New Poems

Commuter

The siren wails across the bridge,
September’s shadow sails the ridge,

The small blue car and you have gone
To Gloucester in the awkward sun

To your first job, demanding screens,
Choked copiers, your colleagues’ screams.

The siren dips then fades away
Past mist-fumed fields, the motorway.

Once, under a striped jeep’s canvas
You saw an elephant lunge at us.

As the lone motorcycle roared
The pony reared, then threw you hard.

There have been planes and swimming pools,
Bicycles swerving right from schools.

On wind, the last long note is spun,
Heart clenched for the most dangerous run
To Gloucester, in the steady sun.

(Published in Poetry London)                          Top

In orbit

Silent and huge, Mars swings close to our earth,
Astronomers write with a flourish. Breath
Will leave for space winds, before Mars comes again,

Skims our horizon, as low as a bird,
In August’s calm country. Light leaves the world.
Farm gates loom in wheat. That the great planets spin

Always, invisibly, under our rain,
Noon’s glare, confounds me. Blue faded, I scan
Sky’s fields. “Any luck?” owners cry. Bats’ soft spin,

Their soundless anger, misses me. Moths whirr,
The pony’s white flank moons through docks. I stare
At true moon’s slice, their roof. Quick brightness rings

Over the tiles. “That’s it!” my dark hosts cry.
I drive out of their sphere. Sky-dazzled, I
See street lights, comets, orbit once again

Wrong roundabouts. But was that really all?
I stand in my own world, the grubby hall,
No bats or flighty stars: a nagging pain.

At one a.m. the cat and I walk out
Magnetic, straight. It rises like a shout.
Mars, vast and milky, hangs, flashes the bull’s red rim.

The century is three. Our second war
Circles. The soft plants droop. The heatwaves soar.
Astronomers are wrong. Mars comes again, again.

(Published in Scintilla)                          Top

Moles

Moles, as I mentioned above,
From habits as firm as ours
Throw crumbled mounds by the dozen
Once they smell frost in the ground.

But the battered spring creaks round,
Paddocks are rich with new dock,
White violets trespass in woods.
The mole strikes out for a mate.

As the moss dries, gold on the gates
His hot hills circle my feet
Echo dark days of the mole,
Crunched worm, his ferocious love.

(Published in Poetry Wales)                          Top

High notes

Over the ridge, flooded tracks snarl with ice.
February shifts through its angles of wind,
North to the bare ash, east to the numbed hand.
Above the torn pasture, the buzzard’s voice.

The buzzard is many birds. Dropped to the road
It rips the soft rabbit with eagle’s hard glare.
As kite, it circles through ceilings of air.
It sleeps in the ash like a ruffled brown toad.

Its voices are many, a mewing prattle,
A languorous whistle over the wood.
Once, when the lambs tottered banks, it could
Draw from its throat a machine gun’s rattle.

Now its voice has changed, though the night is bringing
The sun’s red disc, the moon’s white eye.
Its call swoops and breaks. Its mate hovers by.
To frozen acres the buzzard is singing.

(Published in Stand)                           Top

Polar

Your dream, antarctic. Down the crevasse
The husky howls at his master’s face.

The snow, which flowed through the tent flap, blows
Past caked hood, chill bone, into the soul.

Your legs drag numb through unflinching white,
Too far to cross. At the drop of night

Breath on your back is the bear, who rakes
His claw through guts - But then you wake,

Pad to the January door and stare
At the mild street. It is all out there.

(Published in Critical Quarterly)                            Top

High walls

This is my contract with the rich:
They may keep their big gardens
With the lush deadly darkness of yew
From which a bird dives, past my shoulder. Soon
I will be yards from the hot road,
Watering my patch,
Where a frog rises, olive,
Plump as the moon.                            Top

Cat Poems cat, cats, poem, poems, poetry

Tabby

You played upon the driveway,
You tapped the leaves’ dry skin
Your brother blocked the cat flap
To stop you bounding in.

I finished with the paper,
Its cartoons and its cares.
I walked in the bright hallway.
You sat upon the stairs.

How had you crossed the kitchen?
When had the flap slammed flat?
You stared at me unblinking.
Death is a quiet cat.

(Published in Bricks and Ballads, Carcanet, 2004)
For permission to reproduce, and for details of fee,
please contact Carcanet Press
www.carcanet.co.uk                                     Top

Puff

You leapt up, the computer’s cat, then curled
On your own chair, before a glowing world
Of spidered text and viruses, would wait
Calmly, in paper drifts, as I worked late.
You tongued your ruff smooth, kept your grave eyes round,
Sniffed coffee, chocolate, till an end was found,
Or slept, sleek squirrel, in your feathered tail
So when I scooped you up, your long paws trailed,
Your chin lolled on my wrist, flowed warm past fear.
I do not think, in all your fourteen years,
You knew unkindness. But the tumour grew,
You blinked black lids to lamps as we walked through.
What sun or screen is now too bright for you?

(Published in Stand)                                     Top

Moonlight

The favourite; not for beauty
Though tabbies now are rare
Or great sweetness of nature
But being there

Curled on the stones for gardening
On Sunday, on the bed
Stealing the milk’s last whisker.
The runt, he fed

Frantically ever after.
He swayed across the room
Until the face grew lean as lynx
The hips a hill of bone.

A quiet cat from the country
Born in a haystack’s scent
We rescued him from drowning.
But life is only lent.

Though other cats crowd after
More beautiful, more sweet,
He waits at my eye’s corner
The shadow at my feet.

(Published in Bricks and Ballads, Carcanet, 2004)
For permission to reproduce, and for details of fee,
please contact Carcanet Press
www.carcanet.co.uk                                     Top

As

The car swoops under the tunnel of leaves
As I drive my old cat to be put down
I think of a neighbour I rarely meet,
Heavy, unfriendly, she rushes to town
To buy new lace curtains, whose starchy clouds
Blow from her window, as leaves drift in heat,
Lovely to her as each tawny-ticked hair
Of the tabby’s stripes, white glow of his feet

As I lower his weak warmth down on the slab,
As his air, his last voice, leaves with a sigh,
He is gone and gone, past the busy hush,
The white room’s pain. In the wild garden, high
Over the railway, I dig where he sat,
Soaked up the late sun, gazed through dapple of bush,
As wind steals the hot fragrances from her meat,
As gold smokes the ash trees, as leaves flow and rush.

(Published in Snakeskin)                                     Top

Spotted

There is a glitter on the fence
Caught in my headlights' beam,
On hilltops in the stormy dark.
The town is lost, unseen,

But not this single star. An owl?
It is too sharp for deer.
It is the hunter, not the prey.
My breath grows quick, like fear,

But now I drive more slowly
Safe in my ton of steel
To catch it in the frozen glare
The hungry eye's next meal.

It does not lift on brindled wings
Or slither like a rat.
It turns a white disdainful face.
It is the hunting cat,

The latest in a careless line
Who haunt the sheds and barns,
Curl on old coats, in dusty sun -
Dogs are more dear on farms.

The rough dogs are shut up for night.
The farmer snores near by.
The cat springs lightly from his mud.
She settles in the sky.

(Published in Snakeskin)                                     Top

Horse Poems horse, horses, poem, poems, poetry

Hill Mist

I am too fond of mist, which is blind
without tenderness; whose cold clings close
round the face.

The timid horse likes it;
treading his own space,
he cannot see black haystacks loom
the dog wait in wet woods; the man
crouch in brambles, raise a gun,

Even its sound is muffled. Death would be quiet in the mist.

Up on the crest - though you will say
he bucks, he gallops - how calm you seem
rising soundlessly over the grass.

Mist lets you in - All I see are the dancing
lights advance: evaporate.

The mist grows into a strange horse
the slender chestnut mare - the solid man, we saw
once riding with a woman; always, now, alone.
You make as much of this as the white shapes
smoke, in my eyes - All I will say
is, he is hard, as ground is: in bravado
rides bareheaded. How the mist must cling
to him. As you step out, our horse's mane
hangs heavy, dewed and glinting:

There is no past here. The only future's
The hidden gallop's heat. It is a place
I did not mean to love. Do you live so:
Walking your own space?

(Published in Selected Poems, Carcanet, 1991)
For permission to reproduce, and for details of fee,
please contact Carcanet Press
www.carcanet.co.uk                                     Top

After the X-ray

If he had stayed
in the four white walls
or alone in his patch, the untidy hedge
strewing its roses through empty hours
he would never have met the dark mare
whose neck he licked by the elderflower
whose kick snapped his straight cannonbone.

For sixteen weeks he must stand in the straw
watching the light wash and ebb.
All warmth will have flowed past when he stumbles out
November's wind raw on his leg..
Was it worth it? He shuffles, he cranes to the lane,
calls her, and calls her again.

(Published in 1829, Carcanet, 1995)
For permission to reproduce, and for details of fee,
please contact Carcanet Press
www.carcanet.co.uk                                     Top

Provision

The horses of the first world war
Shipped out to Egypt with the drafts,
Sold, without oats or tack, were found
Starved, scabbed, in Cairo, between shafts.

A charity gave less cruel bits,
Vets, water troughs, to slake some pain.
The ribbed sides had sunk, finally,
When the troopships sailed East again

With cavalry horses, all hand-picked,
Big in bone, packed hard with oats.
A groom I knew marched through Iraq
To haul their buckets, shine their coats.

That war too ended. There they stood,
Sixteen hands high, without a spot
On their smooth shoulders- Do not say
Soldiers learn nothing. They were shot.

(Published in Agenda)                                     Top

On the second of August

Oh I am very tired, but the old horse is dead
I had for eighteen years.
He was twenty-eight. Do you like horses?
One day you will be dead.

His coat shone red; the tumour in his eye
also flared red.
He lowered his head kindly.

You will not be shot, as the old horse was shot,
at nine o’clock in the wheat field
as the light wind drew from the south
as the light rain rustled hay
and he died with corn in his mouth.

(Published in Bricks and Ballads, Carcanet, 2004)
For permission to reproduce, and for details of fee,
please contact Carcanet Press
www.carcanet.co.uk                                     Top