Poem of the Month

2011-12-26T17:14:00.003Z

December
Last poem before new site goes up, so here's a carol I wrote- sung by young Charlie Blair with chorus by the local Dittisham church choir at christmas. A few of the choir muttered about not understanding the owl's blood...

Why Is The Mute Swan Singing?

How calm the snow, how white it is,
How clear and pure the air,
How perfectly each little flake
Illuminates the atmosphere.

Why is the old fox smiling,
Trotting through the snow?
What is the rabbit dreaming of
In the warren deep below?

Why is the mute swan singing?
Why is the wren so bold
Why are the wild geese staying
And
the spider weaving gold?

How calm the snow, how white it is!
How clear and pure the air!
How perfectly each little flake
Illuminates the atmosphere!

Why are the black crows cawing,
That were once so numb with cold?
From amongst the ice-flecked branches
What can they see unfold?

Why are they so excited
On such a winter’s night?
And why is the stable glowing
With such translucent light?

The kingfisher shakes off rainbows,
The river stops mid-flow,
Buried in the owl’s blood
Is something they all know.

2011-11-15T17:08:00.005Z

November

Still hoping to upload new material on a new website soon- meanwhile here's a poem written ages ago that I'd forgotten about.

The Right Mask

One night a poem came up to a poet.
From now on, it said, you must wear a mask.
What kind of mask? asked the poet.
A rose mask, said the poem.
I've used it already, said the poet,
I've exhausted it.
Then wear the mask that's made

Out of the nightingale's song, use that mask.
But it's an old mask, said the poet,
it's all used up.
Nonsense, said the poem, it's the perfect mask,
Nevertheless, try on the god mask,
That mask illuminates heaven.
It's a tired mask, said the poet,
And the stars crawl about in it like ants.
Then try on the troubadour’s mask,

Or the singer's mask,
Try on all the popular masks.
I have, said the poet, but they fit too easily.
Now the poem was getting impatient,
it stamped its foot like a child,
it screamed, Then try on your own face,
Try on the one mask that terrifies you,
The mask only you could possibly use,

The mask only you can wear out.
The poet tore at his face till it bled,
This mask? he asked, this mask?
Yes, said the poem, why not?
But he was tired of masks,
He had lived too long with them.
He snatched at the poem and stuck to his face.

He chewed on it, spat bits out, destroyed it.
Its screams were muffled, it wept, it tried to be lyrical,
It wriggled into his eyes and mouth,

Into his blood it wriggled.
The next day his friends did not recognise him,

They were afraid of him.
Now it's the right mask, said the poem, the right mask.
It clung to him lovingly, and never let go again.

2011-08-22T11:44:00.007+01:00

August

It's going to be some months before the new site's up and running, when hopefully it will be more interactive. Meanwhile some love poems. Or, in the case of this one, a poem about relationships.
My next reading is on September 15th, 7.30pm at Tara Studios, 356 Garratt Lane, Earlsfield, London SW18 (o2o 8333 4457)

These Boys Have Never Really Grown into Men

These boys have never really grown into men,
despite their disguises, despite their adult ways,
their sophistication, the camouflage of their kindly smiles.
They are still up to their old tricks,
still at the wing-plucking stage. Only now
their prey answers to women's names.
And the girls, likewise, despite their disguises,
despite their adult ways, their camouflage of need,
still twist love till its failure seems not of their making;
something grotesque migrates hourly
between our different needs,
and is in us all like a poison.
How strange I've not understood so clearly before
how liars and misers, the cruel and the arrogant
lie down and make love like all others,
how nothing is ever as expected, nothing is ever as stated.
Behind doors and windows nothing is ever as wanted.
The good have no monopoly on love.
All drink from it. All wear its absence like a shroud.

BP from The Collected Love Poems

2011-05-03T18:27:00.001+01:00

May
Hopefully will be getting a new site soon, one that can be more easily updated and added to with new material. Meanwhile, here’s St Peter and the Devil

Saint Peter stood outside the Gates of Heaven
With a far-away look in his eyes,
He was thinking of Rachel and Rebecca,
Of their scent and their plump brown thighs.

He stood outside the Gates of Heaven
Oiling the lock and testing the bars
When the Devil strolled up to greet him
With eyes that glittered like sulphurous stars.

The Devil spoke with the voice of Rebecca,
He came dressed in the body of Eve.
He snuggled up close to Saint Peter
And tugged the goat by the sleeve.

“How well do you remember Rebecca?
Does sweet Rachel still heat up the blood?
Are they both as warm and as ripe
As the earth was after the Flood?”

“They’re the same as ever,” said Peter,
He looked at the Devil and smiled,
“They are waiting for me inside the Gates.
You are the one who’s exiled.”

bp

2011-03-10T10:12:00.002Z

March

I was with an old school friend the other week, talking about teachers who had influenced us, and about how the things they taught us were not the things they thought they were teaching us, and thought I'd share this poem I wrote some time ago. It's called Geography Lesson.

Our teacher told us one day he would leave
And sail across a warm blue sea
To places he had only known from maps
And all his life had longed to see.

The house he lived in was narrow and grey,
But in his mind’s eye he could see
Sweet scented jasmine clinging to the walls
And green leaves burning on an orange tree.

He spoke of the lands he longed to visit
Where it was never drab or cold
And we couldn’t understand why he never left
And shook off the school’s stranglehold

Then half way through his final term
He took ill and he never returned
And he never got to that place on the map
Where the green leaves of the orange trees burned.

The maps were pulled down from the classroom wall,
His name was forgotten- it faded away,
But a lesson he never knew he taught
Is with me to this day:

I travel to where the green leaves burn
To where the ocean’s glass-clear and blue,
To all the places my teacher taught me to love
But which he never knew.

bp

2011-01-03T16:07:00.002Z

JANUARY

THE BEE’S LAST JOURNEY TO THE ROSE

I came first through the warm grass
Humming with Spring,
And swim now
Through the evening’s soft sunlight gone cold.
I am old in this green ocean,
Going a final time to the rose.
North Wind, until I reach it
Keep your icy breath away
That changes pollen into dust.
Let me be drunk on this scent a final time,
Then blow if you must.
bp

2010-12-18T16:29:00.005Z

December

WHY IS THE MUTE SWAN SINGING?
Written with the following in mind, though not set in stone:
Chorus whole choir; Questioning verses soprano

How calm the snow, how white it is,
How clear and pure the air,
How perfectly each little flake
Illuminates the atmosphere.

Why is the old fox smiling,
Trotting through the snow?
What is the rabbit dreaming
In the warren deep below?

Why is the mute swan singing?
Why is the wren so bold?
Why are the wild geese staying
And the spider weaving gold?

How calm the snow, how white it is!
How clear and pure the air!
How perfectly each little flake
Illuminates the atmosphere!

Why are the black crows cawing,
That were once so numb with cold?
From amongst the ice-flecked branches
What can they see unfold?

Why are they so excited
On such a winter’s night?
And why is the stable glowing
With such translucent light?

The kingfisher shakes off rainbows,
The river stops mid-flow,
Buried in the owl’s blood
Is something they all know.
bp

2010-10-30T18:05:00.004+01:00

November

We all write memoirs or autobiographies, even if we don’t know we are doing so. We begin when we get an address book and write down the first name, and end when we add the last. The other week I suddenly saw my own, fat and tattered, in a different light:

This fat address book’s
More like a memento mori now.
Torn bits of paper fall out, the dead’s own confetti.
On each page friends one can’t bear to strike a line through
Mount up, and pull one back to a time before their catalogue of woes
Ended in a last, exhausted breath.
A is for Adrian, B is for Bernard, C is for Clovis
And so on and so on, till the numbers blur
And each old address seems an elegy,
Each postcode the co-ordinates we use
To fix them to where they no longer are.
BP

2010-09-16T15:24:00.001+01:00

September

The other night I was coming back home after a reading in Bristol and the train was pulling out a station. It was one of those moments when you are not sure which train is moving, yours or the one opposite- then the train I was on jolted and both trains were slowly passing each other. In the carriage window opposite me was a man a little older than myself. He was staring at me as if he recognised me. I thought I might know him but wasn’t sure and turned away. When I looked up again, the carriages were still slowly shunting passed each other, and the man was still staring at me – then I realised it was impossible. I was staring at my own reflection. Trains have always provided the mental space in which to write poetry, and more often than not it’s similar emotions that are evoked, and the lines are about regrets and the brevity of relationships and the constant passing-by of other lives, or about memory, and intense feelings that have slipped away. Here’s one such poem.

I caught a train that passed the town where you lived.
On the journey I thought of you.
One evening when the park was soaking
You hid beneath trees, and all round you dimmed itself
As if the earth were lit by gaslight.
O planet-face!
I can still smell the forest in your neck,
Still taste the wine of your mouth,
And your kisses that fell onto my skin like rain
Still shiver there!
We had faith that love would last forever.

I caught a train that passed the town where you lived.

How many years ago did I write that? Thirty? Even longer? And the person it was about? I knew her over thirty-five years ago. The town was Winchester, the woman an art student I adored when I’d lived there. She loved horses rather than poets. Her pillowcases smelt of marigolds.

2010-08-09T12:54:00.001+01:00

August
We have a crabbing competition in the village every August. I was asked to write a poem that could be illustrated and presented as one of the prizes, and came up with this.

CRABBING
They are Nature’s submarines
The river’s dinosaurs
Older than Devon itself
They’ve been here for aeons
Part of Darwin’s weird chess board –
The River God’s currency- Neptune’s stork-eyed spies
Living on the river’s candy-floss,
The green ooze that tastes of sour apples and emeralds.
Sunken logs are their coffins-
Mud their cradles and endings.
Their claws grab at the retreating moon,
At the pink shadow of salmon.
They grab at the hoar-frost at the tide’s edge,
At the starlight still burning on the underside of leaves.
One long claw grabs at the Earth’s currency of clouds,
Another grabs at molton drops of sunlight,
At that regalia of glittering reflections bouncing on the river’s surface.
And at the Dart’s edge this August day
I hear a whisper of how
One child proud above the rest
Caught an army,
A tank division of crustaceans,
A bucketful of Creation,
And will remember it forever.

BP

2010-07-23T13:02:00.002+01:00

JULY

This is a children’s poem written in haste for a friend’s son to read out at school on the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme- (Began 1st July 1916. 310,000 died in the battle: 146,000 Allied, 164,000 German)

A School Visit

The teacher was teaching a lesson
About a long ago war
When a ghost entered the classroom
By simply drifting through the door.
The teacher went on teaching
And didn’t see the ghost’s shadow pass
Nor see the reflection of its face
On the classroom’s murky glass.
“Look, Miss!” shouted the children-
She looked, but saw nothing there
As the ghost crossed the classroom
And sat down in an empty chair.
“What is it?” asked the teacher,
“Are you playing a trick on me?
I’m afraid whatever it is,
It’s something I can’t see.”

It wore an old-fashioned uniform
Of a kind that is long gone,
With badges and big brass buttons,
Like those worn at the Somme.
The teacher carried on teaching
In a rather perfunctory way,
But her heart wasn’t in the lesson-
The children were too restless that day.
At teatime the ghost stood up
And decided to be on its way.
It said the battle the teacher spoke of
Hadn’t quite happen as she’d described.
It said the rats were as big as chickens,
And that the flies were as big as bumble-bees,
That the world was full of horror
And that bones hung like fruit from the trees.
Still, it was glad to be remembered
After so many years had passed
And its three hundred and ten thousand wounds
Had begun to heal at last.
BP

2010-06-12T15:24:00.002+01:00

June

This poem was written for Beryl Graves and read at her memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden 26th January 2004. It draws on the superstition that she and her husband Robert used to follow of standing in their garden and turning over a silver coin at the new moon. Robert died in 1985. Beryl collapsed in her garden in Deia in 2003 and died not long after. Yesterday I was talking with a woman who had known them both when they lived in Devon during the Second World War and was reminded of this poem. Beryl was a lovely person.

REUNION
She went out for a last look at the moon.
It was still there, as faithful as ever,
Illuminating the garden from which, as she fell,
The past rose up to greet her.
On that last day of being wholly herself
She, who encompassed so much more than herself,
Went for a last look at the moon,
And in that moon-struck garden
She saw some ghostly hand
Turning over and over a silver coin,
For luck, for magic’s sake.
And it beckoned to her who, eminently sensible
And brooking no nonsense, followed.
I like to imagine
It was something other than the wind blowing off the sea
And up through the orchard that whispered,
‘Sweetheart,
Who kept vigil over all my folly,
Who tempered the heart’s chaos with dignity,
You were the anchor
That kept the moon from floating free;
This way dear muse,
This way dear one, who kept faith above all others,
This way home”

BP

2010-05-17T14:16:00.000+01:00

MAY

The River’s Story
I remember when life was good.
I tumbled down mountains,
Shilly-shallied across meadows,
I laughed and gurgled through woods,
Stretched and yawned in a myriad of floods.
Insects, weightless as sunbeams,
Settled upon my skin to drink.
I wore lily-pads like medals.
Fish, lazy and battle scarred,
Gossiped beneath them.
The damselflies were my ballerinas,
The pike my ambassadors.
Kingfishers, disguised as rainbows,
Were my secret agents.
It was a sweet time, a gone-time,
A time before the factories grew,
Brick by greedy brick,
And left me cowering in monstrous shadows.
Like drunken giants
They vomited their poisons into me.
Tonight
A scattering of vagrant bluebells,
Dwarfed by those same poisons,
Toll my ending.
Children, come and find me if you wish,
I am your inheritance.
Behind the derelict housing-estates,
You will discover my remnants.
Clogged with garbage and junk,
To an open sewer I’ve shrunk.
I, who have flowed through history,
Who have seen hamlets become villages,
Villages become towns, towns become cities,
Am reduced to a trickle of filth,
Beneath the still, burning stars.

2010-04-16T18:16:00.003+01:00

2010-04-05T19:30:00.003+01:00

April

Late Rain
A Lullabye

The rain is falling as you sleep.
Windows become kalidesacopes
Tall grass bends as if in prayer
The rain is falling as you sleep

The night fills with fear,
Each sleep is a rehearsal for not being here.
The rain is falling as you sleep

In unseen fields ponds fragment
Rain runs like rivers through the air
The sky is a misty cataract, the stars are blurred
Rain is falling as you sleep

On broken roofs and ruined barns
On the carcasses of old machines
On all the valleys darkened farms
Rain is falling as you sleep.

Now terror hums beneath the skin
In the mouth the night stagnates
And the heart fills with adrenalin,
Rain is falling as you sleep

It has washed so much away
Blink and all one loved is gone
Memory breaths out, redolent of oblivion
The rain is falling as you sleep.

BP

2010-03-09T18:11:00.001Z

March

Mr Ifonly

Mr Ifonly sat down and he sighed,
I could have done more if only I had tried

If only I had followed my true intent
If only I had done the things that I meant

If only I had done the things that I could
And not simply done the things that I should

If only a day had lasted a year
And I had not lived in constant fear

Mr Ifonly sat down and he cried:
I could really have lived if only I had tried!

Now life has past me by and its such a crime,
Said Mr Ifonly who had run out of time

2010-02-12T11:28:00.004Z

FEBRUARY

As it is St Valentines Day soon I thought I would post a love poem.
This one is from my new Collected Love Poems, published by Harper Perenial

That Dress, This Shirt

That dress will not stop you growing older,
No matter how you wear it-
Nor will this baggy shirt I wear disguise anymore
A stomach growing fatter by the hour.
Now that we no longer have Times currency to squander
Lets get used to the raw material we are,
Lets celebrate this far harder adventure
And stop carrying about the dead weight of Ago..
That dress, this shirt-
We place them over chairs in rooms
Besides beds that sets sail each night without expectation,
With us the crew, held together by time and by the faith
That we are buoyant enough to see any darkness through.

2010-01-18T18:05:00.004Z

January

Last Year...

was not the best of years.
Friends went,
Leaving bits of themselves behind:
Books, lists of things to do,
Diaries that widows were afraid to open.
Then in spring a woman I once loved
Took me to a graveyard where her shadow was buried,
Then she was gone again.
There were no goodbyes.
Indifference filled the gulf where they might have been.
By summer everything that had ceased to happen
Ceased to happen all over again.
Words spoken with great passion
Were airbrushed from the soul.
Autumn came, nursing cancer and terror.
In winter I convalesced amongst the dead,
Sat writing it in a room that smelt of nutmegs and dust,
And it seemed the years had passed so quickly
That they were like snowflakes falling into flames.

BP, a draft

2009-12-05T13:13:00.003Z

DECEMBER
Here is a poem I wrote remembering back to my childhood, and seeing a thick fall of snow for the first time. It was so beautiful

REMEMBERING SNOW

I did not sleep last night.
The falling snow was beautiful and white.
I dressed, sneaked down the stairs
And opened wide the door.
I had not seen such snow before.
Our grubby little street had gone.
The world was brand-new, and everywhere
There was a pureness in the air.
I felt such peace.
Watching every flake
I felt more and more awake.
I thought I had learned all there was to know
About the trillion million different kinds
Of swirling frosty flakes of snow.
That was not so.
I did not know how vividly it lit
The world with such a peaceful glow.
Upstairs my mother slept.
I could not drag myself away from that sight
To call her down and have her share
The mute miracle of the snow.
It seemed to fall for me alone.
How beautiful our grubby little street had grown!

2009-10-24T16:52:00.003+01:00

October/November

My poems of the month aren't always new poems, but poems I'm simply glad to have written.
This is one of them.

Inessential Things

What do cats remember of days?

They remember the ways in from the cold,
The warmest spot, the place for food.
They remember the places of pain, their enemies,
The irritation of birds, the warm fumes of the soil.
They remember the creak of a bed, the sound
Of their owners footsteps,
The taste of fish, the loveliness of cream.
Cats remember what is essential of days.
Letting all other memories go as if of no worth
They sleep sounder than we,
Whose hearts break remembering
So many inessential things.

BP

2009-04-17T09:40:00.004+01:00

June

Even the one throwing the lifebelt
Needs help at times,
Stranded on the beach,
Terrified of the waves.

BP

2009-03-13T16:14:00.002Z

Best of Mates

February is over - in the orchard after midnight,
muffled up against the cold, whiskey on the table,
head back, staring skywards-
I raise a glass to him- two months dead now-

The grass white, crunchy as sugar,
His ghost, moth quiet,
Steps out of nowhere and is beside me.

Blue shirt open at neck, fawn slacks, sandals-
No coat needed against this worldly frost,
He smiles, takes a chair opposite-

Falls through it, grimaces, nods OK, tries again.
Not used to this being dead stuff, he says,
Sits finally, breath smelling of ice and apples-

Underfoot, violets turn mauve in the moonlight,
Tendrils of river mist drift through him.
Somewhere an owl takes out its oboe.

I pour him one ghost glass after another-
We down the bottle – who cares if we get smashed now?
Celia is up in London- can’t see us.

The stars are bubbling away nicely, he says.
It’s Gods soup, spilt out across the heavens, I reply.
We exchange banter, his ghost and I; best of mates still.

For Adrian Mitchell

BP

2009-02-01T20:57:00.002Z

The River Dart in Winter

In winter the river is an outlaw
Imprisoned in itself, it looks ashen with hunger.
Chained to beads of ice
It pulls the little it can down into its belly.

The fish pay their rent in breath,
In bubbles of light that rise
And sacrifice themselves to the air.

Stark in its beauty, manacled to February
It drags along a retinue of leaves;
In the Estuarys mouth it dumps the clouds reflections.

The encoded message of birdsong
Drifts from the deep wood,
Rinses out the clogged up world.

On the iced over mud flats, where the moth-eaten moon sleeps,
Boats are stranded, sails rimmed with frost.
And the river sneaks by, saying nothing.

BP

2009-01-17T08:32:00.004Z

Selfepitaph
My good friend the great poet Adrian Mitchell died just before Christmas
He wrote with more joy that any other contemporary poet I can think of
He wrote this poem

I Was Lucky

That's all. It was good.
Love was a planet
full of amazing creatures.

This Death is only a dark little town,
in a country, in a continent,
on a planet full of amazing creatures,
a planet called love.

2008-12-03T17:32:00.003Z

DECEMBER

There Is A Boat Down On The Quay

I remember as a child going down to the docks to see a merchant seaman uncle I adored off on a voyage. We none of us ever saw him again. Since then, there have been so many other departures.

There is a boat down on the quay come home at last.
The paint is chipped, the sails stained as if
Time has pissed up against them.
I imagine the sea-routes it has followed,
Sailing through the worlds sunken veins
With its cargo of longings;
A little boat that has nuzzled its way
Into the armpits of forests,
That has sliced through the moons reflection,
Through the phosphate that clings to the lips of waves.
I knew its crew once,
Those boys manacled to freedom
Who set sail over half a century ago,
And were like giants to me.
A solitary child in awe of oceans
I saw them peel their shadows from the land
And watched them depart.
What did they think when they peered
Over the rim of the world,
Where Time Roared and bubbled
And angels swooped like swallows?
Reading an ancient Morse-code of starlight,
Stranded by the longing to be elsewhere,
What secrets did they learn to forget?
I longed to be among them,
A passenger curled up in fates pocket,
I longed to be a part of them-
Those ghosts who set sail in my childhood,
Those phantoms who shaped me,
That marvelous crew for whom
I have stretched a simple goodbye
Out over a lifetime

BP

2008-11-18T18:43:00.003Z

Simple Lyric

When I think of her sparkling face
And of her body that rocked this way and that,
When I think of her laughter,
Her jubilance that filled me,
It is a wonder I am not gone mad.

She is away and I cannot do what I want.
Other faces pale when I get close.
She is away and I cannot breathe her in.

The space her leaving has created
I have attempted to fill
With bodies that numbed upon touching,
Among them I expected her opposite,
And found only forgeries.

I know her wholeness is a fiction of my making,
Still I cannot dismiss this longing for her;
It is a craving for sensation new flesh
Cannot wholly calm or cancel,
It is perhaps for more than her.

At night above the parks the stars are swarming.
The streets are thick with nostalgia;
I move through senseless routine and insensitive chatter
As if her going did not matter.
She is away and I cannot breathe her in.
I am ill simply through wanting her.

BP

2008-10-06T14:39:00.003+01:00

So Many

So many of those girls I longed for are gone now,
Turned to ash that skin so inexpertly kissed,
Those bodies I ached for-
Gone beyond diaries into flames.

When the years tear up our surface beauty
And throw it away like the bright wrappings on a parcel
What is left is what links all the breathing world:
An empathy, the burried knowledge of our going.

It is so easy to forget how the years pour away
And take out of sequence and before their time
So many who deserve longer
On this lush earth.

Along the streets in which I walked with them
The dawn's clear light varnishes houses and gardens,
And fixes forever under the day's glittering surface
So much half-remembered anguish.

The Stolen Orange

2008-09-10T18:19:00.005+01:00

When I left I stole an orange
I kept it in my pocket
It felt like a warm planet

Everywhere I went smelt of oranges
Whenever I got into an awkward situation
I'd take out the orange and smell it

And immediately on even dead branches I saw
The lovely and fierce orange blossom
That smells so much of joy

When I went out I stole an orange
It was a safeguard against imagining
There was nothing bright or special in the world

BP

The Cynic's Only Love Poem

2008-08-21T13:00:00.002+01:00

Love comes and goes
And often it has paused,
Then come back to see
The damage it has caused.

BP