Friday

Digging

Mind with pen engaged
turns the metaphoric sod
furrow to the waiting page

‘god’, my father, took
his spade just the once,
unlike Heaney senior

and dug a quarter plot
by the book, perfection
then fallow, quite forgot

sickled it once or thrice
till we moved, up, away
where digging wasn’t nice

God, what he missed
the earth, the tilth
the waiting harvest.

10 February 2005

A reflection with apologies to Seamus Heaney

Shortly to be published in 'Poetry Express, details to follow.

Sailboats

Polyptych

myopic clouds drift along
tight blue stretch sky
revealing
threshold to lintel

Sailboats 'Two Step'
To their mark on the beat.

cheesewired cliffs pitch
heaving stop framed
mooring
bay to headland

Sailboats glissade
On the wind power bent.

baulking sand underlines
footing wave assaults
gritting
soles to sanwiches

Sailboats pirouette
Gleaming deltoids sheet trim.

uncertain wallflower town
weighs up its options
pretending
arcade to quayside


I saw a triptych painting where a series of views were superimposes over a background. This experimental poem is from 1991 and is a view from Weymouth as a background with details of sailing yachts.

Sweet Nothing

This poem is in response to a very powerful BBC play of the poem's title from 1990. This is an abstract word picture, an experimental poem now divorced from its subject.

raised a babel proof armature
on its prow
this alien
fleshed it from within
our future stow

he saw where they might never
use their rasps
on forhead brow
focused sea of tranquility
now in moonbeam grasp

so sing soft wailing songs to his
thinking box
a living fuel
to melt every chain
and consume each fool
the witness mocks

Spiral Doodle

Ceramics

Diamonds in the Sky

Door

There is a door
somewhere
in my head
I saw once
closed tight

for Jane

Fragments

no more silent mornings
holding back sounding walls
so who did say
the view is black
finding fragments
like unforgiving choice
alone on some spiral track

to the left or to the right
you can not tell
the way to move
to the front or to the rear
is all the same
the stuff of recurrent fear

this space
rough and smooth
strewn with tears
is not yours

yours is stillness
among hands
that raise but
do not hold


This is a recent piece and is an example of a thought stream around which the work evolves.