In The Poetry

The Adamantine Perfection of Desire

Nothing more strong
than to be helpless before desire.
No reason,
the simplified heart whispers,
the argument over,
only This.
No longer choosing anything but assent.
Its bowl scraped clean to the bottom,
the skull-bone cup no longer horrifies,
but, rimmed-in-silver, shines.
A spotted dog follows a bitch in heat.
Gray geese fly past us, crying.
The living cannot help but love [...]

Ave Atque Vale

Moments remain, the sculpted, painted, drawn
Split second millennia long,
Current word silenced, ambered into song
Where nothing can change, no bee molest these petals
Which, met, undo me, leave me unborn or dead,
Unable to compare,
Let hand, make memory meddle.
Momentous did they seem? Not now, so still.
They are, are, are, are, are the things I see
And will [...]

Insomnia

The moon woke me, the pocked and chalky moon
that floods the garden with its silvery blue

and cuts the shadow of one leafy branch across
this bed of ours as if on to bright snow.

The sky is empty. Street lights and stars
are all extinguished. Still the moon flows in,

drowning old landmarks in a magic lake,
the chilly waters [...]

I’d like to finish with this one called ‘The Lost Woman’. The more one reads poetry or novels, the more one realises that almost every writer has a lost woman somewhere or other – a woman he deserted, as in the case of Wordsworth – that applies to Wordsworth too, but I was thinking much [...]

Two Seasons

We don’ have a Springtime like some folk
Who live in dem colder place,
but we have a time when de soft rain come,
an’ tease open de seedcase
o’ de poincianna and de trumpet tree,
An’ whisper to de young cane to wake
when de guangu blossom is pink an’ white
powder-puff, prettying up de earth face.
But not Spring like [...]

Rose in the afternon

Not rose of death:
Drawing in to your centre each wave of colour
That your arrested petals give to the air -
Dying inwardly the petals do not fall.

Nor rose of heaven:
Calm at the centre of this city
Monstrous moons, exuberance of stars
Have nothing to do with the light that you collect.
The light of the world [...]

This poem, ‘Five Ways to Kill a Man’, was written after hearing for the first time, a piece of music by Benjamin Britten called The War Requiem. It was one of those poems which wrote itself. I can remember distinctly sitting rather stunned at the end of The War Requiem, pulling out a piece of [...]

The sun has burst the sky

The sun has burst the sky
Because I love you
And the river its banks.

The sea laps the great rocks
Because I love you
And takes no heed of the moon dragging it away
And saying coldly ‘Constancy is not for you’.

The blackbird fills the air
Because I love you
With spring and lawns and shadows falling [...]

Into What Pattern…

Into what pattern, into what music have the spheres whirled us,
Of travelling light upon spindles of the stars wound us,
The great winds upon the hills and in hollows swirled us,
into what currents the hollow waves and crested waters,
Molten veins of ancestral rocks wrought us
In the caves, in the graves entangled the deep roots [...]

I love to try and bring a note of mystery to everyday happenings. Here, a child wants his father to build him a sand castle as the tide is falling, but the poem is really about the title of it, which is ‘Lord Neptune’.

Build me a castle,
the young boy cried,
as he tapped his father’s [...]