New Poems

Hear my poems

As well as reading my poems (below) you can now listen to a selection, or download them as a podcast, from the excellent site www.poetcasting.co.uk

Another poem, "Geranium Rozanne" (filled with summer!) can be heard at poetrymagazines.org.uk

Lapwings

They were everywhere. No. Just God or smoke
Is that. They were the backdrop to the road,

My parents’ home, the heavy winter fields
From which they flashed and kindled and uprode

The air in dozens. I ignored them all.
“ What are they?” “Oh – peewits – “ Then a hare flowed,

Bounded the furrows. Marriage. Child. I roamed
Round other farms. I only knew them gone

When, out of a sad winter, one returned.
I heard the high mocked cry “Pee – wit , “ so long

Cut dead. I watched it buckle from vast air
To lure hawks from its chicks. That time had gone.

Gravely, the parents bobbed their strip of stubble.
How had I let this green and purple pass?

Fringed, plumed heads (full name, the crested plover)
Fluttered. So crowned cranes stalk Kenyan grass.

Then their one child, their anxious care, came running,
Squeaked along each furrow, dauntless, daft.

Did I once know the story of their lives?
Do they migrate from Spain? Or coasts’ cold run?

And I forgot their massive arcs of wing.
When their raw cries swept over, my head spun

With all the brilliance of their black and white
As though you cracked the dark and found the sun.

(Published in Poetry London and in
Pendulum: The Poetry of Dreams
Ed. Deborah Gaye, Avalanche Books, 2007.
ISBN 978 1 874392 42 2)

Night out

Brahms? Yes, the story. While he was drinking
The door was kicked open, a girl crashed in
A man on her arm, a brooch on her shawl.

The first drink drained, she turned, in a rush,
Wheedled, “Herr Doktor, play something for us!”
It seemed, said the diarist, she knew Brahms quite well-

Flushed, Brahms bent to the untuned piano.
Notes flew in flocks, soft as doves, quick as sparrow,
While the girl swept the stranger through dance after dance.

How long would she last? A winter? A year?
Brahms had his honours, his pupils, his dear
Untouchable Clara, too heavy to dance.

Symphonies, lullabies, songs filled his days,
A whisper his nights. Give all to one glance,
Pound the dust ’s dark piano, whirl dance after dance.

(First published in Stand; published in Singing in the Dark, Carcanet.)            Top

Before an operation

Today, no one has quarrelled, no one died,
The beeches rise, taller where they were thinned.
November licks high fields long green and gold.
The buzzard drops in silence from the tree.
His outspread wingtips whisper on the wind.

(Published in Singing in the Dark, Carcanet, 2008.)
For permission to reproduce, and for details of fee,
please contact Carcanet Press                      Top

The beanfields’ scent

It is light as winds, without coldness,
Fresh waves of sea without salt,
It blows a sweet honey, uncloying,
It is happiness without fault.

Its flowers’ tongues ask no taxes,
Though their purple is royal; their white
Is pressed by black so pure
That noon is burned by night.

Who buys a scent called “Beanflowers”?
Its glossy blue of leaf
Buckles, to June’s sharp showers.
Best things are free and brief.

(Published in Singing in the Dark, Carcanet, 2008.)
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please contact Carcanet Press                      Top

Solo

How can the oboe
Sing like a woman?
The long hair flows
Down the player ’s back.

How can he - yes, he -
Hold breath so long?
Young planets flee
The black horizon.

Dew gleams the long slopes
Of the park.
The notes fly fast
As bees from dark.

Wrap me in sleep
Toss down this care
A tumbled tune
A glistening hair.

(Published in Singing in the Dark, Carcanet, 2008.)
For permission to reproduce, and for details of fee,
please contact Carcanet Press               Top

Schemes

Who plants forsythia now? It is not tasteful;
Too ragged, tall, and dull when leaves are out.
But see the sparrows rush into its heart,
Eyes stroke it, raw and golden as a shout.

(Published in Singing in the Dark, Carcanet, 2008.)
For permission to reproduce, and for details of fee,
please contact Carcanet Press                      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 Singing in the Dark, Carcanet, 2008.)
For permission to reproduce, and for details of fee,
please contact Carcanet Press
www.carcanet.co.uk                                     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)
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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 Singing in the Dark, Carcanet, 2008.)
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www.carcanet.co.uk                                     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