I tuck the blanket around my knees
And contemplate my lovely room,
Where I snooze and read and snooze again
And sometimes decide to write a poem:
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Archives
Trees
A course on trees at Birmingham Botanical Gardens
For two hours we sit on plastic chairs
Entranced by The Man Who Knows About Trees.
Beauty and science combine when one sees
The chlorophyll green that April wears.
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The Second Law of Thermodynamics
(“Everything tends to greater randomness.”)
The watch-strap breaks, the car won’t start,
The battery’s dead, the ink runs out,
There’s a nail in the tyre, the printer jams,
Now the toilet’s blocked. “F*** it!” I shout,
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Chromatic notes – Villanelle
They call my dressing-gown aubergine,
Black is the ink, the paper white,
And the green of the apple tree drips with rain.
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Philadelphus
(or “mock orange-blossom”)
From my grandmother’s home my parents took
to each garden of their marriage a cutting
of philadelphus with white waxy flowers
and a fragrance of orange.
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A wet Jubilee
The royals were always gangsters -
Once in power they can paint out the sleaze -
But it peels in the British weather,
Rather cold, rather wet, with a breeze.
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Jubilee
The Queen walks down the steps of St. Paul’s,
No rail, stick or arm does she seize.
I don’t want her job, or her wealth or her brood,
But oh! how I envy her knees!
January 2011
New Year, new crisis,
New Labour, new stories,
Old theories, old friends,
And the same old Tories.
Maes Howe
A white scrawl on the endless black
Rolls the stone aside. I crawl through the gloom
Of the long stone passage, empty and cold,
Shrugging off fear, towards the tomb.
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Gangsters
The underground car park now is half empty,
Silent and dark. But I know they are there –
Gangsters and mafia and crooked policemen.
They think I don’t know, but oh! I’m aware
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Birmingham Botanical Gardens
A garden has to be enclosed: there are rules
For creating a sacred space.
You must own the land or pay to get in:
Paradise is a privileged place.
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England, My England
What is England? A land of fossils?
Buckingham Palace, Stratford, the Lakes?
Tourists clog up the cosy deadlands -
But still, in the hinterland, there wakes
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Socks to you!
If you’ve got cold feet, you can’t write a poem,
So I find some white ankle socks in a drawer.
I wear them with pleasure and wriggle my toes.
But oh, how we hated them when we were four-
August 2011
We‘ve been carried off to an alien planet.
Even riots can’t bring us back to earth.
Virtue is lost in this virtual world,
Where the old cannot die and the young have no worth
My New Website
With a book, page forty is always the same.
But the internet fidgets and won’t stay still:
It challenges me with crashes and scares -
Computer fifty: Mary nil.
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Not all there
Bony trees blurred in November fog.
Not a sound from the park or the old man below.
The kids above must have frozen mid-romp.
Has the world stopped? And how should I know?
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New Year 2009
The earth is tilted away from the sun:
It snowed in the night, and now it will lie.
On the vast ocean, with trinkets from China,
Round half of the world container ships ply.
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Multi-storey living
I’ve moved my window boxes around:
The winter cyclamens go – they are old!
They yield to thrusting hyacinths
And see! – the first crocus has burst into gold.
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A Good Friday concert
(The St. Matthew’s Passion performed by Ex Cathedra in Symphony Hall, Birmingham, with tea and hot-cross buns in the interval.)
The man we call Jesus believed in stories,
In Hebrew prophecies being fulfilled.
A terrorist, broken in body and spirit,
He found a cruel slow way to be killed.
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May Day
My first May Day: walked and walked
Lost among the legs of the comrades,
On our table piles of coppers for Spain -
But not enough money to stop the raids
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Heat Wave
Flies come and go through the open door,
Tennis balls plop beyond the trees.
They say the sun is baking the city,
But here it’s green and cool with a breeze.
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The Time of My Life
My clean school blouse was soaked in sweat,
The streets were empty. I heard the bell
Far off, as I ran with bursting lungs -
And I lost my faith in prayer as well!
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In memoriam – Tim Johns 1936-2009
Tim Johns was a lecturer at the University of Birmingham.
He died in April this year and his colleagues arranged a
memorial gathering in September.
Duke Ellington was playing,
A passion we could share;
From far and wide your colleagues came –
Everyone was there.
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Translations of Chinese poems
Plum blossom
This spring morning in bed I’m lying,
Not to awake till the birds are crying.
After one night of wind and showers,
How many are the fallen flowers?
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Voices in the snow
Snow lies thick – I hibernate.
No sound to be heard. I am all alone,
Basking in silence. At such times I know
I’m alive. Damn, that’s the phone!
Post Modernism
Four elements were ours to share:
Water, earth and fire and air.
Let’s write about Spring ….
Frozen this year the Resolutions:
- master the satnav – check on the spam -
- delete the emails – find that old letter -
- learn to get music – and what else? Oh, damn!
Me? Eighty?
Eighty last month – and lots of good eating!
My nephew, old colleagues and new friends all came
A day’s circle dancing, a trip to the ballet,
And a scrumptious lunch with old – what’s her name?
The Wanderer Grows Old – Sonnet
Ballet in Moscow and opera in Venice!
And I’ve slept on the floor of long-distance trains.
I’ve tied vines in Thrace, hoed peanuts in Israel,
In Istanbul sniffed at the spices and drains.
Two translations from the Chinese
The Deer Fence
Wang Wei (701-760)
No-one lives in these empty mountains,
Yet someone is speaking – a voice unseen.
Enter the mossy depths of the forest –
The evening sun strikes gold on green.
After three years of Chinese classes ….
In the poem a duck is paddling alone
Somewhere in China – in the northern sand,
The luxuriant south, or the airless peaks -
Too vast to match with the map is this land!
Smile, please!
I smile a lot. Like buses and sunshine
And books from the library, smiling is cheap.
I smile when I dance and chat at the till -
But mostly I smile at the thought of sleep.
Recycling
Between yesterday’s meeting, tomorrow’s
Minutes, take a day off – before the night.
Detach the phone, get two hours’ silence,
No shortage of paper – I write and write.
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Music and Silence
Hymns and ballads, the pianist fumbles -
“The Battle Eve” and “Jesus shall reign….”
Fine Welsh voices, trained in the chapels,
Not much faith, but the songs remain.
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Villanelle
Always in water it’s fear that I feel.
The only air is what you take down.
If only I could swim like a seal …..
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Sunday Driver
I never wanted to drive. But my job
Demanded a car. So – grinding the gears -
I quivered out on to roads full of killers,
And forty years’ driving confirms all my fears.
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The Rollright Stones
(The Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire consists of about 77 lumps of weathered limestone in a perfect circle, some nearly lost in the short turf. It dates back probably to 3000 BC.)
How did I get here? Was it just chance
That the garden I planned to visit was shut?
That I drove back home the prettier way
And turned down the lane to the Stones. But –
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Total eclipse
(Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 1963)
A warm autumn morning. We climbed the hill
Where Romans and Thracians had left their mark.
We danced and sang, while the day turned dark
For the Moon was eating the Sun: it grew chill.
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She Thinks She Thanks Her Mother
Mom wanted a different life for me,
A life of less servitude than her own,
And education would set me free.
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Keep Fit Class
(Old ladies’ Keep Fit class – with ribbons)
Our bodies are old and scarred and stiff,
But our numbing fingers still can hold
The sticks with yards and yards of bright ribbon –
Lilac and scarlet and green and gold.
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After the Dance
So here I am quiet, back on my own,
Back from the fellowship, back from the dance;
Now I am reaping what I have sown
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The Collapse of Communism: two dreams
(1) Embrace tiger, return to mountain
Rolling savannah, a snow-capped peak,
In the midst a garden – lush lawns and a lake
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On Learning Chinese in Old Age (Sonnet)
To read a Chinese newspaper, they say,
Three thousand characters you must learn.
The Chinese bow to a discipline stern:
If they learn to read, with their youth they pay.
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Tomorrow My Birthday
The cards have come early – some very nice flowers,
And then one that’s different – I laugh in delight –
An open-mouthed tortoise, high in the air,
Trying to catch a frisbee in flight!
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Stardust
How does one distil death from a poppy?
Where does one get the barbiturates from?
How retain sense of self, and escape
The black-coated, white-coated guardians of doom?
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National Memorial Arboretum
Here is steppeland. Staffordshire. Flat.
In relentless wind flags strain and crack.
A storm blows in from distant fields –
From Russia and Burma, Iceland, Iraq.
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A Matter of Size
My second-floor flat is a home in the tree-tops,
Against the hard city great trees are a screen:
A chestnut, some birches, a huge twinkling aspen -
Their leaves in the sunlight dance golden and green.
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Playing the River
To Rising Dragon Tai Chi, in gratitude:
Note: Each of the movements in Tai Chi is called a “posture”. The whole sequence of postures is known as “the form”. Practising Tai Chi is described as “playing the form”.
Time slammed me down the mountain,
Hurled me from rock to rock
In a torrent of obligations,
Doing bad work by the clock.
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