In The Poetry

In Prison

In prison
without being accused

or reach your family
or have a family You have

conscience
heart trouble

asthma
manic-depressive

(we lost the baby)
no meds

no one
no window

black water
nail-scratched walls

your pure face turned away
embarrassed

you
who the earth was for.

My wife, to whom I’ve been married since 1955, rather ruefully says now and again that I don’t seem to have written any real love poems for her, or not for a very long time. Here’s about as close as I can get to a love poem. (She does like this one.)

Together, Apart

Too [...]

The Ice-Cream Man

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, [...]

O Many Named Beloved
Listen to my praise
Various as the seasons
Different as the days
All my treasons cease
When I see your face

‘The Yellow Palm’ is a poem that really describes my experiences on Al-Rashid street in Baghdad when I was walking up and down Al-Rashid street in 1998. It’s a ballad, it’s an Audenesque kind of ballad with Audenesque rhymes.

The Yellow Palm

As I made my way down Palestine Street
I watched a funeral pass -
all the [...]

The Blue Room

I sit on a warm stone step in a doorway
to the Blue Room, the Morning Room.

There is much bee-noise and the noise
of birds: the acoustics are fine in the Blue Room.

Usually it may have rained overnight
in the Blue Room: this clear aquarium air.

In the Blue Room there is always one dove
-hidden here, hidden [...]

The News

Here is The News:
‘Two incredible shoes.
Two incredible shoes.
That’s The News.

When it rains
they walk down drains.

They glow
in the snow.

They grizzle
in a drizzle.

They sneeze
in a breeze.

They get warm
in a storm.

They go soggy
when it’s foggy.

They’ve even hissed
in a mist.

But
(sad to say)
there came a terrible frost.
This is what happened:
they got lost.’

That was The News.
Two incredible shoes.
Two incredible shoes.
That [...]

The Mulberry Tree

‘Good neighbour Michael Drayton, and you, Old Ben
Stepped up from London to our Warwickshire -
The air is balmy, so we’ll drink tonight
under my mulberry tree, and hear the chimes.’

But English April’s treacherous. Good ale and wine,
However generous they boast themselves,
Lower the temperature. The lurking microbe
Is everywhere, and waiting for its chance.

Death’s always bitter [...]

This is a poem called ‘The Conjuror’ and it arose quite fortuitously as poems we all know so often do. We’d been to a funeral and we got there too early – it was one of those days you know when they come in every twenty minutes and we spent the time looking round the [...]

Holy the Heart on which We Hang Our Hope

Holy the heart on which we hang our hope.
To trust in Christ is to trust him in the torture.
Shall we believe in pastor, priest, or pope?

The love of God is learning how to cope.
I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in either.
Holy the heart on [...]