FEELING THE HEAT

I wrote this poem back in the days when unfettered travel was still possible and revised it  during our recent lockdown when even a trip to the nearest supermarket was fraught with difficulties. How things change!

ITALIAN CHURCH

Here it is cool, outside the sun

drives cats indoors and blisters paint.

In this dark church, I mop my brow

and search for prayers but there are none

that I remember: no lost, quaint,

supportive words come to me now.

From worship I am long estranged,

I try to feel yet feel unchanged.

Once churches were a place to pray,

now noisy tourists wander through

with baseball-hats and mobile phones

to photograph then turn away:

they have their own gods, even so,

that speak to them in sharp ring tones

but maybe their gods, shrill and small,

are better than no god at all?

A plaster-cast Madonna glares

from a deep alcove on my right

while, to the left, slim candles burn

and Saints regard me from their lairs

with plastic eyes, ferocious, bright,

and features, pale, devout and stern.

Old nonnas pray, mumble and groan 

in varnished pews, their hands like stone,

and though the temperature outside

is forty-two degrees at least,

I rise and quickly slip away,

spooked by those statues, angry-eyed.

I pass a geriatric priest

and drop a euro in his tray.

The thanks he mutters, low and terse, 

could just as well have been a curse.

 

THE INVISIBLE MAN

From Dylan Thomas's Hunchback in the Park to Larkin's Mr Bleaney, cloistered in his shabby rented room, a legion of solitary old men tramp through my imagination and some of them occasionally manifest themselves in my writing.

No one sees or acknowledges them but they're always around: companionless on park benches, smoking roll-ups on street corners or shuffling round supermarkets with their sad, half-empty shopping trolleys ... the elderly, the unloved, the invisible. 

TIMEWASTER

There in his lap, the toad hands squat,

unmoving, on his stained cord pants.

Unblinking, rheumy eyes stare out

at nothing in particular.

A tweedy flat-cap crowns his head

and stubble, like shorn, silver wheat,

encrusts his sallow, sagging jaw.

He wears a parka-coat of sorts,

a form of camouflage, perhaps,

and boots, each toecap battle-scarred,

war-wounded as a tomcat's nose.

His own nose is a pigeon’s beak

that pecks halfheartedly and drips

as though his life were seeping out,

as hope does, leaving just a husk.

To passers-by, the quick, the young,

he is, of course, invisible.

A muffler, like a woollen snare, 

winds round his wisened, scrawny neck

to trap and hold and tether him

to this municipal park-bench:

a humdrum, ancient loiterer 

with pockets full of coins and keys,

put out to grass, adrift, alone,

exchanging walls for parkland trees.

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Q & A

I asked the question recently, via Facebook, whether anyone could tell me the name of the poetic rhyme pattern I'd used that works inwards, from each end, towards the middle, in an abcdef fedcba pattern.

The answer, it seems, is Chiasmic. 

A Chiasmic poem has a structure composed around a Chiasmus: the lines of the text are symmetrical, in that lines one and 12 rhyme, as do lines two and 11, three and 10, etc., until they converge in the the middle with lines six and 7.

Blackbird, is an example of this.

BLACKBIRD

With catapult, once school was finished,

I went to hunt in woodland, high

above Belfast, in summer light

and heard, among leafed branches spread,

a blackbird, singing like a bell.

I took aim, shot; the missile flew

unerringly, my aim was true.

with awful suddenness it fell,

all broken. Exultation fled,

to be replaced by sickly fright.                                                                                          

I knelt to watch it slowly die.

Within me somewhere, light diminished. 

STOLEN KISSES

Royalty or absence of it is hot news these days and the 'Americanisation' of poor, stupid Harry, Duke of Nowhere, is a sorry 21st Century tale of narcissism, self-pity and victim culture. 

This lighthearted poem is about the perils of upsetting a Princess but please don't look for a subtext about Princesses, present or past or even future, because there isn't one. 

THE ROYAL STAMP OF DISAPPROVAL

A cunning and deceitful frog,

one early morning in the mist,

set off from home, a noxious bog,

to seek a princess and be kissed.

He hoped this object to achieve

because princesses are naive.

A true Don Juan, the frog was glad 

that it is easy to convince

a foolish princess, lovelorn, sad,

that frogs, once kissed, morph to a prince.

He’d find himself a handy log

to squat on till he got a snog.

A princess presently appeared.

He croaked, Hey Miss grant me a kiss.

She did. I ain’t a prince, he jeered.

She wasn’t very pleased with this.

Before the rascal could decamp 

she squashed him with her boot, stamp, stamp.

ENIGMA

I rather like the idea that Mona Lisa might have found her cat's expression as intriguing as we do hers.

MONA LISA’S CAT

Mona Lisa strokes her kitty,

whispers Bella, Bella, Bella ...

She’s besotted by her Bella,

even though the dusky feline

seems contemptuous and haughty.

Mona Lisa, Gioconda,

finds the creature mesmerising:

she stares at her cat in wonder

and spends ages speculating

on its enigmatic smile.

BLUES TIMES TWO

Anyone who’s seen the highly successful film Four Weddings and a Funeral will be familiar with W H Auden’s famous poem, Funeral Blues, a poem that tends to crop up at many a real funeral service throughout the English-speaking world.

I used Auden’s poem as a starting point for this little bit of whimsy.

FUNERAL BLUES  REVISITED

(With Apologies to W H Auden)

No need to stop the clocks for time itself has stopped

and should the telephone ring out, then let it go unheard.

The Steinway in the morning room stands silent now.

The dog, distracted by a juicy bone, forbears to bark.

In monumental silence, slowly, mourners come 

with solemn step, with coffin and with muffled drum.

You were a world of things to me: my compass points,

my future, past.  My every diary entry sang

your name and mine, our days of feast and fast.

Naive of me to think such things could last.

The sun and moon are surplus to requirements now.

The stars can be extinguished and the oceans drained.

Discard the beach, each grain of sand, each milligram.

Pack up the doves for nothing is now worth a damn.