In The Poetry

O Taste and See

Because of a kiss on the forehead
in the long Night’s infirmary,
through the red wine let light shine deep.

Because of the thirtysix just men
that so stealthily roam this earth
raise high the glass and do not weep.

Who says the world is not a wedding?
Couples, in their oases, lullabye.
Let glass be full before they sleep.

Toast [...]

I don’t know whether you believe in last words or not – I don’t. Spike Milligan once said to me, “Do you know the last words of Gladstone?” I said, “No,” and he said, “I feel better now”. But this is a serious love poem.

Last Words

Splendidly, Shakespeare’s heroes,
Shakespeare’s heroines, once the spotlight’s on,
enact every night, [...]

For years I practised as a doctor and eventually I managed to write poems that had a medical thrust to them. I used to be asked at poetry readings sometimes – “You’re a doctor but you don’t seem to write poems which have a medical undertone,” and I think I felt I ought to call [...]

My eldest brother is a doctor – I was a schoolboy when he was a medical student and one day he came back from working in the operating theatre in Cardiff when he was a dresser to a well-known brain surgeon by the name of Lambert Rogers. He came back as I say and told [...]

Epithalamion

Singing, today I married my white girl
beautiful in a barley field.
Green on thy finger a grass blade curled,
so with this ring I thee wed, I thee wed,
and send our love to the loveless world
of all the living and all the dead.

Now, no more than vulnerable human,
we, more than one, less than two,
are nearly ourselves in [...]