MAKING A COMEBACK

Most people are familiar with the name of Lazarus, whose reanimation features as the last of the miracles ascribed to Jesus in the Gospel of John. 
Lazarus, already dead and entombed, was commanded to return to life and duly rose in his winding sheets and rejoined his family. 
We assume he was overjoyed with this turn of events.
But was he? 

 








 
LAZARUS REGRETS

I suppose I should be grateful
that I have been restored to life.
Truly a miracle, they say,
for I was dead, my youthful wife
a widow. Then came that fateful
moment: the voice, to my dismay, 
of God, or something like His voice
recalled me from that peaceful place,
a still, enshrouding nothingness
where I was free in endless space.
I sat up, watched my wife rejoice,
enfold me in her warm caress,
and back came flooding all the cares,
the daily desolation, fears,
unspooling like a ball of thread.
My neighbours wondered at my tears
and crowded round me unawares.
A kind God would have left me dead.
In death, I had at last escaped
the terror, that each human knows,
of his inevitable doom. 
A feather underneath my nose
proved me extinct. My coffin, draped
with sackcloth, waited by the tomb.
Then came a Man, a God of sorts,
whose word alone awakened me,
my winding sheets fell off, my eyes
perceived, at first, a wondrous tree,
then children carrying reports
of miracles with joyous cries.
I, through this sudden jubilation, wept
for that lost, lovely place wherein I slept.

FRENCH LEAVE

Driving through France this summer has been a rare pleasure, especially now that we've acquired a modern air-conditioned car.
Our lovely old seventeen year old camper-van has gone to a good home and we now own a far from new, but for us state-of-the-art, hatchback.
The roads in France are a joy to drive and it's a relief to be away from the everyday frustration of motoring in Guernsey: a depressing experience even on a good day, as the island's obsession with car ownership pushes it ever closer to gridlock.   
Here's a poem from our French travels.

 













LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE

A July day in southern France.
The picnic was a simple one:
cheese, ham and crusty fresh-baked bread,
a little wine to wash it down.

Post-lunch, we fell into a trance.
Our holiday had just begun.
We dozed, our paperbacks unread
I sought the sun, you slept facedown.

Waking, I chanced an upward glance.
Above us swallows wheeled and spun
as though they were unwinding thread
from an incredible blue gown.

FRESH AIR AND FRENCH HARE

Whilst staying in Marsac, Jane and I walked a friend's dogs each day in early morning before the heat became exhausting. 
The area is rural and remote, the nearest cities being Cognac and Angouleme, and is largely agricultural with vines, wheat and sunflowers vying for a space in the rolling meadows.
One morning we had the rare pleasure of spotting that most elusive and mythical of creatures, a hare. 

 



















A HARE

Passing by a wheat field, early,
we saw suddenly 
a movement:
something camouflaged 
had broken  
cover and was moving slowly
with a hunched, ungainly motion
to the tree-line 
in the distance.
What had seemed, before, a boulder
now was animated, lifelike. 
As we turned to watch its progress
in an instant it was sprinting,
all ungainliness forgotten,
into sanctuary darkness
at the all-concealing tree-line.
We walked home 
to our commitments.
How we envied it its freedom.

CATNAPS

Having experienced temperatures of 43 degrees in Europe recently and discovered that an escape to the coolness of the bedroom is the perfect antidote, I'm now a devotee of the siesta. After all, if cats do it it must be a great idea.

MEDITERRANEANS

In noon-day sun no creature moves
and even lizards, acid-green,
designed for heat beyond belief,
remain within their creviced walls.
Dogs hide away, cats sleep in shade
if anywhere shade can be found
and noon to four the natives sleep
or skulk like fugitives indoors,
the black-clad women making lace,
the men at dominoes or cards.
They have adapted to their world
far better than we have to ours:
at ninety-three they’re still alive
while we burn out at fifty-five.
 

A HARD RAIN

I was drinking coffee at a pavement cafe in Auray, a small town in Brittany in northern France back in 2001, when I heard the news of the terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers.
Conditioned by many years of exposure to Irish Republican terrorism in Ulster, I was perhaps not as shocked as many of those around me.
A terrorist’s advantage is the ability to think, and then perpetrate, the unthinkable. There’s no defence against this unless we begin to think like terrorists. 
Most democratic institutions are incapable of doing this.
It’s sad to reflect on how much the world has changed since that terrible day.
How good it would be to be able to rewind time.

 REWIND

Wind Time back. Rewind Time.

     

Make the struck towers rise from dust,

reconstruct themselves: 
glass, concrete, girders, walls,

a huge jigsaw

interlocked, 
complete again.

Lights come on, phones chirp like crickets.

In reconstructed work-stations, 

fingers dance on keyboards again;

vending machines cough 
then spew out pungent brew; 

air-con sighs then resumes; 
elevators ascend, descend;

video conferences resume mid-
sentence, emails beep, 

digital clocks flicker
like quick, green lizards. 

Wind Time back. Rewind Time.

Time restarts 
as though it had never ended.

Hopes, innocence, daydreams, boredom: 

all the mundane certainties of ordinary lives 

are reaffirmed.

Shoes, handbags, mobile phones, flesh, 
warped by intense heat:

these un-melt, re-form, 

resume their former shapes.

The terrible, unearthly screams 
subside.

Wind Time back. Rewind Time.

Backwards 

the soft clouds drift; 
birds fly in reverse.

Those grim death-planes, 
stiletto-silver in the morning sun, 

withdraw, like daggers, from the shattered towers,

whose twin glass skins, pristine again,

shimmer

like smooth, un-rippled water.

FOLLOW THE SUN

I tend not to write poetry when on the move, preferring to work in the surroundings of home with its lack of distractions.
Instead, I try to gather material on my travels for later use in poems or short stories.
The poem below however is the exception to this, in that I wrote much of it while travelling to Angouleme.

 















LA BELLE FRANCE

A hawk commands its post as we zip by, his gimlet eye evaluating us.

Beyond the gate a sunflower field spreads like a golden sea,
while to the right
green rows of vines march towards the swelling sun.
It’s forty-two degrees out there
but here,
within our air-conditioned car,
we are at ease,
our summer trip through southern France a joy.

It’s all we Francophiles desire:
small cafes, vineyards, postcard-rural scenes
and pungent cheeses far too numerous to count.

There’s much to see as we drive through
this countryside so similar, yet different, to home.
Each turn, each tiny hamlet brings surprise.

Already
I have forgotten
the hawk’s bleak eye of cool disdain.