Category Archives: Poetry

Rome Revisited

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I travelled light this time
And came to Rome without
Religious certainty
To pin my conscience down,
Free now to excavate,
From strata of belief
And primitive taboos,
Some vestiges of truth.
Now, gods and ages merge.
Inscriptions, sculpted all
By one perennial hand,
In unison proclaim
The noble promises
And hollow alibis
Of each successive age.
St. Peter’s colonnades
And fallen architraves
Of Augustan temples
Possess this in common:
All are, terminally,
Fatalistically,
In varying stages
Of decomposition.
No crying of the geese,
High on the Capitol,
Can protect the City
Against time and reason.

13th November 1990

Lichens of the mind

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I come each year to where my father lies
And read again the polished granite stone,
Which tells me that he died on such a date,
At such an age and may he Rest in Peace.
The formula is bare, so much unsaid,
And with each year becomes more indistinct
As images I hold become concealed
Behind eroding lichens of the mind.

August 1985

My square of window

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My square of window
weeping stars in the blue night,
You asleep upstairs.
I lie awake alone
Breathing in time with you.

Doors clicking softly
In the midnight breeze.
Dark curtains swishing,
Soon to be filled pink
with soft morning light.
The sky cut neatly
By the window frames
Into tiny portions
Like blackberry pie
waiting to be eaten.
Albertine roses
Under the sill tap
The cool cement wall
In their wire moorings,
Moved by the night wind
And their own silent growth.

La Croute. St. Ouen, Jersey. 1967