You drew the line, built a wall along it. The only door is camouflaged, locked from your side. You keep the key in the pocket of your black suit. The wall curves. When I walk its length it meets itself, becomes a circle. You are inside wanting nothing of me. But sometimes you unlock the […]

Printed and broadcast UK media June 2017

Though the death world claws at everything it will not touch her (Callimachus, active 432-408 BC) It might have been a drowsy summer afternoon near Alexandria; the click and buzz of cicadas, the hum and tumble of bees sated with rosemary and thyme, balancing on cistus stars. He might have sheltered under a Mediterranean oak, […]

I’ll choose a boggy piece of ground with mosses and with sedge and build a dry stone wall around, or lay a hazel hedge, and on one side a five-barred gate to let the breezes through; on either hand the gateposts straight, a blackthorn and a yew. The other fields in use there are green […]

The Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, expert, maybe, on Ethics (what we owe one another), hears through the open kitchen window a hubbub she cannot fathom. It comes from over the high wall that separates her from the neighbours. Shouts and cackles in unfamiliar voices mingle with the breaking of glass, the clang on metal. The […]

An ice cream, an oblong of vanilla from the café on the clifftop in the gull-squawking, salty gale. You unwrap the waxy paper in silence, and I tongue-press the ice cream into its angular cone, choose my words carefully, roll them round in my head then say the wrong thing, say nothing, the rain sheeting […]

I am the pigeon on the red roof, next to the lead coloured cupola of the mosque, beside the off-white wall of shadows in Sarajevo. I am the woman in the hotel room watching the pigeon on the red roof of the shrill café, next to the matted lead-grey of the cupola of the mosque, […]

What’s going to happen to us now without the barbarians? For us, they were a solution of sorts. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians (1904)   Reports from the borders are wrong; the barbarians  are crossing them daily. What can we do to stop them?                                                         […]

I set about my eco house with gusto.   A rising helix of straw bales beneath five oscillating wind sails.  Ingenious. My sister was more gung-ho when she got the bug.  A rustic chalet with log walls.  Deep in the woods.  Snug. He had to go one better.  Big bro.   With his massive redbrick […]

Before anybody passes on, they come to play bowls in their cardigans, flat shoes and flannels, free of the day-room in the old folks’ home where they can’t twist the lid off or pump coffee out of the urn any more. Their eyes are out at first, but by practice they become accurate, able to […]

They had nailed him to the wall, palms first his plastic feet cracked under hammers, just out of reach, still wearing combat pants with a crew cut and a scar on his cheek. A day later he was joined by a bearded one in khaki, also pinned the way of the cross. Naturally, everyone was […]

Patron Saint of Bricklayers We spent a fortnight in the glowering sun, laying courses till the job was done, as were we. You the bricks and I the mortar, we’d build rows, our English Bond secured in the soft strength of clay, the blood stirred like a paste to bind the sand and water. If […]

“How,” she muses, “do we keep them out?” “Mirabilis will know,” pipes up the fool, a mop-head jokester swamped in crumpled clothes, “he’s as wizardly in truth as in trickery.” “Go fetch,” she charges, crossing leathered legs. Forth he bumbles, north to distant shires, home to freckled Vikings and offspring of the Commonwealth, finds the […]

They came one night in February from the quarry in the valley with blocks of fog loaded on their carts. The moon rose and the Bear ploughed the dark. The ground was bright with blades of frost. Each footprint they made was a black bite. All night they carved elaborate shapes to fit round trees […]

John Cage, 4’33” (1952) He would staple a piano string to a cloud in his empire of structured air – composer of play nothing, suspend everything – the big unsung serenade of O unravels. What do you hear? Fricative chip of a cough, metallic snap stage left, wet streets ribboned by tyre treads. Breaths in […]

Even if no decipherable word escapes my lips and the whiffle of my breath is all I hear – then a mouse behind the wainscot buffs its claws on plaster dust. Wasps buzz their way in and out of a gap they’ve found/chewed between the soffits and the wall, busy building beauty no-one else can […]

The airport security queue moves efficiently as burly men swiftly remove their coats, belts, watches, shoes; routine as a morning shave. They hunch in silent groups at the gate not hung-over like returning stags but gathering themselves for another wifeless week closing the part of their minds where children bounce and chatter where mothers pray […]

I saw it on her desk, a blurry swirl of darker brown exactly where I went to place my mug, a forearm from the edge, beside the letters labelled ‘to be burnt’. What seemed a complete circle silhouette was actually the endless sum combined of smaller partial coffee rings, offset, and fading logarithmically with time. […]

He walked there and back morning and evening   across the Long Field and the Loughane road   to the pond. He drove the cows before him with a flick of a blackthorn stick. He always had a Rex with him. She remembered at least six. She’d follow like an altar girl, reverent, in procession. […]

Girl siblings have long since spoken in fingers     from the first bash of child hands by accident              to the deliberate thread of digits in family stance.         Hold your sister’s hand, they learn. Then unlearn quick, from ever riskier heights, how to drop the hand that is left in […]

(Paul McGrane writes asking if we have any news for the Stanza newsletter) There is no news.  The pens try hard to write But can’t, still bickering with reluctant ink. The pencils sulk, all spoiling for a fight And point out that they can’t know what to think. The keyboards are depressed, their functions blurred, […]

We touch his silence – hand, hair – amid the pulse and sigh of machines like the silence kept after compline: a flame carried out into night but later I think of a cellist poised at the brink of a solo – how he cups our hush for one last moment before he begins.

snatches its moment between the orchestra’s last flourish and the roar of applause, is captured in the abstract on the far wall made up of squares in different shades of white. It hangs, swaying, between the judge’s question and the jury’s answer, creeps in holding its breath when the baby, finally, falls asleep. It lasts […]

Inside her head she’s eloquent, knows all the answers, words that tumble out in perfect clause and cadence, words like clause and cadence, beautifully enunciated to herself, alone. Like stories she makes up, hobgoblin tales where small girls answer riddles, save lives of princes tied to trees, win golden treasure kept in chests and coffers, […]

I’m wearing ear-plugs on my sun-lounger because the test match is blaring from your laptop while I’m trying to read poetry, and both of us insist on our right to the garden because at last it’s summer, and though you’d be happy to wear head-phones if I asked, I’d still have to listen to your […]

Listen hard .. clocks tick, nibs scratch on paper, minds whirr. Ten minutes left – finish off quick!           * Summit of Catbells, January snow; your arm round my shoulder, our eyes reflect a shelf of mist trapped far below.         * Father’s bedside, D4 East. Soft kiss on his cheek now […]