In The Poetry

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 [...]

I do enjoy writing riddle poems. This particular one I usually read without the title, which I will do now, and without the final word, but this time I’ll put in the final word.

Who dips, dives
swoops out of space,
a buzz in his wings
and sky on his face;
now caught in the light,
now gone without trace,
a [...]

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 [...]

I spent my schooldays on the east coast of Lincolnshire, in Skegness, where the chilly wind straight from the North Sea did tend to put a damper on picnics a lot of the time. This was part of a whole sequence of seaside poems, and this particular one is just called ‘Picnic’

George, lend a [...]

I love to write mysterious poems. Here’s a favourite from my second book, Midnight Forest.

Winter

Winter crept
through the whispering wood,
hushing fir and oak;
crushed each leaf and froze each web -
but never a word he spoke.

Winter prowled
by the shivering sea,
lifting sand and stone;
nipped each limpet silently -
and then moved on.

Winter raced
down the frozen stream,
catching at his [...]

I’m afraid I wasn’t very keen on history at school, so when someone asked me for some poems about the Romans, I was thinking “how can I do this in minimum time?” And I decided to write a history of the Romans in Britain in forty words only.

The Romans in Britain
(A history in 40 [...]