States of Poetry 2017

Patriotism

‘... the last refuge of a scoundrel’.
                                   Samuel Johnson

But here and there a whisk of it
does no essential harm:

an accidental win or t ...

Flags

January 26

The honours list has been announced,
recipients are ‘humbled’.
Three jet fighters, adolescent,

fly past proving nothing.
Fireworks later on are promised.
None of this requires

my serious attention.
How many million barbecues?
Our tall ships and our

sixty thousand years
attempt a sort of ba ...

Judgement

If all we’re told is right
how wearisome He’ll find it;
all those fine gradations,

those mitigating factors.
Psychopaths are easy
but who are we to say?

The virtuous are harder,
their sin of subtle pride,
their svelte self-satisfaction.

The normal are the worst,
one day a fine donation,
next day a little nip ...

The Notebooks

Thirty years of dreams are stored
in notebooks, written down on waking.

Her daughter’s kept them all,
imagining her mother moves

among those shimmering and scribbled
layers on a bedside table.

Those narratives live on, she’s sure,
in all their raw hallucinations,

their sudden runs of ecstasy,
their weird humili ...

The Jugglers

In the warm dusk, pink and purple arcs
appear above the old town’s lanes
as jugglers toss their clubs outside
a gallery’s bright, acrylic interior.
Petunias lean from baskets like cheerful spectators
carriage horses wait in plumed rows
for tourists from the ship that dominates the wharfs
below. A couple and their son pause
with ...

Still Life

As if all the world’s ravel, its bright course
of device were to stream through a pinhole in the side
of a box and emerge into a corridor of Delft tiles
on which tiny figures from childhood or a dream semaphore
at my self-portrait, ghostly pentimento in its dun
vestments, and the servant drying linen in the dunes;
the images unclear, inverted ...

The old rugged cross

When the spirit has been broken
and there’s no place to go
When you look around the world
wondering what went wrong
When your heart is shattered and
torn no patch ever big enough to help it mend.
No bandaid to help it heal.

When tears roll down your face

cascading like a roaring river
When the spirit has been br ...

Got ya

I knew he was mine
frothing at the mouth
(literally speaking)
I was waiting for him
my body ready to strike

Like a leopard
on the verge of attack
I waited, biding my time.
I held my breath.

My muscles taut
prepared to pounce
to strike, to maim.

I knew the moment was at hand
the spirits played around him