The tide slides in again,creeps into the car park,curves gracefully round the green islandbeside the point Creation strolls pastchained to strange beastspulled this way and thatgoing nowhere:giants stand on the horizoneating beetles Abandoned boats sink slowlyinto the marsh:the battered bridge…
Read: Perfect view
Like many people, I stopped watching the news on television. Not because I was getting it off TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, but initially because if I saw one more scientist standing at a podium next to the Prime Minister,…
On a wet and windy Whit Sunday(shameless in shades of grey)I watch iridescent pictures on whitewashed wallsand wait for the Holy Spirit I examine gallery-goers closelyfor signs of fire on their headsand speaking in tongues: yes,there is strange language hereand…
Read: Act of God
I was conceived during the second world war. I don’t remember it happening, though I guess I must have been there – if not at the time, then very shortly afterwards. At roughly the same time the German battleship Tirpitz…
Before the operation, it was straightforward. They were just going to make a little hole, pop a camera and a scalpel in while I was otherwise engaged, then revive me and send me home. I asked several people, and they…
Read: Alice through the keyhole, and what happened afterwards
I am due to have an operation shortly. It’s my fourth attempt, for reasons which need not detain us. As a result I keep coming across stories about routine operations – and mine is very routine – that have gone…
Up here on the heightsApaches gatheramong the bushestheir lines well learnt, the music bold war songs Cold dogsabandoned bicycles watchers from outsidetaking the long viewwait for some kind of movementor act, or scene:something dramatic A lean boy, no feathers, no arrows, scrambles upa scalped…
Read: Fast left hand
Funny thing, progress. It should work: we learn from experience, improve things as we go along, and one morning we wake up and everything’s perfect – or at least, better than it was before. Sadly, though, it seems to work…
[Poem read at Walpole Old Chapel annual reading by Suffolk Poetry Society members] In midsummer the binmen come early:I hear the sound of shelling down the streetor at the edge of town –the thunder, then a dragging soundlike bodies, dead…
Read: Bins
A close friend of mine blames all of society’s ills on cars and television. If neither of these had been invented, she says, we would be much better off – our horizons limited both physically and mentally to the benefit…