A restaurant paper placemat is the best place to compose a poem. There’s nothing venerable about the surface, slightly rough, perhaps a stain of sauce or tea. You can try yourself out on a paper placemat, not take things so seriously. Thoughts fill the squares and dimples while a meal fills the stomach. The pen
I’m convinced he would like a quiet wife. One who would sit on her chair and eat granola and sip carrot juice wearing a ring on only her wedding finger. How peaceful to be concerned by nothing more than juice, dried fruits and nuts, and natural yoghurt! The mind like a quiet seed in
We all need to someone to watch our back, says the man on TV. Yours hunches at the wheel as we sail through vineyards dense with straining vines. Our cases bulge and scrape as we lift them from the boot. You’ve drawn the short straw – the orange one with a dodgy wheel, a
Half through his third bottle of red, he took the keys to the gun cabinet, unlocked it, loaded a rifle, stepped out into the garden, wet grass beneath his feet, breath cloud- plumed in cold air, scanned the organic darkness above, sighted a target, fired, then swung his gun around the night sky, aimed again,
I waited and I saw a bird go winging slow across the sky how slow it flew I couldn’t know how slow because it was so high the sky more pointless than the sea where there are rocks and there is land through which a being flying slow as far as I
under the arch of the Shiraz Palace round to the kitchen tradesman’s entrance young girl walks in her long loose trousers early perhaps for the evening rota does a little shimmy in her long loose body nobody near her nobody watching
for A.J. and N.C. An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar… cheap joke, how it began one ancient evening on the lash in Leeds. Three likely lads, fresh from writing degrees, thinking they knew it all and next to nowt at once, as if the margins of hope and doubt
Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change… Down there the fathom worker Cleans a universe of sand, Whitening bones, blurring wood With weed and merhair strands Our assiduous, unfailing tide Washing the island away And flooding Prospero’s cove. Now all who were shore-born Will leave in their boats. ‘Good sea’
They’ve taken down the trees round Keeper’s Pool. The water’s lifeless, bright and calm, the only creatures left are two white swans, their nest a circled heap of twigs and litter a few yards from a park bench looking at the view – the golf-course, flagged and sweatered. Forever symbols in some poem; what
You told me that you’d read, And were struck by That night in bed, A sermon on the naked limbs that lie Inside your soul, And as you told me so, Our youngest son, whose loud voice cried, rushed Usurpingly to climb Inside our sheets and quilt, with soaked
Her grief is like the shadow play of bones snapped in an old X-ray unsleeved to show what love had done to her and her bright skeleton. Lit up, half-cut, she starts to flag still clutching her green shopping bag of gin and ashes as she weaves through deep, midge-haunted silences exhausted to this break
‘To arrive at the place you know not, you must go by the way you know not.’ – St. John of the Cross How many times the bloody GPS led us astray. It pointed us down stairs, over a cliff, into a pathless field barbed-wire barred and pocked with curious cows. Castel Gandolfo,
Neutral as a wheel it is not culpable for what it picks up. Shock jocks, phone-in bigots, ministerial lies and bleating celebs. A cup cannot be blamed for what fills it. No judgment. No fear of offence just submission to whatever is snatched out of the air by chameleon range be it war,
The gardens are in bloom your mother loved. A jazz trumpet blares – ‘Stormy Weather’ – to a girl spread with her laptop on the grass. Delinquent for a day, you came to catch the last of summer on these paths or the bank grown perilous with out-of-control, knotted weeds, where your father fished at
Richard Judge, Whitstable RNLI I was brought up on boats. Trawling, potting, netting. The harbour was very active at the time. We were using claxons and maroons so the whole town knew – there’d be quite a crowd, watching people running down. It’s more discreet now, the crew can click an app.
I have in mind a snapshot of our son Upheld by you in a prospect of snow, Taken when he was less than half of one On a cold mountain seven years ago. It was the first snow he was ever shown, Was blinded by and touched, and his cheeks glow. His puffer suit is
The lone stag’s crossing a field. He’s done with rutting. Outside Snape Maltings he listens to Alexander Gadjiev. He’s got Chopin in his head. He misses the girls. He’s missing an antler. The sky is blood-red. The sonata was perfect. He’s always had a thing about New York. He slips into the water at
Five of them dressed in black from head to foot. We do it in a circle, partly for the children, partly because we’re teaching the English words for arms, legs etc. Wednesday morning in St Stephen’s church hall. The children have already done heads, shoulders, knees and toes knees and toes. The ladies from Afghanistan
May there always be a friend to write a letter — always time for silence between bars of music — always more stories, more music — always a flock of birds over the river — always old maps promising new journeys — always an island at which to moor and
With all the rain our great provider wished upon us this long winter, a brick-lined pit dug umpteen years ago (I had no inkling it was there), fell in. More than six foot wide, more than eight foot down. The shock. The fear of falling into piss, shit, bone-eating worms. My need to