I bought some flowers for dead people.I saw them dancing in the winter breeze:the sunlight shone through cold and naked treesand showed them shiningin strange, exciting colours.They moved gracefully, in waysI had not seen before.They seemed perfect, and Icould not…
Read: Cemetery
Board games go with Christmas, don’t they? Ludo and Scrabble, not to mention Monopoly and Dixit. Gold, frankincense, myrrh and Cluedo. A shepherd did it, with a crook, in the stable. You must remember. But not chess. Too introspective, too…
I am like a watchman waiting for the morning:I stand on the hills, and in the darknessthe night is emptyformless and cold I look for the light of all mankindand look againknowing that the people who walk hereare children of the…
Read: Up and away
I know I am slowing down, but that’s my age. However, I can’t help noticing that a whole host of other things are slowing down too. Civil servants, for instance. We already knew that the function of bureaucrats was to…
Read: Slow, slow, quick – hey, wait a minute, what’s the hurry?
Steep stone steps climbthrough the trees above the empty theatre –giving it wings Exit stage left,leaving the naked woman on the lawnto answer questions about the plot Her lips are sealedbut on the clifftopanother figure standswhispering in the wind,and her story…
Read: Llanbedrog
The Daily Telegraph, which is not one of the more empty-headed of newspapers, reported on the “terrorist” taxi bombing Liverpool under the rather surprising heading: “Suicide bomber was a Christian convert”. If he was, someone did not do a very good…
For a change, this is a poem not written by me. It is a short one by Raymond Carver (1938-88). And did you get whatYou wanted from this life, even so?I did.And what did you want?To call myself beloved, to…
Read: Late fragment
This has been an exciting week for me. I found something I have been looking for for many years. When I say looking, I admit I have not been spending all my spare time on the project. It has been…
Read: Buried treasure? Not quite what you’re thinking, I imagine
The river, pushed by the tide,smudges the edges here, pulls back to leave a footpath in the sandquickly printed, away from the electric fence The magic goes:swordsmen emerge from the mistand the church hovers in the distancealways just out of reach On…
Read: Riverside path
To be honest, I was a bit underwhelmed by Dippy the Dinosaur, now in his (or her) last month at Norwich Cathedral. The sheer size was certainly impressive, but then I discovered that it wasn’t a real dinosaur. It wasn’t…