and now it sits

beside the bins as if it’s gone on strike

from serving as a sporty piece of kit.

I often would, but find obliged to quit.

Big tools or bulky shopping, or suchlike,

prevent me getting there while keeping fit...

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So when we shoot past two degrees

and all the land is toast

and skies are black from the burning trees

what will you miss the most?

Me, I’ll miss the song of birds

that welcomed in the day:

those heart-rending, incoherent words

that had so much to say.

And when the heating of the ocean

flays the coral reefs,

will you temper your emotion?

Modulate your gri...

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The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind  -  Bob Dylan

What force can power the years ahead?

Now the age of oil is dead

we wait for industry to heed 

the whisper of the wasted wind,

the whisper of the wasted wind.

A pivotal crisis is upon us

and ready or not we shoulder the onus. 

We must make good or else be goners,

be dust dispersed by the wasted wind,

...

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My early life relied so much on trains,

to catch just one to write about’s a problem!

Too many have been subject to delays 

or cancelled altogether, to applaud them:

the “bogs” I took to school were crammed and smelly;

my backpacker travels, the aura no more fresh;

a record seven hour wait once, in New Delhi;

I almost got killed on the Tangier-Marrakesh…

But overa...

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What hope remains while politicians skirt

around the crisis, pledging they will shut

a few polluting plants but token cuts

in fossil fuel extraction fall so short?

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I think I only walked down Fleet Street once,

my grubwork year in London. Not much wowed,

not like I’d heard - most rags no more ensconced

but fled to Docklands - the street name but a label          

for billionaire media magnates trumpeting loud

reactionary taunts and celebrity libel.

I had an inkling then: there was a proud

historic river, sadly much polluted,            

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Looping round till it’s a blur 

the falconer swings the weighted lure

beneath the bird, enticing her

to go into a stoop.

With hooking bill and crookéd claw 

and plunging like a meteor

she swipes the fakery to the floor

with a vicious slap of feathers.

Around the crowd, a communal gasp.

The predator’s grappling in its clasp       

the prize, but is the bird a...

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A boisterous assortment of martins, swifts and swallows 

is swirling above the lushly forested hills

of West Amanga, a scatter of soft green pillows.

Wherever a radiant splash

of morning sunlight spills

out through an open window in the cloud,

the canopy emits a plume of steam

and bird calls resound: the rattle of wrens; the loud

cracks of whipbirds; squawks

of parr...

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They’re like some alien culture’s hieroglyphs

these utility quotes, scrolling down my screen.

Fixed price or variable? TV and broadband scheme?

My eyes are stuffed but still I’m grudged to sniff

the tricks tucked in the tariffs and warily choose 

which deal might steer my budget round the reef.

My parents weren’t coerced to skirt such cliffs:

back then you’d pay flat rate for ...

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The balance of life and death

rests on a dot in the sky

whose frivolous shivering breath

rivals the moths in its quivering

rippling hovering, high

and triumphant amongst the cumulus,

the twin-piping syrinx delivering

an opus more complex, more tremulous

and vaporous than any cantata.

The minstrel of the meadow 

sees the grasshopper climbing,

sees the froghopper fal...

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The day when you don’t kiss me I shall starve,

and if you should dismiss me I should starve.

If I wake one frozen dawn

to chilly winds and find you gone

I’ll lose the will to carry on.

I’ll curl up in my lonely bed and starve.

And if you didn’t care for me I’d starve.

And if you were not there for me I’d starve.

With you not doing what I don’t ask:

putting coffee in...

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A colony of terns concedes no paucity

of energy: the strident racket rising

in steep vociferous steps

envelopes your whole mind as if by sorcery. 

But one event might strike you as surprising:

now and then - untold by any augury

and with no cause - it stops.

A rigid talon grips the atmosphere 

and sound shuts down, as though there’s been a sudden

resetting of the wi...

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Her family home is blood-soaked rags and rubble

when Anastasia rises from her cot.

At first she’s pleased she’s suffered not one cut,

then shrieks: she wears an iridescent bubble

like those of the saints in Mama’s picture Bible

and the doorway to her life she finds slammed shut.

Though Mama won’t come now to quiet her shouts

she howls her anguish dry, then with the pliable 

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The fields are laundered sheets,

ironed and smoothed across the dale,

tucked under walls for the comfort of sheep,

clean green cloths that veil

the messiness of former days

when vetch outstretched untrammelled tendrils

randomly grappling floriferous sprays

of meadowsweet; when spangles 

of cuckoo-spit sparkled 

blobbish on stems of raggéd robin;

when there was miscell...

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Morning gridlock, nose to tailpipe, can’t see a soul on foot or bike.

Not stuck in traffic - I’m the traffic! Going nowhere, engine turning,

and though I changed my ancient van last year for one that’s burning 

half the fuel, it still consumes much more than I would like.

It’s gestures, gestures.

I turn on the radio where a Greenpeace chap’s on mic and getting shirty.

T...

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Back when I was young I didn’t fear:

I knew the world could solve this situation.

We understood the cause, so the way out was clear:

a comprehensive pact between all nations 

to stop emitting CO2 

into the atmosphere.

Back then there seemed no need to march and shout,

to sit down in the road and press for truth.

We could not conceive of a climate up the spout.

In th...

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Every gob of oil we suck today,

every turd of coal we flame resplendent,

every age-old species we erase 

is assault against our own descendants.

I stoop before the few that reach tomorrow:

striving to live, I understand how they

must curse us, dodging lethal hails of arrows   

we senselessly let fly today.

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Shut my eyes on Sunday evening. 

Moments pass, the clock is screaming.

Flip my switch from dream to drowning 

in a sea of morning light.

Scoop the mucus from my lashes.

Splash my cheeks and scrub my gnashers.

Quell the bloating crush of pressure.

I’m already late!

Complacent men and placid women -

TV Breakfast hosts - sit grinning

at the fan-like big hand sp...

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Shufflings in the shrubbery,

leapings on the lawn,

furtive assignations and who knows what skullduggery,

surreptitious shadow shapes, sundown to dawn.

It’s my own familiar garden but it happens out of sight:

it’s all undercover

…under cover of the night.

Nighttime was a blank space, destitute of life,

a time I’d stop the clock and quit the world.

But then I bought a...

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A poem generated from random words over the course of April. See comment below for full details of how I wrote  it.

A chilly April morning. Lazy lambs 

couch lifeless in the fields like balled up fists 

in woolly mitts. I need no diagram

to clarify the Spring: the tousled strips

of trees beside the river view an uproarious 

theatre of water, the riot of the weir and lak...

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Harrogate 21/3/22

It’s when I see the kites

a family are flying on the Stray

and notice how they glint in blue and gold

belatedly I catch on, how today

the bichrome of the flag of the Ukraine

has never been completely out of sight:

I’ve seen its vivid tones unrolled

not just where you’d expect:

flourished on the apex of a pole;

sellotaped to windows or on do...

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after Philip Larkin

Never again such crowds

shouldering such exultation,

no more the sea lion choir

hauled up on the stands.

The stadia and arenas

silent like grief,

the sun quenched in remembrance 

of a million flowering hands.

And shutters on the High Street

tight against the abyss,

the weekend staff furloughed,

the checkout bleepers schtum.

The h...

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October 2020

Once we’d bagged the first we should’ve quit

but we are so elated 

to make it safely down by noon 

we press on like a perfect pair of twits,

sights set on a much-alike, elevated

cairn across the valley, reckoning soon 

we’ll add another summit to our list.

We scale a gate which warns us to KEEP OUT!

and brave a barbed wire fence 

before the grad...

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All the fuckin’ country 

is tense about some dead duck football game

tonight at 8 pm (or so I’m told).

The sea it slinked away but turned again

and stealthily manoeuvres to reclaim 

the mudflats populated by the clumsy

clumps of seals. They loiter, lolled 

like slack balloons, like lard

collapsing down to chip fat on the hob.

But we, we sit up straight: our sofa, st...

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Such jubilation every time a vessel

debarks a new contingent at the port.

So much relief when loved ones, wrested apart

for long, lone months are free again to nestle 

cheek to cheek, to hug and kiss, to jostle,

guiltlessly mingling among the singing throng,

siblings swinging siblings, making rings

to dance till dawn with no one a virus’ vassal.

Ravenous variants infes...

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I

Sixty tonne of metal bellowing down the sky

assails the quietude

of reeds and muddy pools

where spoonbills sift through sludge and seagulls drift nearby.

The mouth of the Ria Formosa’s a birders’ paradise:

miles of salt pans hosting

birds of low-lying coastline,

in thousands upon thousands. It’s Eden beyond price

in every way but one: the fence of Faro A...

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Kudu kudu

how magical to view you

your pinstripe torso and your curtain fringe mane.

Kudu  kudu,

posing like a statue

licking at the dawn dew

lifting your head and sniffing for rain.

Kudu kudu

horns in a corkscrew

your muzzle with a tattoo,

a sharp white horseshoe, 

you master the plains.

The bush birds of Africa

are setting up a clamour.

The Bokmakierie’s...

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I used to range unchallenged on this hill

keeping mankind under my surveillance.

I watched as you discovered

the wonder of the wheel

and ways to traffic goods along the rivers.

You harnessed blameless power from water mills

but we became estranged.

My name is Silence.

Once I was your day-to-day companion:

the backing to your birdsong at the daybreak

and as t...

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Not so infamous as ‘81

when Liverpool went feral

and anger blazed for nine whole days,

the riot of ‘85 arose

in Toxteth when someone

was stabbed and four men’s freedom hung in peril.

I didn’t know that then, although I was 

stranded in the middle

thinking “What the fuckin’ fuck?!!”

In ‘85 there was a lack

of means to know the cause.

We had no internet to solve...

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As promised yesterday, my updated secular and politically correct rewrite of Land Of Hope And Glory...

Land of Hope and Mercy

Mother of the Free

How shall we extol thee

Who are born of thee?

Wider still, and wider

Stretch thy welcoming arms;

Embracing all the needy

With tolerance and charm!

Dear Land of Hope, thy hope is crowned.

We’ll make thee more me...

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A lot of debate recently about the appropriateness of "Rule Britannia" and "Land of Hope and Glory" as songs for the modern age. The middle verse of "God Save the Queen" is equally controversial, but it strikes me that although I sang the song hundreds of times when I was young and had little choice in the matter, I have never sung the offending verse because it was always tactfully dropped. I don...

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Today we’ll learn to build a wordstone wall,

substantial as the one before you now.

It must survive hard frosts; wild gales and squalls;

ride seismic shifts; endure the shunts of cows.

First we think about what it’s for.

The purpose might be to keep your chattels penned

or keep intruders out.

It may define the boundaries of your tract

or simply be aesthetic.

Conside...

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“PIG

MAAAN!

PIG

MAAA-AN!

HA HA,

GERARD YOU ARE!!”

Not the most astute critique, I know,

but we were just fifteen. The Pink Floyd song

would volley from the mouths of my home gang

every time a panda car rolled slow

to cast a cagey eye on us then slew

away from those street corners where we’d hang,

and mumbling some Prog Rock lyrics wrong

summed all the in...

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The sun was filtering through a gauze of green

and ripples of lustre rolled pearl-like over moss

as if her path lay deep beneath the sea.

The branches overhead 

seemed polished with a gloss

that flung each iridescent spark of light

ricocheting sideways, bud to bud,

before they sprinkled, sharp and diamond white,

to soak into the vibrant

forest’s spongy bed.

...

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Anemones frizzled sparks beneath the trees

and bluebells rippled lakesides in the glades

the day Amelia Hamilton first breezed

into the woodland camp

sequestered in the shade.

Although no one had seen her face before

they felt she had been born to live among them.

Willing to muck-in with all the chores

the new recruit soon proved

more expert than the young men.

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The night Amelia Hamilton was born

the caravan was battered by a gale.

Her mother gripped the drop-down bed and scorned

the father who was now

a thousand miles away.

The caravan site owner made it clear 

that babies have to pay their rent as well

so young Amelia passed the next ten years 

in custody of Gran

where none would wish to dwell.

Daily beatings, sma...

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