Rhymes
Poems don’t have to rhyme,
If you ask me it’s a matter of time:
When you’re not really stressing
Because nothing is pressing
Then, thesaurus to hand,
You invariably land,
If fatigued and slow
On a fitting bon mot.
The Aegean
A night flight to Rhodes Town,
Thence to Lindos and a surfeit
Of people just like us.
Blue tiptop crowns to a white
Hilltop village glossed by sun;
Slow moving bundles of children
Clasping holiday drachmas
In impatient pursuit of treasures
For shelves or mantlepieces.
The sands are too hot for bare feet,
But there’s refuge on ragged mats
Purchased from makeshift stalls;
And the green-tinted sea is rolling
Gently from a cloud-free horizon.
Only the excited yells of the young
And an occasional fishing boat
Punctuate the water-paint wash
Of this long-awaited seascape.
‘A pint of bouzo please mate’,
I overhear at a tourist bar.
We eat outside in a stepped taverna
Under the gold-lit gaze of an acropolis
So pristine
– though long since crumbled,
and bolstered by slabs of grey concrete –
Donkeys relay to and from the ruins.
Guidebooks and serviettes adorned
With portraits of the waiters drawn
By tired, hungry, contented daughters.
Back though the arched gate, a courtyard
Shadowed with the sinking of the sun.
We have slowed and are breathing
Deep and free, though it’s taken
Several days to cleanse souls
Tarnished and clogged by set daily
Niggling rituals of schools and work.
New Orleans
Crescent city by a Mississippi
Pilot-navigated by Clemence
Before he wrote his way to Twain;
Residue of Spain with its moss
And Inscriptions in hotel balconies.
Stand on the shore awhile and watch
The paddle-steamers labour by.
The blues lived here, root
Of the jazz that seeped into the wood
Of the shacks and late night bars
Of Bourbon Street; King Oliver’s
Creole JazzBand, the neophyte Louis
On cornet, whiled away the hours
Till the rising sun announced the day.
Maybe since Katrina the cutting edge
Of this vulgar, boisterous hub is blunted.
Jaffe’s Preservation Hall lurks close,
Still run down and frayed to its core,
Retreat for horn blowers on hard times
Who once played just for tips.
We stood at its smoky backdrop
Listening, drinking, chatting, till a couple
Of bare wooden seats fell vacant:
Jazz is black, and this ageing trio
Guardians of its immortal codes.
White music is scored, black improvised.
Off to the Gumbo Shop for seafood;
The tram driver had his trombone
Lodged beside him, waiting to jam.
Once we chanced on New Orleans
On the eve of St Patrick’s Day,
Bourbon Street throbbing light and sound,
Jugs of beer swilling around revellers,
Jazz leaking out from a straddle of bars,
Seductive beads lobbed from balconies
Into the gleeful arms of grinning girls.
No, the French Quarter is not wholly
Cleansed, neutered for the tourist trade;
And Katrina, who swept away the poor,
Failed to wash away its obstinate, swarthy
Promise of the unexpected.
It’s What Art Does
You don’t write poems, they write
Themselves: all you have to do is wait
Till you have something worth saying,
Then sit, a blank page before you,
And your inner thoughts and feelings
Will be transcribed, as if by magic.
Music too strips you bare and dresses
You just right for the occasion,
Classical suited and scripted scores
For formal, black-tie emotions
In stately homes; improvised jam
Sessions, black and sparky, rallying
To the cause in smoky, ill-lit cellars.
Do composers ever plan, or even
Know, the half of their creations?
Paint speaks beyond the brush strokes
That apply it and has different voices
For the artist and for those who gaze on;
There are in the patterns it leaves
Worlds known and yet to be discovered,
Secrets in their interstices, dipping,
Now sharply, now with a slow fade,
In and out of light and shade.
Yes, skills matter, for these are crafts
And must be laboured at and refined,
But rules are to be broken! How else
Are gauntlets to be thrown down
And thoughts and feelings emboldened
To escape the arid, colourless, mundane
Confines of a hope-less conformity?
Tomorrow needn’t be another today.
Listen to the Murmurings
If you go to a graveyard, no matter where,
And you bend quiet and with rapt attention
Close by a headstone, you may just catch
A halting, hesitant murmur from the past.
The words I’ve heard are faint and hard
To piece together: it’s like doing a jigsaw
Without seeing the picture, or walking
Blind through a rustling, autumnal wood.
But the stories I’ve been told are part of me,
Stuttering whispers from the soil filed away
For futures unknown and undetermined;
I hear the voices and grasp at what’s said.
There was a single mum whose only son,
Out of work, alone, broken, threw away
His life in the early hours, just before dawn
Seeped through one Friday after WW2,
And the echo of his trauma assailed her
Sucked the very marrow from her bones;
She could only see what he would never be.
I often feel it is the saddest of the dead
Who weave the most plaintively narratives
For the living with ears to hear them:
Their voices are so urgent and insistent.
Once I chanced on the angry mutterings
Of a young black dad protesting innocence
To any passers-by willing to stop and listen,
Lamenting the travesty of death in a police cell.
What lingers longest are the inchoate words
Of a four year old infant girl, quiet and shy,
Wrong place, wrong time, robbed too soon
Of the chance of all she might have become.
What this multitude of insinuating strangers
Have in common is their eternal anonymity.
If you don’t halt by their gravestones and sit
Silent while, then it’s as if they never were.
So That’s All Right Then
They prayed for peace in the Yemen,
So that’s all right then.
It may take a while, but then God’s
Time frame is different from ours;
In any case He knows best.
So how long shall we give Him?
He promised to listen: it says so
Quite unambiguously in His book.
When a handful gather together
In His name, kneel and elide the palms
Of their hands, utter hallowed words
And sing appropriate hymns,
Surely that will stop the guns?
But maybe we need a re-set.
Didn’t those very people with heads
Bent in prayerful pleas for peace
Just vote for a government
That sells arms to the killers?
And while we’re about it, isn’t it
The policies of that same government
That led to the foodbanks God’s faithful
Visit as charitable volunteers?
But there’s no collateral damage
Without wars, no hungry children
Without poverty.
Surely there’s something odd here.