Late Poems

 

 

From "Beyond Doing"

This love that draws me is so true, 

a heavenly moon in June 

And bunch of red roses comes calling; 

I want to leave me behind.

Mare’s Nest

Would you Adam and Eve your petrified eyes?

An angel in the bedroom; love gone mad;

The most awful experience I've ever had,

A blissed-out God-willed boy, agelessly wise,

On rainbow wings, whose higher plane flies  

In the face of doubt, a knelt Galahad

Flowered with lilies, as if I'd be glad

Of seven thrust heavens between my thighs!  

Well, into my bubble he bursts, like a kiss,

The drop that never came out of the ocean,

The timeless Idea that never took form, 

The perfectly endlessly arch frustration

Of Spirit requiring my bodily fission

In finite infusion of infinite bliss.

This sonnet attempts, UA Fanthorpe fashion (she's still my favourite modern poet) to comprehend the gulf between the transcendental and the parochial, the immeasurable sublime and the Church of Little England, yoked together like a metaphysical conceit in any neighbourhood "St Mary's. Here Mary gossips as a modern congregant might, arranging flowers at the altar or navigating a minor dispute over the parish rota, might about the ineffable event.

43rd Anniversary

On our 43rd anniversary,

Taking coffee and cake with this daughter

We raised - mothered and fathered and taught her -

A lifetime ago in the last century;

Both the kids off her hands temporarily

In playgroup and school; this respite we’ve bought her

A return to her life’s first quarter

As our soul-charged responsibility.

As across the table her friend ciaous warmly,

An Italian Madonna with infant on breast

Whom she feeds as bold as love before me,

While dissing our granddaughter’s school

And we, age-spotted, crumbling, short of zest,

Nod, smile, have been through and see through it all.

Ascension 2022 (England Win The Euros)

“He fell over! I would chant gleefully

At any woman player I saw faking it

Like a man, which (for old boys mistaking it)

Was to be heard, self-satirically,

As revenge on the tittering twattery

Abuse of glorious athletes in bloke-kit

Made so female, fluent and fabulously fit,

My her-zero joke should be his-story.

Now, in parks, homes, schools, wherever white is worn, 

Earps, Bright, Bronze, Daly, Stanway, Williamson, 

Stokes, Wubben-May, Carter, Greenwood, Walsh,

Scott, Kirby, Mead, Hemp, White, Roebuck, Hampton,

Toone, Parris-Kelly, England, Russo; all’s

Changed, utterly: an empowering beauty is born.

Quo Vallis

(The Road Led To Frome As All Roads Lead To Frome…) 

Our Sixties’ ‘Milk Street’ is now ‘the Vallis’
Its new BOYS wing (1909) still flying
Somerset’s wyvern, still teaching
Under a portico like a Greek palace 
How to beat this Station Voice from ‘Quo Vadis’:
“If you see a Rodden man escaping
(Through the old Grammar) his shoplifting
Rap from 1965, call Frome Police!

Do not apprehend him or ask his name
In hotels; he’ll react as if accused
Of scrumping apples or palming the cane.”
Here be wyverns, here be the roots
Of the wings they couldn’t clip, the anytime 
Checkout I can never leave behind.

Frome July 2022. 

credits