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.

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.

bp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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