In The Poetry

For a whole race of people freed from slavery with nothing – without money, without work, without education – it has not always been easy to hold fast to dreams. But the negro people believed in the American Dream. Now, since almost a hundred years of freedom, we’ve come a long ways but there’s still [...]

France

Broke to every known mischance, lifted over all
By the light sane joy of life, the buckler of the Gaul;
Furious in luxury, merciless in toil,
Terrible with strength renewed from her tireless soil;
Strictest judge of her own soul, gentlest of man’s mind,
First to follow the Truth and last to leave old Truths behind -
France, beloved of every [...]

Sea Grapes

That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband’s

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is
like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name
in every gull’s outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility
will never finish and has been the [...]

Miller’s End

When we moved to Miller’s End,
Every afternoon at four
A thin shadow of a shade
Quavered through the garden-door.

Dressed in black from top to toe
And a veil about her head
To us all it seemed as though
She came walking from the dead.

With a basket on her arm
Through the hedge-gap she would pass,
Never a mark that we could [...]

Voyage

Water opens without end
At the bow of a ship
Rising to descend
Away from it

Days become one
I am who I was

This is called ‘Hair-Raiser’

Why are there hairs in your nose, Daddy;
why all those hairs in your nose?
Those are vibrissae, my darling;
vibrissae, as everyone knows!

Why are there hairs on your chest, Daddy;
why are there no hairs on mine?
Hairs on your chest will come later, my son;
hairs on the chest take some time!

Why’s there no hair on [...]

Still Falls the Rain
(The Raids, 1940, Night and Dawn)

Still falls the Rain -
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss -
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter’s Field, and the sound [...]

One of the forms I became very fond of over the last ten years has been the terza rima which is a story-telling form which I found in Dante – each verse leads you on to the next and the whole thing unrolls or unspools like a reel of film. ‘Noir’ is about film, it’s [...]

Poem for a Daughter

‘I think I’m going to have it,’
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
‘Dear, you never have it,
we deliver it.’
A judgement years proved true.
Certainly I’ve never had you

as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart’s needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom’s end. Yet nothing’s more perfect
than [...]

This poem came out of a commission I had from the VA museum to write about an object in its British galleries. And I asked for two objects because, extraordinarily, a tapestry which Mary Queen of Scots made over seventeen years in captivity, until she was executed by Elizabeth I, her cousin, has ended [...]