Poems 2003

POEMS 2003

FOR ADELINA

I commute on my computer

from the West and to the East

and a well-known Pushkin translator,

translated West instead of East

or was it East instead of West.

So let’s kill the sense for the best rhyme –

I’ve been guilty of that in my time.

Outside the tube an ad for Davidoff Cool Water,

scented like the aftershave I rarely use.

I can conjure up that scent, bet daughter

can too: it’s light, it’s light blue, it waves away the blues.

The interpreter who wore it, a mist around her,

about now will be having her second baby.

Again that baby will maybe not hear

mother or father tongue first

but the English of doctor or nurse.

Because of a shortage of time,

you and I, Kosovan Adelina,

never sat down and read each other’s lines

that tell fortunes better than lines in a

hand. But perhaps like last time

you gave birth you are renewing poetry’s contract

and the contractions become more frequent

and your insistence on language as consequent

means you are a spokeswoman for your country.

I still think of the schoolgirl and the poison gas

and the poems you brought out but did not bring out.

Before 6 January 2003

POET FOR POET FOR SHIRIN

You didn't quite ask for a poem from me

and I don't want to flatter

but the heart of our poetries fluttered

and that's what really matters.

Here are my uneven rubais to compliment your language.

From only a reading and a couple of poems I can gauge

that the coals of your poetry burn and rage

and people already warm themselves by their fire.

If the ghazal is the sonnet then I hunt it too

but when I catch it in the net I don't run it through

but cherish it in notebooks. I'll send this one to you

to whelm not overwhelm you: we'll translate for the many and the few.

I liked it when you read the poems out loud, a thing I rarely do,

the last line comes too fast and that too is true.

TROUBADOUR IN THE SNOW

The first snow thickly fell –

I paced in it from the square where we dwell

and thought of all the women I had loved

and that I'd loved them well,

but could have loved them better.

But the snow is falling now my dear

and I must love again:

the white blanket muffles pain,

the snowflakes cushion fear.

I'm king of this snowy country,

but this will not last long,

soon the snow will be melting –

I'll be back in the people’s throng.

But when I write these words for you

I'm king, prince and troubadour,

my poems sleep with you I adore

and they make love, as is their due.

8 January 2003

TWO POETS ROUND A TABLE

Weep not for me and do not cry

for I will be with you after I die.

Weep not for me, shed no tears

for I will be beyond all fears.

Perhaps there will be no heaven,

but I will be with you in poetry’s leaven,

though I do not break bread, give wine to share

but here with you at this simple Pub table

I share with you Guinness and Greek salad and this air

and we are ineffably able

to have a communion so close

in words, that we only lose

the expirations, you and I we retain the inspirations

that blossom feelings into poems’ impressions.

One day a book within your home,

not an academic tome,

will serve as a reminder

that we were the finders

of a special friendship.

9 January 2003

FOR GRIGORY PASKO

We need warmth outside as well as inside.

Here I am not sitting by the fireside

and I wonder how cold you are in Usurisk.

You knew you were taking a risk

reporting the dumping of nuclear waste

and they immediately made haste

to put you behind bars.

For me, Captain, you deserve the VC and Bar.

My warmth goes out to you, brave poet, friend,

when will your prison term end?

Denied an appeal, you officer on

in camp and you are fate modern,

a victim of the terrorist age:

we must harness our rage

to free you from your cage.

Before 12 January 2003

‘I’ll put Saddam on the rack’ he says,

but ‘What will be the fate of Iraq?’ we say.

You can’t fight terror with error.

In Russian if your drop the ‘t’ off ‘tyrant’ you get Iran,

as Velimir Khlebnikov punned.

I hope we will never be stun-gunned

to the extent that we lose our languages,

but tongues can be disgorged

and have you ever seen a dead man talking?

13 January 2003

FOR FUNDA

‘So, do what I say and not what I do’,

she says and at once we are on shared territory.

It is given to few

and not to New Labour or Tory

to scoop up worries and give advice

like a nutritious handful of sage rice,

to pounce on a point and in a trice

to turn it into the positive

on which I see you thrive.

But when it comes to ourselves,

though you today looked the picture of the aesthetic,

you say you’ll breathe in and die under the anaesthetic,

and I ‘contract cancer’ never shown up on the biopsy,

taken under examination of the endoscopy.

We tell ourselves these scenarios,

but where is the interpreter in this duo

who would certainly cry ‘oh!’

as we would to another.

Do we have to make ourselves suffer,

and in telling others rely on safety in small numbers.

Listen to your voice that says: ‘It’ll be just a slumber’.

You will not be put out, just put out,

and thanks too for the advice

on the Poetry Reading, that was very nice

of you.

16 January 2003

You see me sitting alone and not alone

in the Pub with a pint of Guinness.

What I admire is finesse,

bridge-building in languages’ tone.

Selchuk’s pen flows well:

he’s used to drawing krokis

and I say, what the Hell,

the idea is certainly not rocky:

a book of poems and drawings,

drawn from two interpreters,

horizontal lines indicating swings

of mood, the chiaroscuro

of lives when all is not black and white.

Mick, with the healing hands, sleep tight tonight,

and you, Funda, have an aesthetic slumber – it will be alright.

16 January 2003

FROM LEMLEM

How to rhyme Raimok? I

search to tell what it means.

An Eritrean rhyme, a Scottish och aye:

It’s a Welsh Eistedfodd,

It sounds very odd

but there it’s the height of the poetry scene,

held in the capital Asmara

at the unlikely titled Expo.

Forget about tomorrow and tomorrow,

let today’s time be exposed.

21 January 2003

A long pause before writing:

I hope a block is not tightening,

or is it that the world will be fighting,

soldiers their belts tightening.

January 2003

FOR SELCHUK AND MAYANNA

The radio is playing: ‘After the boys of summer have gone’.

I’m preparing to have my photo taken.

This morning I just couldn’t waken.

I wonder if the lens will see my Turkish tongue?

There are some faces that you know can understand.

languages you see are not underhand,

they hover in the mouth with potential tongue movements,

they are the triumph of a civilised event,

honoured by the speaker, the receptive ear,

telling truths and forced lies I fear.

People have said I am not visual

yet I know the ‘pain’ in painting

and the ‘ting’ when the brush hits canvas.

I canvas words onto the paper’s canvas,

sizin ichin, for you, dlya vas.

25 January 2003

Someone is lying but it isn’t me,

someone is crying but it isn’t me,

someone is dying, this time

let it not be me.

Oh Lord, give me the strength

to stay awake the length

of this day then sleep the night through.

I need to lean on you.

You know a thing or two about night vigils,

scraping your mind like Roman strigils.

Too tired to think straight,

yet my mind circles over love and fate.

SONG

Ne param var,

ne pulum var

Haven’t got no money,

haven’t got a bean.

Ne karim var

ama dostlarim var.

Haven’t got a wife,

but I have friends

ends will meet in the end.

FOR INGRID

Last night I didn’t sleep till four –

I would have slept in more

except I had to be at work by 9.30.

All war is dirty, dirty work,

Somebody has to do the dirty work,

somebody has to get their hands dirty,

they say. And yet, I think,

my duty is as Poet Militant,

though not reading in public,

but writing in Café and Pub, not Rick’s

Bar in Casablanca

and silently sparring with the White House,

quiet as my mouse

moving on its pad in the pad I’m leaving.

When the body bags come back there’ll be grieving

and where now are Khayyam, Rumi,

Hafez, Ferdowsi, Nizami,

the Sufi spirit of Islam, not the fez

stereotype? Sam sang: ‘the fundamental things apply’,

Now, it’s ‘the fundamentalist things apply’.

Another friend needs her papers from Sweden,

fled from her country,

not a million miles from the Garden of Eden,

but as I lumber from work to café

I cannot accelerate the asylum process.

Once, Ingrid, you were my princess,

I was your host and you were my guest

in Istanbully, bull.

Now, I have lost you in the depths of Stockholm.

Eight years ago I sent my book of poems to your home

address, but like with Elvis Presley,

It ‘returned to sender, no such number, no such zone’.

I write to you across the waters, across the years,

are you alive? Are you happy, do you hear me still?

Briefly we were a couple, now I’m single

and the world is going to battle

and I would like to stroke your fine red hair

and see your freckles faded from that long ago summer.

27 January 2003

I sit on a chair in my room –

boxes all around.

The square sounds

quieter than when we arrived,

now we’re leaving after

20 years in Southwark

and I’ve never done the Lambeth Walk.

A last breakfast

at Terry’s Café.

This is our last day

here before we go to Bromley.

It is a feeling not a thought,

that cries to be expressed in words.

It is a subtle pain caught

up with the suffering of the Kurds.

‘All violent regimes hate exposure of violence’,

Mehmed Uzun, the Kurdish novelist, told me once.

Now we are exposing his words to English,

We’ll need help where there’s a glitch.

I’m hitching my workhorse to no bandwagon.

Kadri, the eight year old Kosovan,

for his punishment outside the door

told me two new words: ‘puberty’ and ‘horsepower’

and at MF ‘velcro’ and ‘survivor’ when he drew a massive snake.

Yet he is hyper as a viper and his wriggling takes

him back into the league when men were far from gentle

and his infancy was full of real guns and pistols.

5 February 2003

SONG

With a spring in my step

and feeling full of pep

I return to my home again.

We’ve heard a lot of pain

again and again

and we’ve pulled you

from hell to earth again.

Shame is no gain

I prefer snow to rain

and now I’ve got to catch the train.

Squashed like a sardine

feeling tired yet green

I survey the crowded carriage scene.

No one talks on this train

but poetry reigns

silent ink flows and flows.

The drips from my nose

are not dewdrops on a rose

and I am writing a song not prose.

On finishing this song

I feel something’s wrong,

I sense the tension in my neighbour’s back.

I know tension when I feel it

and when it’s slack

and when it’s black or white.

So I hold my pen tight

and the train goes through the night

and control my sense of fear and fright,

and keep my eyes down on the page.

The journey lasts an age,

I am stuck in this carriage –

more than 6 minutes silence of John Cage.

Conversation burbles now,

a couple’s pow wow,

I think ‘O la vache’

and want to play cache-cache

to disappear myself into this poem

to take the line right home

not a moment too soon

though the clouds hide the stars and moon,

the street home will crunch under my feet

and the Hikmet book that came in the post I’ll meet.

6 February 2003

So you need loves, crashes and clashes

for your inspirations.

Some people breathe in hashes

and loves’ expirations.

Akhmatova’s poems come from rubbish,

dandelions, even kitsch,

It is my habit to get poems’ kicks

from my friends, my heroines, not heroin,

from the quirky, the rhymes’ twists

that climax the lines,

The butterflies fluttering in the stomach,

fear and pain that give heartache.

I flag up the imperceptible signs,

words I borrow, heat up and serve back.

Now loves, crashes and clashes I too lack:

the difference is I write on

and say to myself ‘right on’.

6 February 2003

I sit out the ten minutes before my train

avoiding the levelling platform of wind and rain

with a Cappuccino in the Slug and Lettuce.

I don’t want to insult my reader’s intelligence

with banal commuter stories,

the level of the Tory Conference;

But I cull poetry from the everyday

and even while the sun shines not: make hay.

7 February 2003

COMMUTERISED POEM FOR JULIET

I love our new flat: no doubts about it,

the unwritten contract I would not flout it.

Today I went to Bromley South

to make my simple commute,

A gulp of Cappuccino in my mouth,

before the page I was mute.

An executive taunts me with office talk

on his mobile phone, more irritating than a walky talky.

We pass the outlying stations,

rationalising, I know I’ve lost a box of early MSS

but what can I do: write to replace

not reconstitute: it’s torn the lace

fabric of a Complete Poems – a removal blunder,

yet still I write their influence under:

their wine is still in my bloodstream

or was it coffee’s caffeine, that constant black stream

which gives a lucid high, not to mention nicotine,

my drug of preference, which I didn’t start in my teens.

I have a distinct anxiety this train

is going 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

Unfamiliar place names: Crofton and Nunhead – this is a pain.

I feel like a patient inexorably being sectioned,

no control, off the rails, a commuter without destination.

Garbled messages on the intercom-ex

the driver, but now familiarity on Connex:

we’ve reached Peckham Rye.

Why, over two hours I’ve been away from home,

walked, bussed, sat, stood, sat on train.

Luckily I’ve been training for this all my life:

the notebook work, the striving with words’ strife.

The trouble is not the three hours commuting

which could be spent on the computer.

The trouble is I can’t stand to stand,

my legs cannot stand it and

I’m often not forward enough to ask for a seat.

It’s the old story: ‘You’re a sheep so you have to bleat.’

Does the tale wag the poet or the poet wag the tale?

Is the poet God re: verse,

and is this godderel or worse?             7 February 2003

FOR HELEN OF LONDON

An Epic Fragment

Whereas yours was ‘the face that launched a thousand friendships’.

For most of us Menelaus’ loss was meaningless:

not a casus belli – ridiculous –

but who can tell what geopolitical factors,

what trade and powers forced the actors

of the Iliad – in reality the ‘heroes’, common soldiers,

captains, sailors, and camp followers

to join in unholy war –

and what of the civilians,

Greek and Trojan,

the women and children?

10 February 2003

CROCUS

I carried across your heavy words,

more weighty than your 38 kilos,

little woman, slender Alevi crocus,

with sympathy but no strain or fuss

and I did not eat them

then throw them up.

I wish we could have sustained you more,

talked about ‘Not by bread alone’.

Frail crocus, they plucked you

and attempted to tread you in the dirt.

But here to us you shined through hurt

and though you vomit at night,

in your struggle, in your fight,

a little bit communicated to us yesterday

and I restlessly wrestled with words

and found that persistent rhyme: Kurds, Kurds.

11 February 2003

FOR FENIK I

Uncalm, uncalm, qualms.

Larme, larme, no larmes left.

Arm, arm, no arms, no legs.

Palm, napalm, no palms.

Peace, peace, no piece of cake.

War of Babylon.

War of Babel.

Iraq wracked,

world unstable.

Who smashed the Tower?

Who couldn’t communicate even

in the remaining languages,

in the ensuing millennia?

13 February 2003

FOR FENIK II

War is in the air:

it feels like lead –

Haji gets it in a stomach ache,

others get it in the head.

Your tooth blows up

like a bomb exploding

but it’s a different take

for the bombs they are a loading.

I cannot march because of my leg,

but it’s to the page these marching words I peg.

With you, I think, I have one reader,

one valuable reader from Iraq

and here I try to give back

to you some of the friendship I have taken.

Though your country may be forsaken

and the future looks black indeed,

it’s not my choice that my poems feed

on the disasters of the world –

the pain shows on your face:

my friend, accept these words.

13 February 2003

POET FOR POET AT THE PUSHKIN CLUB

FOR ALEXANDER VELICHANSKY

To some it would seem very chancy

to translate a book of Alexander Velichansky,

but for me it’s developing

the line that I’ve already taken,

with his words enveloping

themes that are now forsaken.

His poems are without cynicism:

his re-naming is tinged with Acmeism.

In him nature goes from green to brown

and he works on Adam – and Eva Braun.

Thus he is original, primaeval

and prepared to name good and evil.

17 February 2003

His poems are filled with soul,

so short yet they emerge whole.

The early Russians are there and the ancient Greeks

and he plays with the Muse a game of hide and seek.

The words themselves speak,

leak through into his Russian CD.

They say Moscow is another city,

where the frosty snow creaks

but here is veliky Velichansky

in London town – and we are all lucky.

17 February 2003

FOR SELCHUK B. IN THE PUB BY THE MF

When the conversation is so good it rules out poetry –

you can’t write it down on the spot, try

as you may and I was never good at dialogue.

But who’s to tell – 40 minutes of talk with Selchuk

could perhaps fill of mine a book

and of his a canvas or a sculpture.

Your guard you have to let down to be avant garde,

that bubble of vanity you have to rupture.

And there it is: the ‘sohbet’* – rapture

to the ear when one is not in fear of one’s voice,

though around is the midday pub’s noise.

You bought the turkey sandwiches

and we sandwiched English and Turkish, which is

a powerful combination, for the two nations

are on the brink, on the edge of war.

Whereas we are in fluent control of our words,

and if as interpreters we and our friends here had worked

at the construction of the Tower of Babel,

I honestly believe that Tower, those Buddhas, those Twin Towers

would still, such is my faith, be standing,

for I believe in translating understanding.

19 February 2003

‘Sohbet’: Turkish for a long, deep conversation which can be punctuated by long, deep silences.

SONG: A PARODY FOR OUR TIMES

Your head is soaked and you’re chilled to the bone,

you’re surfing your mind in an unknown zone,

still no one’s come to connect the phone,

so – let’s all drink to the life of a clone.

Your body has lost its muscular tone,

you’re watching repeats of the twilight zone.

You’ve parked your car on an orange cone,

so – let’s all drink to the life of a clone.

You’re getting used to sleeping on your own,

in your single bed you’re not all alone.

Long ago your wild oats have been sown,

so – let’s all drink to the life of a clone.

You know science has done it and it’s been shown:

Dolly the sheep is the first known clone.

The egg has hatched but the bird has flown,

so – let’s all drink to the death of a clone.

21 February 2003

FOR FENIK III

It seems inexorably inevitable:

no discussions or a Round Table,

no wisdom of Merlin or chivalry of Arthur,

played by Richard Harris of McArthur Park.

Now the world is struck

by the parapsychology* of Harry Potter.

Will the paratroopers get Potts fractures

as they land in the desert

and will goddamn Huseyin get his just desserts,

people all round the world in the ‘process’ killed and hurt.

* A little way across the water from Greece, in Turkey, ‘para’ means ‘money’, adding a new dimension to this suffix.

21 February 2003

FOR RUTH V.

Hypnotised by your eyes,

not the bubbles of your Appletise,

I’d watched the two hander play,

then we were in the bar.

Outside the Evening Star was huge

and I declared ‘What an enormous Venus!’

The thin strands of your blonde hair,

your ethereal face take me back there

to a time upon a time

when you alone typed out my lines and rhymes.

I haven’t thanked you for the last occasion,

being without a phone was not evasion.

To get you to Bromley will require persuasion.

You have the keys to my keyboard,

to the heart of my poems in draft.

21 February 2003

FIRE! FIRE!

Stand back – I’m going in!

I’m going down! I’m going up!

Is this how the poet enters the poem,

like a fireman going into a blazing home

with breathing apparatus.

No, the public wouldn’t rate us

as courageous: pen pushers merely

and don’t credit that we are end pushers really,

putting our lives on the line not for a living

but for the living language crowded with intent.

That is why if you see me looking intensely

into the middle distance

you know, my dear, I am entering a poem.

22 February 2003

Once again sitting on a windy platform

but feeling in quite good form.

I think I’ve got a Guernsey on my lost diary

for which at several shops I’ve made enquiries.

Now I think it’s safe in a plastic bag

from WH Smiths – but what a drag

if it’s not – appointments disappeared,

phone numbers gone, my worst fears

concatenated. This evening James and Ruth

hosted Bejan, Negar and Roger, Stephen and me. Truth

to tell it will be strange but nice reading in Galway

in such a team – but I’ll go all the way

in poetry and translation, pull out all the gos

and hover, as I do, between populism and elitism,

between doggerel and highflown verse,

for good poetry is not truism and altruism:

it lies between the prayer and the curse,

somewhere between your last poem and your first,

literally a product of hunger and thirst.

21 February 2003

Each time we watch 24,

with all its high tech wizardy

we find we cannot open the jammed door.

Now I have lost my diary.

Having escaped from the living room with a knife

I feel that Jack Bauer and Kiefer

would be ashamed of me –

I’d make a lousy secret agent,

but I’m not a pseud or a piss artist, just a gent.

23 February 2003

I have to become my own personal organiser

and my own literary secretary.

Recently, I repeat, I lost my diary

and I cannot rely on my memory.

‘Forgetfulness is ninety percent’

and is especially rife in the medium term.

If I worked in a city firm

I would be sent to Coventry, Tipperari or Timbuctoo,

but I continue to interpret not like a parrot or a cockatoo.

24 February 2003

I want no white or red carnations

at my reincarnation,

which I don’t believe in anyway.

Yet I was born again,

not as a Christian

but a rebirth

the moment I hit the earth,

the lowest depression,

an anti-hero

at my ground zero.

Equipped with my orthopaedic boot –

Paul Birtill once quipped:

‘Do you write poems to your club foot?’ –

I now stride the streets

not on the wasteland walk

but between commutes.

I stare at it mutely:

the constant reminder

of how I scaled life’s ladder.

See how it talks

volumes of reborn poetry.

25 February 2003

I know someone is reading about Akhmatova –

she’s a close poet friend as a matter of fact,

working for another poet who knows no Russian.

The prospect of auto- or biography

is not for me a comfortable cushion,

yet they will accuse me no doubt of graphomania:

‘You write 200 poems a year. I mean ya

must be more florid than prolific.’

But I find it not frightening but terrific.

I’m not scraping the barrel of Guinness

but entering the record book eponymous.

Sometimes I feel I’m writing with or for a chorus,

perhaps the bedrock of my belief is porous

but I can only tell that when the flood comes.

War is approaching, it’ll seep into all homes.

I’d like to recoil all weapons into themselves

on both sides but I have not the power of Harry Potter elves

or the wizard technology.

Nonetheless I give you this analogy

as we tumble over the edge:

it’s prickly even not sitting on the hedge.

26 February 2003

FOR MY FRIEND GILLIAN BALLANCE

I’m in the Irish Pub, Gillian,

not thinking of Innieskillin

or Inniemore, Isle of Mull.

A pint of beer and I’ve had my fill.

I’m thinking of the brain cells we kill

as we get older, as our brains get full

of heard tragedies and suffering.

It’s not solutions I’m offering,

but those wee connections

that can lead to personal resurrections.

At my mother’s I learnt that carnations

are embedded in reincarnations

but did not dare to express that rhyme-find.

It’s easy, I’m at ease with you, kind

one with the batty sense of humour.

We meet on a level platform, rather a plateaux

and yes, we help each other down to drink the eaux

of life. Long life to us, though one day it will run out

but before that, undisciplinarily, we’ll stop words’ rout.

Walk now from the Foundation, past the Police Station.

You’ll not spot me in the Pub. Now I’ve had  my ration

of people for the day. Gillian, I’m climbing the steep graph of a poem.

Unspotted by me, make your way home.

As your interpreter I follow your words

whether they’re of Turks, Russians or Kurds.

I am ten seconds behind you, but you allow me to run in front at times.

Tonight you left after me,

I will be leaving after you one day, probably

and all this brings a tear to my eye,

but we’ve seen many strong men cry

and the light is dim here,

a sensitive poet writing with a tear

two noble poems over a pint of beer.

26 February 2003

ESCALATION

Let the young run down the escalator –

no sweat, I’ll catch up with them later.

I’m always first to find the word,

the mot juste, justice in language heard.

My friends it’s the end of a long day –

and at the end of the day as they all say these days

suddenly I was ambushed by three poems or more

and I could do nothing but surrender

to them as they poured over my mind

with rhymes I didn’t need to search or find

and all this in a supremely confident psychological state:

indeed I was handed them on a silver plate.

26 February 2003

It is a feeling more than disgruntledness

but it should not be leading to my feeling depressed.

I, the privileged one, the lucky one

with three languages at my fingertips

still learning from my rare slips,

but spring tiredness is upon me

though it feels still midwinter.

I try to get into

my head with this poem to quantify

the malaise, undoubtedly connected with money

and being off e-mail

and the long commute by tube and rail.

How I ached when I saw you near Apex

House, never mine to be now called ex,

when I was in a tizzy having left this notebook,

but still I was able to show you my poetry book

and have a chat and cup of tea with you.

I stretched out my hand and touched your hair:

‘It’s good to see you!’ for each other we were there.

You knocked out the ashes of my disgruntledness,

my friend, my North London princess

and I thought of crossings of fate

and why you should be walking down this street, I late

for interpreting and how this charmed chance meeting

should engender feelings less fleeting

than the disgruntledness that pertained.

So, since I’m without your phone number, I maintain

I should walk the streets of North London

so my depression should be undone

by our next chance meeting.

4 March 2003

FOR JOHN RUNDLE

You say you’re pissed off enough to write

and I say that is absolutely right.

You say it all comes out aggressive

and I say that is not excessive.

To extreme material you have access

and several men in your head may stride with axes

to execute you in your nightly nightmares,

long shadows of the ones you see in your little room there.

I could not teach you to write poetry

but I planted the acorn you grew into a tree:

it is always happy, felled, to host a poem on paper –

poetry is not always as light as a caper,

not always from reality an escape.

We daily handle torture and rape,

your interpreters don’t just ape

words – so dive in the bathyscape

of your soul where poetry mixes with medicine

and both are innocent of guilt and sin.

4 March 2003

HYMN FOR HIM

The orange light sheds on me on the bench

as I wait for the Bromley South train.

This pm I got a second wind for my interpreter’s voice

and did five consecutive sessions.

One of our patrons John Sessions

would have been proud of me. I’m not one of the boys

in blue but I lay myself open to risks and pain –

sometimes each sentence is a wrench.

My daughter has been working nights

and I greet her at 5 am.

I hope she’ll not be got into any fights

and if she does she’ll be protected by them,

not unlike we interpreters look after each other

with turns of gallows humour in the staff room.

Sometimes I wish so strongly that my brother

Andrew was alive and back in his chaotic room.

He had more than one novel in him

and now, who knows, we might be singing from the same hymn sheet.

7 March 2003

You said: ‘The rhyme-led poems

are getting worse’,

but prose by any other name

is certainly not verse.

what to do? To shoot oneself in the head

with blanks and reincarnate to my old style?

To abandon the line by line sense

for that twist in the tale

that you imply may ruin the poetry

or to go back to unrhymed translations as the dominant feature,

but, oh dear, I am a creature of habit.

9 march 2003

Poem by Christopher Garvey

to me Antalya ?1972

Your love unknown,

you love alone

with words of love unsaid

and written down

they starve to death

to live among the dead.

KICKING RHYMES

How can I write blank verse

and disarm the warhead of rhyme?

See, they’re flooding in: terse, curse, time, crime,

but I admit these words would lead me down another track.

your argument, Ruth, is that these could be wrong turnings,

but I find them a framing, a discipline

though that very structure and order

I destroy in translation

and rarely recreate. But my habit

is not recreational – I have become a rhyme addict

and that you say is dangerous

for my reader and me.

Glumness rules.

You have deflated

what was not smugness but pride

so the rhymes are guilty

you have imploded them

even the essential one:

quirky and Turkey,

yet before the fall comes

and the line drops on the next line

I say I am leading the poem,

but at the end of the line what crime

would it be to be led with word endings

not beginnings?

10 March 2003

You’re a star: you travel first class

on Eurostar. You pass by the window

of my humbler Thameslink train –

a Tale of Two Cities with the rain holding off.

My cough is smoker’s – I’ve changed tobaccos

Because they’ve run out of Clan.

Come reader, join my quirky clan

McKane – you’ll never be quite the same again.

You’ll say this poem is out of kilter

that for rhymes I certainly need a filter,

but I’ll kill you softly with my song

not like tartan kilt killed tartan kilt

and Glencoe is still a symbol of guilt

after the hospitality blood was spilt.

If the Campbells had found a peaceful solution

and the UN had passed a resolution

would they have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Oh no, now armed to the teeth,

it’s still the ayes to the left,

still eyes for eyes.

10 March 2003

Eminem is rapping up a storm

of simplistic decipherable lyrics.

I’m drinking a Purdey’s

and missing my Russian friend Alicia –

it’s a long time since I said to her ‘see ya’.

It’s been suggested again I kick

the rhymes but they still warm

me and remain the keys to my poems.

Today I got the Herne Hill connection from Bromley,

now you ask for it; here’s Joanna Lumley

to compound the rhyming argument –

I guess really you meant

well with your criticism

but I apply this form with no schism

in my personality, though I may be of the schizoid

poetry school of Ilia Bokstein

and now my eyes will shine

into the middle distance,

coffee not instant,

tapping into the universal subconscious,

though I am not young or Jung,

and world events make us more than anxious.

10 March 2003

STRANGERS ON THE TRAIN

I said a bare white bone jutted out of that other conversation.

We met on windy Kentish Town station,

I bound for Hernia Hill as you put it

and you for Tulse Hill. Our pulses didn’t say ‘Shut it’,

and we fell easily into talking about the privilege of education.

You are working in administration in family reconciliation

a floor above the Medical Foundation –

have I exhausted this rhyme’s ration?

For I talked to you about my rhymes being pilloried.

Your PHD is in oceanography and marine chemistry –

I couldn’t place you – your accent was a mystery –

I thought perhaps Irish not as a compliment,

then as you described your area as being the North Sea,

I tried Scandinavian and you said gently:

‘Can’t you guess? I’m German.’ Before I got out

we exchanged names: Richard and Kerstin,

and agreed I’d call in

at your high floor between Monday and Wednesday

and we would go to one of my Cafes

and we’d talk of your algae and my poetry.

The sun has long set but I feel your warm rays,

another evening out of loneliness

in half an hour of shared happiness.

10 March 2003

I gave as an example of rhyme-led poetry:

our new hometown Bromley and Joanna Lumley,

as we edited ‘Ten Russian Poets’.

An hour later in the pub Peter Jay risks:

‘I wonder if Roy Plomley ever had

Joanna Lumley on Desert Island Disks?’

Her voice announces ‘You’ve got mail’ on AOL –

it’s happened again, oh hell.

CREMATION OR BURIAL?

They say there will be only vertical places

left in the burial stakes.

I have no objection to being buried feet down,

head up – by then I’ll be beyond all aches.

Sleeping horizontally was once a preparation

for death, especially when you thought you might go in the night.

But separation comes before burial or cremation

as the little firing brain cells fight

and go out one by one like the lights

going out over the Middle East and Iraq.

It’s down to the care of tortured individuals.

In the face of the enormity of Iraq,

Helen, you must lead yourself back,

you’ve never left off in the last ten years in fact,

to bandaging the survivors of the Halapja poison gas attack.

The tea the barman brings me is hot and black.

I am in a safe country and place so I must redouble my work,

must push my pen against Saddam going berserk

and the Kurds in the north of Iraq being massacred by the Turks.

In the pub there is no Turkish raki

and I can only imagine what it is like to be an Iraqi

poet in this maelstrom, but I lend my pen

as he calligraphises right to left

words of freedom as the bombs may take him to kingdom come.

Mesopotamia hems me between two rivers,

between two armies, rather than two cultures.

They will wheel, the vultures

over carcasses of tanks and the air may be poisoned by gas.

I see other masks as well as gas masks.

Today questions we can ask

but this pen gives no answers

as it freely swoops from my left hand

to write fluent words on this notebook page, and

all we’re left with is a God, who, they say, answers all our prayers:

but how can ours override the fundamentalist

mentalities on both sides?         17 March 2002

IRISH MANDY THE BEGGAR GIRL

‘Say a prayer for me’, she said,

and I: ‘I’ll write you a poem .’

Aye, aye, as we part a fire engine roars past.

Strategically placed by the cash machine,

she was waiting. I am observing a new rule

for me – not to give money,

so when she agrees to my buying her a ‘fish pie’

from McDonalds, I take my life

in my hands and cross the road,

equipped with £60 withdrawn,

+ chips and a hot chocolate

I return to eat the fish burgers

together. ‘Can you spare a fiver –

I just need it to get into a hostel

up the road. It’s St Patrick’s day

after all. I had two cans

of Carlsberg today. I’m not on drugs,

I swear. He slapped me twice

this morning. Give us a kiss before you go.’

We kiss, dry lips to dry lips:

that rare taste is sweet and incredibly, incredibly sad.

17 March 2003

KERSTIN AGAIN

We fall into conversation like old friends,

as others would fall into bed.

We share a locus classicus: the station

and the train: once strangers on the evening platform.

But we met at an even level

while in the world all sorts of evil

was detonating and concatenating.

I give you for friendship and conversation

one of my highest ratings.

17 March 2003

Catch me angels if I fall.

I crushed your wings in my crash,

gave my feet an almighty bash,

catch me angels if I fall.

Will the paratroops shoot

as soon as the parachute

closes? But this is not the Arnhem route,

more a Crusader’s armoured suit.

Across all boundaries, all frontiers,

in the empty Greek theatre tiers,

above ground and underground

the heavy war drums sound.

The tragedies are returning

with avenging fury,

but here they’ve killed the judge and jury

and witness: high stakes – there’s only burning.

Harvey, my Californian therapist

challenged me with: ‘If you had one bullet

in your gun would you shoot Hitler?’ I make a fist

at Saddam Hussein and wish someone would pull it

off for him to sand wrestle with George Bush

inside a ring of steel armour

and there would be no casualties. But hush,

how quiet this London Pub at this the thirteenth hour.

17 March 2003

The beggar girl wants to sleep with the poet

and that’s for forty pounds.

But they are similar our wounds

and we both know it.

So give me and take from me this kiss

and arouse my sleeping lips

to move in prayer for Irish Mandy

in direct descent from my dead brother Andy.

Was I giving or taking,

I never know.

I suffer from this aching,

beats me blow by blow.

Always on the edge

but it’s not we who’re mad.

Too easy to jump the hedge,

loose into the upper field,

like kangaroo in danger.

It’s good to get the fire of anger

against injustice from your hometown

as the war kicks off in Iraq

a long distance away. Tracks

in the desert. Stacks

of books to translate

and read: these are my ordnance

though I’m not under holy orders.

Translation gets across borders

without a passport but with papers.

There’ll be refugees, soldiers will surrender,

but Oh Lord (where are you?) hold off the massacres,

hold off the scorched earth acres.

I am not as confused as the conflict is,

but I see no clear picture

emerging, just black and white strictures.

It is not a computer game in the desert.

Desert Shield and Desert Storm

have gone, now what do they assert:

Desert Earthquake?

Baked earth, scorched earth:

did the earth give birth

for this? And this poem on the train

that started with a beggar’s kiss

is not entirely off the rails.

I borrow this English language

like a soldier lends his water bottle.

Hey, English, do your words still avail?

18 March 2003

You are not here your Highness,

and you would have learnt of the strain

on interpreters from the play The Witness.

I’m drinking a beer in the Irish Pub again.

Soon it’s going to rain lead in the desert

and sand will be soaked with blood,

though there’ll be trenches, even mud.

But my Iraqi friend in London’s miscarriage is

also a powerful miscarriage of justice.

I gave you my solemn promise

I would write poems to you these hard days

but they’re also to keep my fear at bay.

Unlike an automatic weapon stuttering

out of control I maintain my right of uttering

words on the page – they mutter

into the mute computer.

When diplomacy fails in utter

breakdown, bombs will do the rest,

smart, clinical, inimical, destroying,

toying with our emotions, a modern Troy

in a savage Iliad. Homer, you were blind

but you saw the destruction.

I come to you for instructions.

18 March 2003

I remember Ctesiphon by the banks of the Tigris:

a brick arch under which an orchestra could fit.

37 years ago I recorded a powerful sunset

there – Richard Cassels took photographs.

In Baghdad they specially opened

the brand new Archaeological Museum

for us and we stayed with a man in BP.

All this was so very long ago

and the world is none the wiser.

From Jordan we’d followed the desert pipeline K1, K2.

At Babylon the Persian bee-eaters and rollers played

at the site of the Hanging Gardens.

I wonder what they did with the rubble

of the Tower of Babel, landfill?

A language fill for they must have detritus-dumped

many tongues into the burial hill.

20 March 2003

So what I lack is meditation,

is contemplative time,

which is a different art to revision.

You said: ‘The people on the platform

should not curse those already on the train.’

Am I the train driver or the passenger?

I feel the latter, my reputation is on the line.

Soon I’ll be dismounting at Hernia Hill

is it a low-handed rhyme to bring in Harry Hill –

am I too playing the stand-up comedian

in a climate far from median

when it’s hotting up in the desert.

One more time I assert:

it’s not the tongue or the words that failed us:

we failed the words, we failed the languages,

now it’s the turn of guns to speak,

of bombs to wreak havoc in Iraq,

silencing the opposition, deaf to pleas

or peace, for bombs and guns speak, don’t hear.

Uncomfortable outside this Bagel

Bar; it’s landed again the Eagle

and now we can only demonstrate

for a quick end to war the monster.

I have half an hour to kill

before Ziba and Stephen’s reading.

Once I perched momentarily on a windowsill,

then my feet were bleeding.

Death is a split-second decision,

the bombs are aimed with smart precision.

The dead can’t be interrogated

or tortured. I never gated

my daughter and now she polices

the front line and leases

our home. Each new generation

seems to pick up the wars of nations.

The twenty first century

knifed the sentries

posted by the twentieth

and swiftly came its aftermath.

22 March 2003

The sand whirls like a snowstorm

in the desert, choking men and machines.

You tell me to have nothing to do with ‘this cheesy chess game’,

yet even radio gets to the eye of the maelstrom

and I start tuning in when midnight chimes

and for this vicarious grief I only have myself to blame.

Are we at this distance all bystanders

and is fate playing a three hander

when not all the cards are on the table

and the bridges are over the Tigris and Euphrates.

Commandos are not does, the desert has its rats.

26 March 2003

A little bit of swagger in my talk,

a little bit of stagger in my walk.

You plunged the dagger in my heart –

I was Mick Jagger singing a part.

27 March 2003

It is a feeling more of disgruntledness than depression:

the still life of this coffee table:

a glass ash tray, a pipe, red lighter,

a plastic pouch of Clan tobacco, taken off varifocal glasses,

a bare saucer with a teaspoon, black coffee

in a white cup on the black wood surface.

A friend may be in real depression,

feeling near the end, suicidal.

Somehow he has to find his enemy to be a fighter

and to realise that everything passes,

shake it all off he

can but first he has to discover it to face.

27 March 2003

IS TIME ON MY SIDE?

Left with time, for many projects have ended,

I have to get down the mountain I have ascended,

always a more difficult task than the ascent.

Reader, I wish for your approval and assent,

these lines are not heaven- but earth-sent:

it is too late to rely on divine intervention

but I use my Muse in the Classical convention,

not like certain countries abuse the Geneva Convention.

My poems give me food and water, take my hand in the street,

some of them are bitter, some of them are sweet

and some are quirky which rhymes with Turkey,

another constant theme that turns the key of my poetry.

But still I can’t stop this queasy feeling

as my pipe smoke slowly rises to the ceiling,

perhaps from cancer my fate I am sealing

and finally death will give the answer I’m seeking,

final, ultimate but till then I’m writing and speaking.

27 March 2003

Apprehension

feeling tense

hypertension

in the present tense.

Past into oblivion

full of forgetfulness.

The future we know

is what we fear.

Radioactive iodine

to obliterate my thyroid

will I remain literate

or become a humanoid?

27 March 2003

In addition there is the cultural tradition,

there is the fight to get the first edition:

extra, extra McKane’s book is out,

like Brodkey’s long-awaited novel

and was it fate that Brodsky and Brodkey

should die on the same day in rhyming harmony?

27 March 2003

Tania, the French girl, was listening to Punk

on the bench at Hernia Hill.

I lit my pipe and in no blind funk

started chatting the minutes away.

She asked ‘Do you have any war poems’

and I said ‘Yes, I will

read them to you. So, to an audience of one

on the Thameslink train

we pick up the most powerful issue

of the decade. Farringdon is only

four poems away and she says: ‘Shiiit,

I have no money for your book.’

I give it to her and take her mobile and work number,

and say: ‘I’ll invite you to a reading’

and she goes away with a blown kiss.

29 March 2003

There was a time when each hole in the rocks

housed a grouper in the Turkish Mediterranean.

Now I seek out beggars in doorways with only the harpoon

of conversation, but they catch me rather than I them.

They ask for prayers but I write them this poem.

I rub up against survivor guilt of a powerful ilk

and usually cry over spilt milk

and also over their lives’ broken bottles.

Exposure on the streets needs a lot of bottle.

30 March 2002

‘THEY’RE BITING’ PAUL KLEE

The man in the cells called my daughter: ‘Dog the c word’,

she who had hunted in Berkeley’s philosophy as an undergraduate.

That was long after we’d made friends with the wonderful poet

         Sarah Berkeley,

who, strange to tell, became a post grad at Berkeley,

and what do you know, my bank account was closed by Barclays,

for no reason other than my then poverty.

But now we are made of sterner clay

and I play the fish of words in a serious way,

though I’m stuck now at Hernia Hill, late

for the St Bride’s service this Mother’s Day.

30 March 2003

Juliet daughter, we used to spoonerise

the streets and shop names

in the taxi from Grane Crove

to Halford Shouse.

Some people say the sooner I

abandon rhymes and word games

and let my pen rove

in blank verse

the better poet I’ll be.

Games playing is no longer for me,

since my almost 20 year old fall,

but I used to hit a mean squash ball,

beat the No 1 seed in the Oxfordshire Open,

but now my handicap has destroyed my handicap

and in the golf war I’m not off fourteen any more;

the Royal Bethune Rec. Ground is more my score.

I doubt whether I’ll ever shoot my age.

Now I drive, slice and hook words on a rampage

that one friend says is out of control,

but sometimes I get the line right

and sink the ball in the hole.

30 March 2003

LIT. CRIT.

Once the word ‘scan’

was only applied to scansion

and the horizon.

But ‘It doesn’t scan’

is still my mother’s weapon

of choice, even after she has had a brain scan.

My first poem, aged 11, came under her guillotine.

The first four lines run:

‘The sea was an emerald green,

the sky was an azure blue,

as I awoke that morning,

to hear the seabirds calling.’

Her critique, I now know, was scandalous:

that’s not how to handle us

budding poets. Yet I prefer her

criticism to Brodsky’s,

despite both, I retain the quirky.

30 March 2003

TO YOU I’LL CALL MY DARLING

The woman I have yet to meet

may be from thirty to forty,

need not be nifty with the needle,

should be beautiful

in soul and spirit,

speak at least one language,

be able to handle anguish,

have a sense of humour

that could devastate the tumour

of boredom, and be a subject of the kingdom

of heaven on earth.

With Katia Kapovich and Velichansky in my bag,

in the midnight hour I walk my way back

to my e-mails from males and females

and snail mail on the floor by the door.

A modern contemporary whose visit is temporary

to the kingdom that never came.

When my father was dying

on his great adventure

I venture to claim

that we assuaged each our blame

and when his candle flame was extinguished:

his kingdom came.

1 April 2003

London’s wet enough for brollies to be raised:

black bats’ wings on the street everywhere.

In this safe place I am getting phased

by the same Robbie Williams’ air.

Last night I saw Saddam’s statue toppled

by the populace of Baghdad.

I wonder what he’d have felt, my late Dad,

world events were certainly his bag,

cold war warrior with the US connection that he was.

In this café this futile waiting has

brought this poem to the boil:

so was the war all for profits and oil?

But there were no Shakespearean buttons on the foils,

in this non-play bombs create civilian death toll

and it stretches inevitably, inexorably, the bloody roll

call of the dead by leaders led.

As ever, more wounded and maimed:

God knows it has to be placed, the ultimate blame.

My Kurdish friend regretted the death of Chemical Ali –

for, she said, he should have been tortured brutally.

There is no just revenge for the poison bomb in Halapja.

I don’t know whether it’s closed, this chapter

of the Doomsday book and whether Syria and Iran will follow.

This is not the time for exultation – that would be hollow,

we are in for more tumultation, that I know.

10 April 2003

The meeting with you when you stood me up

meant an opportunity for my poems to stand up

and be counted. They are my peace-loving foot soldiers

with bayonets fixed. I am older

considerably than the army and forces age,

but not a chairbound colonel in intelligence

as my father before me. See the serried ranks

of lines, see the words above all propaganda.

I’m also an interpreter at MF under Jill Gander,

in a different category to the interpreters

who will now be translating for interrogators.

John Simpson’s Kurdish translator,

friendly bombed would be more our style,

let’s pause and remember him for a while.

The three languages: Kurdish, Arabic and English

died with him there, but Hind, Haji and Fenik

honour him with their same languages’ living words –

and he died defending the Kurds

in the most humane way, fighting with lips, tongue and mouth:

now in comparative luxury this interpreter poet

is switching off in the pub before taking a train south.

10 April 2003

I didn’t ask to have life easy,

to have my stomach full not queasy,

for great log fires in grates to please me,

for the hand of a spouse to squeeze me.

So, not having asked for these,

apart from the stomach being full,

life was hard, the logs were jammed

and I was banned from marriage.

FOR INGRID HOLAN

I strained my ears as you talked on your mobile,

then grasping the stray word ‘dobry’,

I launched: ‘Ty russkaya?’

It turned out you were from Slovakia

and were ten when the Velvet Revolution

happened. You wore a houndstooth grey suit

and a cream coat, I seem to remember.

You worked in finance in Kentish Town,

pale pink were your lips, blonde hair –

you reminded me of Shirin.

I told you of my good late friend Jan Kopold,

of the Dubchek years. I was struck by

the fact that you looked me very direct

in the eyes and I explained I was an interpreter

and poet. We held each other

in natural conversation. I gave you a flyer

of our ICA reading with Negar

and showed you an old poem to another Ingrid.

These little meetings in trains

are like Haiku, hi, cool Ingrid.

If poetry is beauty and truth,

the three poets with the Hs,

Holub, Hanzlik and Holan

are proud of you.

And yes, I missed your birthday,

the day you came to this earth:

that was full of smiles, tears and mirth.

Later your poems became a peaceful earthquake,

the fireworks of an active volcano

and I am not a Russian ‘volk’, ah no.

Old age is Rome, Mandelstam said,

that’s Osip’s gossip, so I’m heading

for Rome but you are far away from her.

I will not found again that city

like the she wolf suckled out of pity

Remus and Romulus,

but in my old age I will have accumulated

so many poems of mine, of yours,

that nothing will come between us.

In 71 I wrote about riot-wracked Iraq,

but that was more a play on words:

now I see those words coming back

prophetically to haunt us,

and looting takes over from luting

on Broadcasting House:

is there a place for the Troubadour

and does he still have a foot in the door

though the rooms are pillaged

and bombed are villages

and we the privileged

await the latest news to be divulged.

The babies to be born in Baghdad

these days will have Mums and perhaps Dads

but the weak ones will have no incubators

let alone electricity.

In the markets no rice let alone kachaloo potatoes.

It is more than eccentricity

to write a poem at this distance:

the feet of this poem are my balance.

14 April 2003

I’m sitting opposite the Medical Foundation building

and to me the walls are transparent.

I have a little time for meditating

on my role as parent,

for I am a father and father figure,

recently, my daughter with boyfriend, the latter

is figuring bigger.

But spare me the Oedipus and Electra syndromes.

I’m not up for Greek tragedy this close to home.

I repeat, the poet says: ‘Old age is Rome’:

forgetfulness, oblivion, bad memory –

we learn here all can be caused by bad memories.

My aged mother with one brilliant stroke

came up with the French for cauliflower,

though admittedly we were looking for broccoli,

(not the Bond producer but the vegetable).

I told her to say to herself ‘choufleur’

whenever she felt she was losing her marbles,

those that Christopher and I played with, garbling

our French when father paid 10 shillings

for two cokes at Le Pecq in the 50s.

So I rambled happily in my mother’s room about the houses

we lived in. Maison Lafitte, which housed the racehorses

and where we played by the German Bunker,

the Second World War only eight years away.

Troi Rue des Bucherons, St Germain-en-Laye,

where Daddy broke a single glass pendant

off the chandelier with my first tennis racquet . . .

FOR INGRID H.

For me these tracks are ley lines

and I write not these lines as lay lines.

Again we meet with strong eye contact.

You send a text to an anonymous contact.

I thrill to the conversation though I’ve had a hard day,

worried about a client who rushed away

and by the intensely visual memory

of a seven year old boy in a village scene of frozen violence

committed, the body surrounded, the parents

unable to display emotion

fearful of identification.

Ingrid, I told you this in confidence,

didn’t want to disturb the cadence

of our conversation, your hair neat, suit grey

and those eyes of yours looking into mine:

and I correctly guessed: ‘You work with people’.

So what brings us both to catch this train at nine

and to be coupled in the same carriage.

This time I described my former marriage

and you talked about au pairing with your degree

and about the degree of difference

between you and the families. Hence

the imbalance and I remember those eyes

but strangely not their colour

and I displayed my true colours

of poetry and conversation

that I possibly do even better than interpretation.

I loved the sight of your waving

with curled fingers.

‘Do vizheniya’ I said, confident of having

the chance of new meetings.

I tracked you down beside the tracks.

I looked at you and you looked back.

I have the impulse to talk,

but in no wise stalk.

Ingrid, it was not in greed

that we should talk and then this poem read.

It’s not a question of prolificity:

good lines have enough power to light the city.

Baghdad and Basra are still without electricity.

Libraries and poems too burn in war’s pity.

Language is debased to orders and shouts of the rabble,

in the same country the Babel experiment toppled,

though then the word bomb did not exist: rubble is rubble,

dust is dust in civilisations cradle.

Once sculpted bulls dozed

in the Museum*, which is looted. Bull dozers

will clear the worst destruction level

an archaeologist will ever find,

and the looters of the Museum

give Philistines a bad name.

*In June 1966 with my school friend, the archaeologist Richard Cassels, I visited the Museum in Baghdad. Since it was not yet officially opened we must have been among its very first visitors.

The Portuguese waiter to whom I talked French

announces that I am ‘a world citizen’

but also seems to think that I came out of Russia

after the Bolshevik revolution.

Does white hair make me White Russian?

A double shot of coffee – less water –

and the archetypal Mars Bar

settle well as the saxophone plays.

Glad that I didn’t go to a Notting Hill bar

I write my second poem of the day.

My overcoat this hot day is entirely redundant –

I trail it over my shoulder, red scarf in the sleeve.

I am harvesting poetry abundant,

like Zabolotsky’s Agriculture Triumphant.

It seems only death will stop my lines,

or perhaps these are the seven years of fat kine.

The Turkish translations – a glut of agglutinations –

came at a time of desperate shortage in that nation.

I want my poems to be the uncompressible density

of sea water, but with an irrepressible transparency.

Though they will accuse me of graphomania no doubt,

my gramophone doesn’t wear the same records out.

Perhaps the Government Inspector will order me to revise

my work but I will firmly advise

him that I prefer fluency, spontaneity

and inspiration to hymns to the strict deity

who’d meter my poems to iambic pentameters.

Thus, free to the end of the line, it matters

to me that I am content with the contents –

let the form be the clothes on the body’s form.

15 April 2003

FOR REZA

Since we’ve not met for some weeks

and I guess this war is making you weak

I will speak to you in this poem.

It was you who told me waiting is the worst torture,

now your status is in the lap of the future.

You could have caught me, I can catch you,

so unlike the police who snatched you.

In our talks I want the interrogatives

to do the opposite of the interrogators.

I don’t hold any prerogative

over you. No one is going to gate us

as we walk to the pub or café

to let the words have their affect.

15 April 2003

I come down heavy on threats of suicide

since I have expertise of it from both sides.

Today one person complained of the unusual heat.

On the train now I didn’t meet

my chance fellow traveller friends.

The destination is always the same in the end –

Bromley South is my lode star magnet.

She said she found a triple suicide attracted.

I noticed my voice changed – stern father

that I rarely am and the further

our sessions take us, Gillian,

I realise you’re right: I have to be the balance.

You and I have a good alliance

though I have to reach into the crannies of my soul

at the same time knowing that you are playing Granny.

The momentum of the interpreting

carries me past therapeutic opportunities

but this last session I’m pretty

sure we didn’t miss a trick that she often tries

on us, smiling driven one, fearful teaser,

tongue-tied-eloquent, vivacious tired one.

I’d deflect here eyes to you

and her words too. I no longer translate

her interpolated ‘Richards’. But lately

I find that if I hold the key,

you Gillian are the house, the room.

Perhaps it is not her father she needs

but her mother – her father was easy

and her mother complied.

I know in the family there were lies.

Yet her spirit rushed to her dying mother

and death struck her again like her father’s.

Can I be a rock in this situation?

Though my face is pitted with my own experiences,

they are not dulled my senses.

16 April 2003

At Passover we passed words over the table.

The situation in Bethlehem was still unstable.

In Ireland I’m going to read Hikmet’s ‘Fable of Fables’.

Baghdad is being looted by the rabble.

These letters are more than serious Scrabble,

though the q in Iraq is valuable

but now doesn’t seem to exist.

The Irish beggar woman said ‘Give us a kiss’.

Probably on crack cocaine, she is.

FOR MUSA AND NINA

It wasn’t the three beautiful young poets dressed in black

and others I love each in my own way, back to back;

it wasn’t that our reading was successful but I should have cut back,

it wasn’t that I didn’t go to the Crane Club for the craic:

it was in Brennar’s Yard Hotel I held onto your wrist firmly

and said ‘Draw strength from me:

I’m all topped up.’

It was you my elder brother, eyes sparkling with diamond tears,

it was you with me absent quelling Castlerea’s prisoners’ fears,

it was that ultimately time was too curt in Cuirt,

yet we showed our innate courtesy

to each other in this warm-blooded country,

it was my brave but ever inadequate try

to calm an old friend’s justified concerns:

that was the best thing here I could discern.

24 April 2003, Galway

The wind is out of my sails

and the sails are wet.

On the street rain flails

but his course is set,

though I am not resigned to his resignation.

On Friday I have an assignation

to eat a sea bass in the harbour.

I don’t want to deal with the resentment,

though I had a sort of presentiment

it could come to this. Sentiments

should not be more powerful than the cause.

Here I am in the land of the Corrs,

but old records and LPs play in my brain,

60s and 70s tunes rock me again

and the one inexorable strain

of my own composition.

This poem is in a position

of an open letter unposted

on any bulletin board.

24 April 2003, Galway

So here it is, the challenge

I have waited for all my life:

to my very essence, to my four languages –

I pray that I may be worthy of it

as a man is worthy of a wife.

For it has all to do with love,

and all to do with loving and living life

more abundantly. And if my wording fails

it is we who listened and talked

in these days in Galway who will reshape

it until it is worthy of being a poem,

a statement. No one dictates to me –

this poem, these terms

but many real hands guide it.

While we sat in the gods

at the theatre listening to the panel

that touched my heart till

the tears smarted but did not fall –

now they do as I write in my hotel bedroom –

you touched my wrist and the abyss,

the rubble that was being described

started yielding to the description,

the inscriptions not encryptions

of the recent past, as though trained

archaeologists were already sifting through it

before the dust had settled.

Were they investigative journalists

or poets and writers, no, not just?

They were not rabble rousers

in a time of trouble for the world:

they are the keepers of the flame

who need to dowse the flagrant

conflagrations at the same time.

Negar told us of a flame

that is kept alive below ground

near Tabriz, the flame of Zoroaster

and another Richard, traveller,

gynaecologist, writer and publisher,

who smokes a pipe and Erinmore

told of his travels in Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh . . .

FOR ARIEL DORFMAN IN GALWAY

Sometimes the bearer of a name

is not aware of its resonances –

I’m sure that’s not the same for you.

High on the roof of billions of buildings you perch,

like a weathervane upon a church,

but you are receiver and transmitter

at the same time, calling the people

to proactive prayers for world peace.

Aerial may mean feet off the ground,

may mean flight, but it also means

communication, that living wire,

that lifeline. Share then your name

with Shakespeare and Plath,

a literary, a real association.

You capture the waves of the ether:

this is a developing atmosphere –

the expanding and contracting universe,

where there’s still a place for our verse.

28 April 2003

LETTER FROM THE CAFÉ BY THE MF

FINISHED AT ARCOLA THEATRE

To Tonita

At last I am where I am most at home – one of my cafés –

writing to you with pen and paper this letter that may

turn into a poem. I have not had time to think,

late last night relaxing watching TV I had a port to drink,

but it’s only now that I am picking up the links

of our trip to Galway to the court of Cuirt.

I should have written even earlier out of courtesy

not like a maid of honour performing a curtsey

but like a noble knight making a bow

or an actor at a curtain call bending low

for on that occasion applause and feedback become plausible;

but it was you, Tonita, who touched me and made possible:

the sea-bass with the Scandinavian caviar in the harbour,

the sight of the Claddagh swans on the black water,

a hand held in the gods at tense moments

in the panel discussion. Inviting Stephen to stay too was a good omen.

The fact that we share thyroid, bipolarism and acute appendicitis

were three of the things that united us

so we could meet on the level of surviving suffering,

but what those days we were offering

to each other was something different:

a warm-blooded friendship,

a continuing conversation.

So in reply I too launch our correspondence’s ship

without further tergiversation

and send this letter/poem to Yeats country

and soon Ten Russian Poets’ poetry

as promised in return for your hospitality.

29 April 2003

Waiting in the Arcola Theatre Café

to buy a saz for a Kurdish girl with a wonderful voice.

With the people I interpret for I have no choice.

I am not bey effendi or efe,

long ago I became amca not agabey

and in a few years I’ll be dede.

Perhaps one day I’ll really be an Ustad or a Bilge,

meanwhile I am proud, O Lord, to be simply your chirak

and write poems on London, Ireland, Turkey and Iraq.

28 April 2003

Fresh air makes an empty stomach rumble,

going hungry is a way of becoming humble

but weakness can make your tummy rumble,

can send the mind on a long ramble.

Sometimes life proceeds at an amble.

To you I would hold up a candle

and on my life I’d get a handle

and my readers ask: ‘Who’s Nathalie Handal?’

28/29 April 2003

TROUBADOUR AT THE COURT OF CUIRT

Lame troubadour, 16^th century poet as Bejan

described me, or ‘like Byron’,

with two beautiful poets from Azerbaijan

I try to maintain my irony and iron

in the soul and play in all seriousness the role

of poet, of makar, though billed as Australian,

but when I open my mouth it doesn’t come out strine

or Scots or Irish here in Galway.

I am not galled, not in a Gallic or Gaelic way

though these are elements that tick

within me in my genetic or biographic clock.

I’m told there is a dynamic priest here who tends his flock

and recently in writers’ turmoil,

when, in the cliché, I have been trying to pour oil

on troubled waters, well, I have not sunk

but I’ll soon run out of that precious commodity

and I’m not about to perform that miracle/oddity

of the walk on water like Peter Sellars

in a late film I caught on TV. I like to think of the apostle fellows

as unruly disciples under discipline of the Master.

Those pupils – how lucky their pupils were to cast a

glance at Him. Oh Lord, they say you died to rise again,

but in resurrection what is the gain?

A full span on this Acmeist earth,

to categoric death from life and birth,

abundantly living, receiving and giving,

completing daily and writers’ tasks:

this is all I ask.

30 April 1 May 2003

Today at seven in the morning the doorbell interrupted my sleep.

Boots on, I descended the steps without banister

and found that I too had promises to keep

in return of the packages. William and Maud

and Constance Markievicz and a blue and white ashtray

and best of all a letter from you: a treasure hoard.

So our feelings for each other hadn’t gone astray.

I’m writing this in the pub after visiting my mother:

she started off by saying every month she’s nearer my brother –

Andrew, who died of a heart attack eight years ago.

I find it important not to let her go

down the road of self-pity:

this Nursing Home is as good as any in this city.

I explained one message was as good as 18 on the answerphone,

this and her desire to move are the danger zone.

Then we tried French and she beat the ‘culottes’ off me.

‘Cerveau’ or brain was her best discovery

when I was stuck with ‘tete’.

I valued this tete a tete.

I could have to spend several months at a crammer

to revive my at present atrocious French grammar.

But we had some good laughs

in both languages and after

it was not adieu but au revoir.

3 May 2003

Lucky to be wearing my overcoat,

sitting on a bench at Stamford Brook tube station.

The evening air is cold,

the tubes seem to be rationed,

mainly funnelling down the line in the middle.

Lucky to have stopped in the pub for a soup, pipe and piddle –

I feel at ease on this tramps’ bench

no need  for me to have a pipe to clench,

just waiting and writing, writing and waiting

and no, with Nathalie I’m not dating –

you see I love my friends deeply,

but every friendship does not keep me

from the others and it’s not trophy hunting

or my late father’s obscene rhyme in anger.

It was to my mother I gave the flowers,

blue irises like the ones Kathryn

threw in parting from a balcony in Paris.

My mother has always been Kate,

not Catharine – her maiden name Harris.

The pumpkin soup has stained my jeans,

this evening I was able to observe our genes

in action – a dominant one is language

and as I steered my mother away from anguish,

realising that I couldn’t completely disperse her worries,

I attempted to analyse what hurries

her from fluster to panic

and flattens her life’s tonic.

But in French we found the etincelle

that is still couched in her brain cells.

Her humour is with her surging on,

but it is accompanied by the urging on

of a pronounced loneliness,

but we shared some moments of happiness.

3 May 2003

SPITZ CAFÉ BAR

So life is a series of halts in the wilderness,

but I’m lucky to have a home and wireless

and a job and cafés to indulge my verbal wildness.

The rehearsal was more like interpreting

than translating. Several times it was called interrupting.

Reading in cut form those high voltage poems

made us all feel hyper and not quite at home

but we planned out the reading

and now we are bandaging any bleeding

in the Spitz Café Bar in the market.

We put our markers down and: hark – it

turned out well, and all manner of things will be well.

4 May 2003

At Aldgate East I board the tube:

the train is like a funnel not a cube

and races down the tunnel

like rain down a runnel.

A long journey ahead of me –

I’ll devote it to underground poetry

though I don’t spy any

poetry on this underground.

Time was, in the carriages a fragment of my Akhmatova’s

Requiem was an example of the art of a

true poem. She would be happier

now that I use a rhyme scheme that’s much snappier

than the non-existent one in my translations,

but at that time I was not prepared to make that oblation.

Negar cured me of that: she who said: ‘Sometimes hearts have to be broken

in order to be healed.’ Does this start

to make sense with these words spoken?

The rhythm of the heart beat:

the end of the lines where the rhymes meet.

Only without contortions and distortions

should rhymes be accommodated.

I date my poems – I never dated

her but she liberated me to translate

in a different way not to mention to write my own poems

in such abundance that I have ten full exercise books @ home.

I like to approach themes and tackle

issues that might raise the hackles

of other poets: prison, mental hospital,

war, even torture have been survivors of my pen –

their continued existence bears this out – open

these veins of poetry not literally with Reza rather than the razor

but enter into their despair

with the added time you have to spare,

the years you have saved by the failed attempt

and when grey depressiveness tempts

you as a result of boredom and bad luck

sometimes, as Peter Levi admonished me say ‘Oh fuck!’

in as many languages as you can –

I tell you this is as good as the results of a brain scan,

and always remember: ‘What a piece of work is man.’    4 May 2003

RUSSIAN ROULETTE

He’s a talker, a stalker, a silence breaker,

a thorn, a thistle, a whistle blower,

a faker, a maker, a risk-taker,

a staker, an earthquaker, a trouble maker.

He does it for his sake, he doubles for fun,

sometimes on duty he carries a gun.

He plays the roulette wheel with six bullets in the chamber.

He sees red then he blacks out as the wheel spins,

‘rien ne va plus’, he loses more than he wins

and it will ever be so –

they know this in the Russian Casino.

8 May 2003

It’s cold now sitting outside the Café in May.

I have underachieved in writing today,

brooding over my Pushkin and PEN Clubs.

It’s ages since I lifted a golf club –

as a result I’m not meeting up with my brother

but once a week I go to visit my aged mother.

I never gave you cause to shy away,

to make you feel embarrassed or shy in any way:

so why this long unexplained silence

on the email which makes me so tense?

This poem could apply to many situations I realise:

its universality doesn’t make it any easier

in your writer’s and reader’s or In my eyes

and you , silent one, I’m sure you’re not a teaser.

When my mind plays tricks I feel you may not just be gone but dead,

the ultimate nature of being parted is such.

A part of my heart as well as my head

responded to the keys you touched,

in our correspondence now interruptus.

I try not to interpret us

as in the past, still every month I’ll fire

an email into your unresponsive inbox:

this is how I’ll enquire

whether your heart ticks and tocks,

friend, I’d like to turn back the clocks

to when we wrote and read each other.

And at the keyboard we were never bored

and our screens did not separate us from each other.

I hope that your terminal is not terminal

that this interval will be minimal.

I’m sure the reasons for silence are simple:

a glitch on one of our servers

that for so long served us

so well. Ah well, I’m writing in a Café

before a concert, still to you though you’re far away.

Poems don’t necessarily need a response,

are not like the ping pong of emails –

they do not even need to be sent to their sponsors:

though our emails may fail

poems to you will always avail –

see this one hovers already off the page

like a white bird released from its cage.

You may not hear its song for an age

but it’s here waiting for you at any stage

in your life.

16 May 2003

POST OP

Tomorrow I’ll visit my mother in hospital

then with translations I’ll test a poet’s hospitality.

After her operation they say my Ma’s life is not in peril

but poems about death now have more reality.

At the end of the Chadwick concert they sang in the dark,

hark at the perfect pitch angellike,

I fear now I’ll never fear the stark

darkness again even when the final hour strikes.

Aya from Kazakhstan could not paint her President black

or white but there was in our chance meeting no doubt of her love of Abay.

It’s not so much that there’s a lack

of poets. Wise readers are in abeyance.

This train seat is warm in the small of my back.

I’m glad that my poems have come back

and are taking up the interval’s slack.

The Irishman in me always finds the craic.

16 May 2003

You are young and I am old.

I don’t take risks but you are bold.

At nights my feet feel cold

as the duvet slips to the side.

When we sleep apart perhaps many people dream of us

so we do not have to dream alone.

We are not coupling couples

but poetry can couple in couplets.

Is poetry a marriage of harmonies?

Is it without divorce and alimony?

You are never likely to earn money

from your own poetry – that concept is funny.

Translation is a different art –

you have no voice at the start

but then you realise above the taunting words

that by a miracle you have two voices

that blend together till

my voice and your voice speak and they are still.

18 May 2003

TELESYMPATHY

Our long phone call made me late for lunch

but covered so much fallow ground

that I had a strong hunch

the words were more than received sound.

The concept of ‘no breach between receiving and giving’

came up again: give and take by which we are living,

in that lies nature’s balance.

‘Take, take’, the businessman looks askance.

‘Profit, profit’, ‘Prophet, prophet’

reply the poet and the treasured reader

and if this prognosis is right, other criteria

have to be considered – lines of a sort of pre-emptive history

are being written as we speak, shrouded in the poetry’s mystery.

18 May 2003

OKTAY AND FRIENDS

We worked on Oktay Rifat for three hours,

fine tuning poems exercised our powers

of concentration. Some of his poems go in circles

rather than rectangles as on the page.

Oktay had a canary in a cage

or was that Nazim’s ‘Memo?

There are not many instances when we’d write memos

to Oktay’s poems but often he has memento moris –

many poems are on death and blackness

which emerges from Mediterranean colours.

A friend of mine, Dina, once said that real terror

comes not in the darkness

but beneath a blue sky in the bright of day.

She was married to Oleg the engraver

a great supporter of mine.

They went back to Moscow

when the Cold War ended,

but I never lost those friends I befriended.

18 May 2003

My left hand is smooth,

my right hand rough.

My left hand writes,

my right does tough stuff.

No doubt it’s a skin condition

and in the Russian tradition

I should be ‘conditioning

it with herbal remedies’

as the wife of a Russian

officer told me the other day

in a gap when I was interpreting away.

It seemed irrelevant to me

as he suffers from acute trauma and HIV.

But she showed me her two hands in an identical state

and is not sharing symptoms the interpreter’s fate.

19 May 2003

‘My God is energy’ the Poet said –

for I had spotted calligraphy

by the pipe and Clan tobacco.

At 4pm he sits at the Coffeehouse

with his silver prayer or worry beads

not with a beard in Saudi Arabia but Victoria station,

advising me against chocolate on my cappuccino,

bought breaking my last tenner.

Our conversation revolves round

poetry and life – luckily I proffer my credentials –

the Coffeehouse Poems – and he reads

with attention ‘We’re miners united,

we’ll never be defighted’

interpolating words of approbation.

Christ. 200,000 copies of his book at 25p

Ouais

24 May 2003

With Ouais the poet I found an oasis

in the desert of humanity

as we drank the bitter bean

and smoked the tobacco leaf

on the Victoria station concourse

at an ordinary Coffeehouse

not in Beirut of course,

with a Turkish waitress

to drive away further stress.

24 May 2003
Getting the 9.33 cuts it fine,

plus I have to change at Hernia Hill

onto the Thameslink line.

The pit in my stomach feels hollow,

a sure sign

that all is not well.

Oh, Hell, my finances all shot,

not that I am a drunken sot.

I’m a hard worker not a shirker

and I haven’t yet lost the plot.

Friday

Once I cried and twice I cried

and I could cry again,

for the issues I interpret

touch the strongest tissues of the brain.

Today it was words through tears

not Russian and Turkish laughter –

twice three of us needed tissues.

Once I had asked the trick question

to a potential interpreter:

how do you interpret tears?

Well then how do you interpret fears

or any other unspoken emotion?

Do we carry an ocean inside us,

though it may well through at times:

and today was sunny, windless,

the sea would have been blue –

I know why my tears came, from you

and you and you, sometimes truth is too true.

30 May 2003

SPRING/SUMMER

I pause as the seasons change,

try to get the range

so I can target a poem.

Not yet out of danger,

still I don’t enlist the Lone Ranger

to gallop me out of trouble

with a ‘Hi ho Silver!’

My financial security’s bubble

has burst, now ‘gold and silver

have I none’ as the Apostle

said and there’s no Kurdish beggar

to offer me money. This is more epistle

than poem. Though I have less I grow bigger,

my lion heart expands –

I stretch out my hands:

sold books fill my belly,

I don’t watch the Telly,

living off air and poetry.

27 May 2003

Time, sleepiness, the traffic’s exhausts.

Poems compressed into a station stop.

A rushed half-meal of potato wedges.

‘And perhaps at this very moment

some Japanese is translating

me into Turkish

and has penetrated deep into my soul’

Osip Mandelstam Moscow Notebooks

Translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane

The poet Cevat Çapan

translated me into Çapanese

but he also stole our lines of English

and translated Osip

Mandelstam into Turkish –

and this is not just literary gossip,

but given that he was the only credited translator,

into whose soul did this creator penetrate?

31 May 2003

FOR JULIET

The sirens sing their song, the blue light revolves,

at full career your career evolves

with crack and cracked heads in the depths of society,

I pity them without piety.

Ulysses, without wax in my ears

I walk the ten o’clock streets with small fears.

Flags dither between full and half mast,

the coke snorters take their blast:

home for the homeless that is our task,

of thousands in this city is their cast –

one last line, one last…

1 June 2003

STRANGER ON THE STREET

Gaunt, tall man in blue T shirt,

smoking a roll-up,

comes up to Lucy and me

in the café and says:

‘That’s a nice bag.

May I look at it?’

As he reaches for it with his hand

I block his hand with my foot.

‘I like the aluminium handles.

You’ve borrowed that from the planet.’

I say: ‘I’m sorry I’ve got valuable books in it.’

He goes away, comes back

and shakes my hand.

‘I forgive you for kicking me.’

It’s more a vinoette than a vignette

and why is it I’m describing

a man off the street rather than

the wonderful conversation we had, Lucy?

Is it that we can both hold this conversation

and hold it again – perhaps we don’t know

our memories’ capacities but we trust

layer on layer these lines on the page.

Those ‘cons’* will last us through till a ripe old age;

but what happens when ripe age decays,

when bones, sinew and brain rot,

when we think everyone is in a plot

against us and the waiting lingers on interminably,

will we just beg ‘inter me’?

1 June 2003

* ‘cons’: my grandfather the Methodist Minister Bernard Harris’ word for ‘conversations’.

ENGLISHMAN ON PLATFORM

The man on the Hernia Hill platform

is wearing dark glasses, looking at a form

from the British Council. I chip in

chipperly: ‘I could do with one of those’. In

a minute for three minutes

we are discussing his daughter’s visit to Chile.

She was born in South America. Will he

open up to me from behind his dark glasses?

I drop Ariel Dorfman into the conversation.

No lead balloon and no souring of relations

as I announce my interests in Russian and Turkey,

but the talk is clipped, laconic – the key

to the English character. Colombia where Rod is

he has not spent much time in.

As the train pulls in

he moves down the platform

true to English form

but there’s no doubting the sincerity,

of which I am an inheritor,

of ‘Good Luck with whatever you’re doing’.

Perhaps he suspected I needed the rest of the journey

to write this poem in my chronological journal.

It was the white equivalent of a black ‘Respec Man’.

You can travel far with English on the train lines

from Bromley South to Hernia Hill with a change for Kentish Town,

farther than you can travel in silence

through South London where my daughter deals with violence:

with this with her I am in alliance,

my words are my defence.

In speaking to you, Englishman with dark glasses,

I know I caused you no offence –

I don’t only talk to lasses

on trains as some people suppose

more than a gesture, more than a pose

in these seed-beds I water with a hose

and give the abi-hayat to those

poems that otherwise I would not find but lose.

3 June 2003

??? Epigraph and whole poem

‘But I am old and you are young

and I speak in a barbarous tongue’

W.B. Yeats

It takes several poems to grasp a complex woman poet,

that’s writing them not reading them.

It’s easier to decipher the Queen in Buckingham

Palace than to make out enigmatic poems.

A poetry affair, you should know it,

might be as prone to failure as a relationship:

easy to fall into the trap of your worship,

to soar into the heavens of your highness.

Perhaps you too could go into a royal blush

and friendship-love would not get beyond a poetry crush,

but, no I see humour reigns in our interchange,

but, no our poems have already been well exchanged.

Though set in my ways like an old dog I could change,

should learn new tricks, be able to tackle our versions,

before I’m hobbled on two sticks,

before I’m finally ferried across the Styx,

which I am told by a friend, in reality

is a turquoise river of crystal clarity.

3 June 2003

THE RIVER OF POETRY

The river is made up of many tributaries,

tiny streams are its attributes.

My poems lack distribution,

no English publisher is my tribulation.

With mine on my sleeve, I enter others’ hearts swiftly –

a friend says: ‘Some hearts have to be broken

to heal’. I write these words I have heard spoken.

Lips in crasis form a kiss. I think that’s put deftly.

Its reading rather than translation that saps the energy

for my own poems. I am not a member of the clergy –

I have all the normal human urges.

In the writers’ trial I commit no perjury.

The jury is still out on a full-scale relationship

where life, love and poetry could be in kith and kinship.

3 June 2003

It’s possible these poems are overcooked,

that I have overlooked too the power of an inscription

in my Russian book – I should sell it by subscription

rather than slinging out my line and hook.

Tell me that my heart sinking is in vain,

that it’s mainly hunger that gives me a stomach pain

as I ride the Circle Line tube train

next to a woman reading Michael Moore.

At home my practical performance is poor –

I’m only bringing home scraps of bacon,

I never became a priest or a deacon:

my poems are my beacon,

beware the lesson of Angus Deayton,

though it is in humour that risks are taken,

the reader’s sense of humour I may have mistaken.

3-4 June 2003

POEM OF THE HUMOURS*

Something is happening and I know what,

my brow feels cold, my brow feels hot.

In my stomach is a swarm of butterflies,

my life is swiftly flying by.

My skin feels moist, my skin feels dry,

give me a hoist, let this cup pass by.

Something like triumph, something like despair –

I can’t wash these feelings out of my hair.

I’ll never scalp my own scalp

so no Samaritans need help.

My blood is red not blue,

like the ink of this poem I write for you.

The printed page is black and white,

the rhythm – blues, the rhymes – tight.

At times like these I have to write,

to emerge from darkness into light.

4 June 2003

* The humours were the seats of emotions in mediaeval times.

??? lines 3&4

How can I have my feet on the ground

but my head in the clouds?

It’s because I don’t allow the sound

of your name to be voiced aloud.

Translating our lines will be our secret –

we shall never let them seek it

out. Dogs wag their tails in innocence

but to let tongues wag makes no sense.

For you my heart is roomy,

in the spirit of Jelalleddin Rumi.

I’ll let your poems in at this late age

but you will have to lead me with your language.

How will I learn to read the Elif Beth,

long since I have rhymed with Elizabeth.

Just one more tongue to learn before death,

over my vocal chords to pass my breath.

A language more ancient than ours,

Eastern but not the Book of Hours.

Robert Chandler is learning it for Hafiz,

I for our poems fizz.

4 June 2003

INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE (OVERHEARD)

As we get off the train at Grove Park,

the businessman says into his mobile phone:

‘Have you been given an ETA for an SPA?’

and we all laugh.

He’s still on the phone now on the Charing Cross train:

‘We’re testing something with London European’

and about ‘hosting a website’,

then: ‘We’ve got to find out, I don’t know either.’

He talks as though no one is at

the other end: ‘Let’s gather as much information as possible.

Wander round and have a chat with IT.

What obligations do we have for hosting this?

We should be putting a paragraph together.’

I’m attempting to translate an Oktay Rifat sonnet

as he signs off: ‘These are my thoughts of the day for you. Bye.’

I come away tired but with understanding and admiration

and without any vexation

but I doubt my old age will be this fruitful.

I try to be son dutiful

to my aged mother devoid of my younger brother.

Now I really appreciate the beautiful

not just in women, but, say, in this summer evening –

grey sky, wind in the trees, a crescent moon leaving

a refrain to the Turkish poems we’ve been working on,

this level station platform.

But it’s not such a level platform after all –

a young alcoholic-looking man is on the prowl –

his name is Billy and he is an expert on trains

and asks me if I am a trainspotter.

He hates fast trains but his greatest hate,

his detestation is the changing of the clocks:

this is why he is not proud to be British.

Booze but not excessively hangs on his breath,

he’s been to his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

His parents he says are both alcoholics,

though father ‘one drink and he’ll be dead’

has an enlarged heart. His hands can’t roll his cigarettes

and I attempt for him a thin, straggly stranded one

and we try to light his roll-up and my pipe

in the breeze. He was on twelve Tennants

a week ago and blacking out on the twelfth.

He told me of his mother saying:

‘Go on and have a drink’

and how she’ll be cross with him being out late.

I give him on the train a two pound coin

to phone her in Clapham Junction

and for a sandwich.

He acknowledges: ‘It’s a matter of life and death’.

My legs tingle as though I’ve written a good poem

and I remember saying to Musa:

‘Take some strength from me:

I’m all topped up.’ Billy

gave me this poem.

5 June 2003

THE THORNS PROTECT THE ROSE

Perhaps I am writing too many poems to strangers,

not concentrating enough on my friends,

in writing to people on the street there are dangers

of giving preferential treatment that sends

the wrong message that I am not friend-wise but street-wise.

But everyone knows

the thorns perfect the rose.

The poor are always with you was Jesus’ refrain,

when the bloom has gone the thorns remain.

8 June 2003

*     *     *

Slipping in and out of sleep,

verging on unconsciousness,

but it’s a quantum leap

going bye-byes

for one who’s sleepless.

8 June 2003

*     *     *

‘It’s a dud’ Ma says,

with an almighty thud,

and I would agree: ‘It’s a blank’.

Only in French do we not rob the bank

of expressions and meanings –

I find myself avoiding

her staring into the void.

Her mind is locked, blocked – to unlock it

unblock it is more than I am able.

8 June 2003

It’s possible it seems to have mini-dreams

between tube stations on short journeys,

then, startled by the stop, to come to bolt upright.

Of course not missing the station is the key,

remaining relaxed and not uptight.

Now here I am at Victoria concourse having a coffee,

where I met the Arab poet Ouais,

no time before the train to waste,

straight down to writing while the Turkish waitress

gets a taste of my Coffeehouse Poems in her break.

Ouais takes fables from the Bible,

Rushdie took on the Koran,

blasphemy the latter was called not libel,

but Ouais’ poems run and ran.

I see us now chewing our pipes and the fat,

his A4s covered in the calligraphy I’ll learn,

raconteur – his sexual adventures a little too pat,

but there were sparks in his words that make me burn.

Not at his post today I deliberately sat

at the table where we met,

our locus Classicus, to get

inspiration, then to Nilufer, back from her break,

I presented my book and not at breakneck

speed easily got the 18.05 to Bromley South,

this poem written, not just pipe but heart in mouth

as I enter a period of hand to mouth.

8 June 2003

The man in the white shirt is talking about

his Will Self book and drinking a Pilsner.

The woman opposite has an open art book,

with a picture of a woman in a white bonnet:

Dutch, I think. He talks casually:

‘Well, this is it…’ then later: ‘I’ve got more

and more lazy as the years go by, genetically lazy.’

They are just on the verge of being out of earshot.

The woman is wearing jeans

and a black pinstripe jacket.

The man smiles a lot –

I like to hear voices on the train –

real ones not ones talking on phobile moans.

I’d like to hear my own again

for I don’t seem to strike up conversations

these days on trains –

oh yeah, there goes the first mobile refrain

again, again.

8 June 2003

BLACK ON WHITE PAPER

For a whole hour I’ve been drawing a blank –

no poem emerges from the memory bank:

this limbo I have to thank –

some people would call it relaxation.

The triple rhyme of Rubais,

rarely witnessed by western eyes,

quatrains called by Ziba sighs

balance poetry’s equation.

In childhood I learnt the samba and cha-cha,

not knowing that the ish of Turkish is che or cha,

mother’s wild idea was to raise chinchilla,

will Chechnya ever be an independent nation?

You see, the domino theory is not just American,

black and white does not just apply to the Penguin.

10 June 2003

MY MA

She’s halfway down the bed,

wanting to press the green bell-push

for the pull has not been answered.

No stranger on the road this:

this is my own mother

asking for a pill to put her to sleep,

and all we can rhyme together is weep.

‘Buy me a dozen white linen handkerchiefs,

surely this one of you can achieve.’

I edit her words for rhyme’s sake.

‘Every night I ask Jesus to take

me, but he doesn’t.’ I say: ‘We’ve lots of conversations

left, the two of us,’ and tell her of the Oxford translation

prize our Hikmet so nearly won.

It may be her time is coming up to be done

but she still says: ‘I’m so proud of you’

and the fact that it comes out between exasperation

at being unable to pull herself up the bed on her own

seems to add impact through the angry zone.

I decide to write her a letter,

better prose than poesy,

so that she can keep it and see,

hold it, lose it, use it as a handkerchief,

for white linen is like a page

and these lines not unlike tears.

I may be working out my fears

of death,  in her old age,

contrasting the way my father went,

not like a climber in an oxygen tent,

but suddenly as though his air was spent,

but quick at the end nonetheless.

There’s no priest at hand to bless

her and the spiritual sustenance

I offer is by chance.

Poetry she accepts grudgingly

except for those 8 lines of Aronzon

found for her off the Internet

emerging from a review in the unknown zone.

No, we’re not going to think of internment yet

or cremation, Ma, I tell you.

I know you love me and it’s too painful. Let

me relieve you of some pain,

let’s talk together, again, again.                 10 June 2003

 MUSINGS ON THE MUSE

FOR SHIRIN

??? (first five lines)

I call on a new Muse of Poetry not Memory,

you don’t polish nails with a board of emory

as a bored office secretary

but ensure that if accidents happen

we are well accounted for.

You write poems: as it happens

I’ve only read three or four

of them but they were so beautiful

any mother would go beyond being dutiful

and love you for them alone.

To be with you is to be with beauty.

Poet, translator, friend I’m ready beyond duty

to enter into your poems’ zone,

not to clone them into translations

but to give them all my enthusiasm, elation and support,

like a crew brings a sailing boat into port.

Seas can be rough and seas can be calm,

short-lived tranquillity cannot quell qualms –

peace of mind is essential

even in the midst of struggle.

Human storms will blow,

droughts will follow

but unlike the constant sky the rarity of the rainbow

means that it needs to be found in memory,

except in reality, except in long-lasting poetry.

13 June 2003

Evening Primrose is in my bloodstream

mingling with lithium salt:

they make a powerful team

but coffee keeps my nerves taut.

I’m drinking a treble espresso

for the price of a single,

still wondering whether I expressed, oh

too much in an email to Turkey.

Am I getting increasingly quirky

in letters, poetry and prose

and do I ramble like the wild rose?

14 June 2003

TIME WAS

I loved you in all your movements,

your speech patterns and your gestures.

Time was divided into moments

only we two could savour.

I catch now your spirit,

yearn for the love within it.

They say the soul’s eternal,

its essence green and vernal.

Three times I woke in the morning

to behold without warning

my whole room filled with green light:

I felt a radiant warmth, no fright.

In five seconds every time it cleared, my vision,

like my computer screen comes to life and goes into action.

15 June 2003

In the back garden of Arzu’s shared house,

birds are twittering, washing on the line,

I’m sitting at a green wood pub table

writing these lines which I feel should be in Turkish

after the long interview I did yesterday evening.

This was the first night I’d spent from home

in years and years. I slept deeply

from 1.30 to 7 in the bare room,

now how good it is to eat a Turkish-made

breakfast outside, omelette and delicious yoghourt.

Writing Turkish prose for an interview

has drummed the poetry out of me.

On war as well I take a poet’s view.

I look back at the day – it’s nothing new

that I have forgotten what I wrote.

On the train now to Victoria,

they say in old age one becomes Torier,

not me, or the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand does,

heads and bodies ache, ears buzz

and my mother thinks she’s in prison

in her Nursing Home, cursing her fate.

Silver spoons, Crown Derby plates

are not for me, but if a hand to mouth

existence may be doled out

to me again I must not become uncouth.

White is the skin of my kin and kith

and it is my privilege

to live not in a Kurdish village

where as this poet I would have been shot.

My mother thinks I’m in a plot

paid by ‘them’ 100,000 pounds –

realistic to her, her paranoia sounds.

‘See what ‘ilham*’ it brings you’ says Waterlily,

for that’s what Nilufer means, and I don’t sit idly

but as the large free black coffee cools

at the café table of my Arab poet friend

I let the little associative pools

of energy spark in my brain’s dendra ends

and enter a state of relaxation

above all vexations of recent days.

He is not here, the poet Ouais

and I still don’t know how to spell his name,

unknown on the Saqi computer, but I knew I had spied real fame.

As I started this poem a tiny grey, white and blue pigeon feather

fluttered onto my table – birds often flock together

even inside stations. I am at my station.

* Ilham: in Turkish from the Arabic means ‘inspiration’.

It’s possible I should not write another poem on top of this last:

I’ve got a performance to catch, so I’ll have to compose it fast.

Here I realise it’s memories not the coffee that bring inspiration

or is it the waitresses that bring me my daily ration?

At stations the people are difficult – they are more on edge.

Beggars roam, not so level platforms, some are out on a ledge.

I get upset by conversations I can’t understand,

especially when they are just in earshot,

undertongue they seem, underhand

but I don’t light a cigarette before being shot.

I work for the reverse of a firing squad,

see the bullets recoil into the barrels and it doesn’t seem odd,

but recently in Cuba and Iran death sentences were carried out

on journalists, students and writers – did the world make a shout?

Preoccupied by Iraq, they could have gone almost unnoticed:

blindfolds are for living and dead, done and undone by the secret police.

WITH MY LITTLE I

Your destiny it will be clandestine,

your fate it will be fated.

As soon as you join us

with dollars you’ll be feted.

Poetry is not unlike espionage

or intelligence, messages in code,

the uncertain road,

the dependence on sources,

then suddenly in your bed:

the hand of the Mafia: a horse’s head.

23 June 2003

Three trains in a row – cancelled.

I sit powerless on platform 1, fuelled

by a black coffee from the Polish Coffee Bay.

I should have stayed on the Victoria train today.

The news says Connex South East has gone to the wall.

27 Jube 2003

My reading has gone to pot –

let there be no delusions about it.

Not that my eyes are shot –

I write not read – and flout it.

Already I had abandoned reading prose

in my three languages,

something in me long ago froze

seeing the lines going right across the pages.

Newspapers too I eschew,

on the news off the radio I chew,

and watch French cable TV.

Indeed I still keep on the ‘qui vive’

and interpret words live:

‘Hope I don’t die while I’m still alive.’

27 June 2003

FRIDAY ABOUT SUNDAY

The weekend comes in all its majesty

and opportunities for friendly gestures.

On Saturday with Ruth the poetry of Oktay Rifat,

on Sunday, well I don’t want to jinx that. . .

for even unread poems can make tongues wag

and I am tired of eternally playing the wag,

demolishing what should be serious with a joke,

where silence not a jest would be best.

I want my poems to be strong as an oak,

to come from the heart; and for the rest

that may befall me, cut me not down in my prime.

On Sunday we could have a serious fun time.

27 June 2003

Publ on internet (and translated into Russian)

I turn over a new leaf of this notebook every day

and indulge myself with fun and serious play.

I have found an outlet for my thoughts and feelings

and the result is a sort of spiritual healing,

which, however, depends on my moods’ well-being.

When I am buffeted I struggle back,

searching for white areas in black.

Most clouds are white enough to not need a silver lining

and lightning borders the black storm clouds

and delayed detonation of thunder is always loud,

the loudest sound the ancients heard

panicking the dogs, flocks and herds,

but its incomprehensible rumble

now mimics military strikes and trouble –

Zeus’ thunderbolts never left such rubble.

29 June 2003

FOR SHIRIN RAZAVIAN

You said you liked the thought

of bottled water, (I now add a bird: an avian)

at the end of your family name,

and ‘raz’ means ‘one’ or ‘times’ in Russian.

I said: ‘After all, you are ‘abi-hayat’,

the ‘water of life’ being interpreted.

Let neither of us ever put on high hats,

let our friendship always be asserted,

like it was this sunfilled day:

Veneziana and tuna salad at Pizza Express

and four perennial Peroni beers –

I took you by surprise by poems hot off the press,

you said you were overwhelmed, but I felt no fears.

Our friendship contains much humour –

you’ll hear it again when I read you this poem aloud.

Your black bag is like a gondola,

with Venezianas I’ve done Venice proud.

We travelled so far today forging a friendship

not just in poetry which we both worship

religiously. For your headache, caffeine

at the Café in the park.

(I once was a coffee fiend

and drank it after dark.)

This poem on the train nears my destination, is closing:

I’m impressed by you, feel your poems are imposing,

and that neither of us on the other are imposing.

Receiving and giving energy, a source of pure abi-hayat,

Shirin, my friend, let’s drink to that.

Sunday 29 June 2003

TO BEAD OR

The sky blue bead against the evil eye,

the bead a sniper trains,

the old man’s beady eye,

the worry beads, the prayer beads,

the rosary that’s told.

The Hippy beads

and a string around a dog’s neck.

Beads on an Abacus

and the Venerable Bede.

Acorn beads on a Quercus,

Hesse’s Bead Game to read.

A colourful list – you must admit –

there is even a bead shop in Covent Garden

where Juliet bought then strung

beads by the dozen for herself and for her cousins.

Beads are childhood, beads defy ages

and round tender young necks and wrists,

not to mention piercings in innumerable places.

Beads are creative

but still there are colonial beads for the natives.

30 June 2003

LETTER TO SHIRIN

1.

Sitting in a Turkish Café, breakfast digesting,

concentrating on remembering your hand gestures

at the Pizza restaurant table.

Our positive energy makes me able

to recall more than partially in my partiality.

The pros are many, the cons become prefixes

to versation and we are not contras in Nicaragua,

but consorting with each other for co-versification

and co-translation: the truest of collaborations.

2.

We ran with the idea of our book,

taking swift steps we’d never taken.

Two languages will meet at the backbone:

which editor will take a look?

Where is the middle eight, the hook,

to catch their commercial imagination?
Or would it be in this island nation

that our poetry will catch the people’s fascination:

I hope for your, for my, for our recognition,

for our metaphors to flame into ignition.

3.

My friend, for the word encapsulates all I desire,

off your swiftly tanning arm you gently brushed a tiny orange spider

into the grass near the oak-tree as we lay high on poetry:

may I give you a new word, I applied to Baudelaire’s verse,

for your controversial article you’re to write: exrotica: perhaps it works

and will enter the Oxford Dictionary,

but it’s my creative joke – like phobile moans,

my philological neologism when the former means

friend of logic, of the word, of languages.

I could go on like this to you for ages –

extemporising on our themes and variations

at this Turkish Café table, so alive

on a day when I don’t get to work till five.

Cont’d

You remember when you deleted:

‘Don’t talk rubbish.

you are talking nonsense’

from ‘Pain of a Wheat Grain’

That was quite right: both of us poets write sense.

30 June 2003

LE BONHEUR

The good hour of happiness –

the time frame for a poem,

a little shifting of stress

on the train heading for home.

Not for nothing do I address

you in these lines

as the day declines,

though I demand no redress.

I have known vicious circles

but know there exist the opposite.

I shall orbit your planet

as to the beach return the turtles.

Fifty sonnets you’ve written in Persian –

how happy the eyes that can read them!

???

These poems are not a broadside –

have nothing to do with warfare,

they are on the love not hate side,

though they frequently break the midnight curfew.

But this evening I write as the light fades,

I write to share with you.

Is your father near the Everglades?

I hope he likes your poems too.

‘Odi et amo’, Horace wrote –

‘I hate and I love’ how that can be said you know

but it’s an idea I don’t float.

The passenger sitting opposite and I quote,

says: ‘Is that poetry?’ but just as I show him my note

book, he has to get out of the train,

but his cheery: ‘We would have talked

a lot’, lifts my spirits though he detrained.

What reaction will you give? The soul has to outpour

at times, especially to the soul of the Dost.

I hope to God I’ll never bore

you. On the train I am at my post.

You should know: I’m not obsessive or possessive

though poetry for friends is my passion.

Flow mighty river and I will float on you.

Surely these lines from heart and head

are more important than the Times headline:

‘How Lady Archer tried to cover up her face lift’.

Give us a break or at least a rift!

I play spot the Harry Potter reader in the carriage –

the big red and yellow book for every age

is being read by a blonde girl in jeans jacket.

The money rolls in for J.K. Rowling.

You and I talked about the packaged packet,

how to get our works bowling

down the same alley.

And where is she, Calista Flockhart –

gone to good old Harrison Ford.

Sometime, you say, you’ll have to ford

the river of poetry

to cross over to the fertile land of the novel.

In prose I lose the plot

before I create it. What

ho, the poems flow:

the sprints rather than the marathon,

short length poems like Aronzon.

Now I have your translations to nurture,

look forward to diving into your culture,

to divining you future

by divining for the water of life

with the forked hazel twig of my pen.

1 July 2003

Grey day. Waiting for 9.30 to catch the train.

No Pain of the Wheat Grain

poet’s creative response.

Just be still and translate for the nonce.

Be still and let the seeds of future poems

sprout silently in their husks.

All roads lead to home.

This morning elsewhere is dusk.

I’m cold but your warmth is inside me.

2 July 2003

‘THE SEA AS METAPHOR OF THE SEA’ W.S. Graham

For Shirin R.

A few birds chortle as the sun comes out,

meditating as to how life will turn out,

somnolent but happy at my poem’s surge,

I feel like lying on the beach by the edge of the surf.

Your wave lifted me and carried me shorewards:

each of these waves move my life forwards.

I record their crests, bodies and troughs,

the fact that they’re not swings that cast me off.

How much pain have these sand grains gone through

to become so tiny, fine but gritty too?

Sky and sea are blue, but not yours truly,

in nature I eulogise you duly

with lines and rhymes not vulgar or unruly.

Though my energy is on an ebb-tide

even now I don’t want the words to hide –

but to praise from weakness into strength,

from shallows into depths.

Honest tiredness is not exhaustion:

more the wave that has worked without friction

lapping up the beach with caution.

These days in me there is a sea of emotion –

feelings energise the intelligence quotient.

We didn’t meet by accident,

our getting on well is not coincidental,

for within us both poetry is inherent,

yet the rest is not entirely incidental.

I write many poems to you – it’s true –

that’s because I’ve stored up an ocean

and because we share a passion

for languages and words of every hue.

I will not let anyone pour cold water on these,

anyway I am swimming in a kind of kind sea,

my feet not of concrete or clay but ‘rosy’.

See I whisper your rainbow words under my breath

and they don’t cramp me but give me breadth.

3 July 2003

Oh Lord, who created bird, beast and flower,

in this city where Big Ben tells the hour,

grant me my soul’s power

before injustice not to cower.

3 July 2003

It’s not that I didn’t want to email you,

but I thought I should restrain

myself: now again in the train

I search for words that will not fail you

like a troubadour searches out melody

and lyrics into a perfection of harmony.

Every weekday I go away on a campaign

but last weekend I virtually drank champagne

with you lying on the green sward,

with no knight’s lance or sword,

under the oakwood tree

and now I tune the merry notes,

the grace notes of our conversation,

the never false notes. I note

the quadruple repetition of notes

but regret it not. These are poetry,

these are melody

and if I hadn’t taken them in my head

I wouldn’t have slept at home like an oaklog in my bed.

4 July 2003

FOR SELCHUK AND MARIANNE

Bruce Springsteen and the East Street Band

are going ‘Down to the River’

and I’m thinking of Selchuk and Marianne

and know – simple rhyme – that both are givers

and comparing how many millions of fans

have listened to this band

and how many will hear this poem, banned

though it is not – but still I lend a hand

more than air guitar to Bruce

and drink not blood but cranberry juice.

This poet’s slim following,

the lack of volumes,

the vying for the contract – vay, vay, vay.

Selchuk, you know it too with your art

and Marianne with your photographs from the heart.

It becomes a struggle,

one that is politico-aesthetical.

No, our voices may not be heard like Bruce’s

but we too have our creative uses.

The passersby this summer day

break my concentration.

I’m sitting on the busy street,

far from contemplation.

The Turkish waiter moves my bag:

‘bu bolge tehlikeli’,

he says to me and lifts it:

‘there’s danger in this region.’

The bag my daughter gave me

is my treasured possession,

together with its contents

it sees my poems progression.

Many notebooks have passed through it,

my lines in them written,

they lie up on the shelf at home,

on computer now transmitted.

Their backlog is my inheritance,

foundation of my archive,

proof that I’m alive,

bad habits am I kicking.

Coffee is a quick fix,

perhaps its like these poems,

they’re full of energetic kicks

to reach into your homes.

9 July 2003

FOR SR

I forgot to put my palm on your forehead

to soothe the ache of the muscles of your temples.

I used to be really good at this:

it would have been an unorthodox kiss.

9 July 2003

All around the station the summer people walk,

they put me off my writing work

and I want to be completely alone

to write the poems I have to write.

Now I’m sitting in a pub with loud music,

my pint of lager making me slightly sick.

But I have to wait out thirty minutes:

the project to write a letter to Ken Livingstone,

a very good idea, innit?

to ask for premises for a Russian Centre –

I may not be the mother of the idea, but the placenta:

so I give nurture, now and for the future.

9 July 2003

Boisterous shouts fill the bar with noise:

I see the executives are still boys.

A Barry White sound-alike

must have been recorded at some ropey mike.

My lager is at half mast,

writing puts me in the present not the past.

I am exhausting fast,

pack up the rod after the last cast,

I’ll catch no more words this evening.

‘DOWN TO THE SEA AGAIN’ For SR

‘I must go’ as the old poem says,

to cool me and my poems off.

You’d caught a chill in the night air,

sore throat and cough.

Though the sea is far away, my dear,

my writing makes it near.

In French it’s cognate with mother

and I remember meeting my older brother

on the wrong Greek island – Naxos

instead of Ios before anyone could Fax us,

let alone send a backpacker’s email.

With my luggage and letters like a snail

I’d made my way round Middle and Near East,

was to drop in and dance at Wedding Feasts,

had been cautioned by a guard above Persepolis at dawn,

had glimpsed the Caspian, no caviar, no brawn.

Many years later in Tehran’s bustle

I had a drink at Xanadu with the poet Peter Russel

and presented him, who knew little Russian,

with books of Mandelstam Nadezhda and Osip.

‘O for an inch of blue sea, for just enough to go through

                                                            the eye of a needle’,

as he said, looking on life with the eye of an eagle.

Let the tip of this pen be like that eye –

you’ll see these sea lines first, but not before I do.

13 July 2003

In the Old Bull and Bush

a man sneezed like a dog barks,

for both of us it was like the shock of ambush.

A sunny day, but our shadows were not dark,

the world had taken the black out of chiaroscuro.

Our poems are not old fashioned curios,

today the ghazal and sonnet can be avantgarde

though writing them is getting even more hard

as time goes by and fundamentalism applies.

Our craft of spontaneity we ply:

the deepest abysses are under the sea,

buoyed up we can observe them comfortably.

If we invite each other, as your buddy, I’ll dive with you

and as for your mountains, though I have a fear of heights,

I’ll certainly overcome it for you

and take turns to lead and keep the line tight.

13 July 2003

'18 hours my brains work flat out'

you said – I noted the accurate plural

and made my singular brain into a double

then our four hemispheres made a quadruple,

but it was not just intensely lobal.

Into my head an ad jingle refrain,

‘Make your mouth a kid again’

reminds me of the ice cream cool as falling rain. 

On the grass my childhood game we did not play out

of hunting the four-leafed clover

but our friend the oak covered us over

giving half shade, half sun

for our conversation half serious, half fun.

You taught me the Persian for 'I'm happy' –

'hosh' was in it but the rest I've forgotten

but the feeling lingers happily –

and all my recent rotten

luck seemed to fall away into context

as I read your poetry texts.

My mind and heart concentrate

as before, no, as never before.

Our words are not trite - 

and there are so many more in store.

13 July 2003

CONDITIONING

The air conditioning on the train will give me a cold.

When I was twenty I wanted to be this old,

so here I am in a happy phase of my life,

in charge, charged up with a good friend, larger than life,

who writes and translates beautiful verse.

Now I have no need my fate to curse,

though poverty has raised my hackles:

I try not to hear the black witches’ cackles

but concentrate on you the whitest one

with the swiftly browning arms from the sun.

The thrill of knowing you, of regarding you,

without yet pronouncing the word love to you,

how you have powerfully moved my poetry,

how I believe we have a mutual sympathy

for each other – my cup runneth over.

From the far east, the white cliffs of Dover

to Land’s End in the south west

I would troubadour you as I do best,

though publisher John R. would give us no groats.

You are beautiful too in my mind’s eye.

I can hear your lovely voice in my inner ear:

let’s not be petrified, let’s take steps without fear:

our book, our play’s the thing

that will catch the conscience

of the people not the King.

14/15 July 2003

Is it only two days since I wrote my last lines?

It seems like a huge hollow between mountains.

But no poem’s end seems to face the final curtain –

I won’t impose on myself any punishments or fines.

But it is longer since I last saw your face

though now I have your photo, poems and translations.

I like this mixture – it seems eminently in place.

Hard work and fellow-feeling give us inspiration.

My rich private life revolves round poetry.

When your smile is as strong as our oak tree

how can I say I’m feeling lonely:

that would be living the lie and phoney.

But writing demands separation,

the breaths between words and strophes.

I’m not trying to hunt for trophies

though I’m an athlete in my verbal preparation.

Nathalie signed your copy of the Poetry of Arab Women,

my mother looked at your Star Poem

and announced it was like my poetry – an omen? –

as she complained about her third Nursing Home.

But today I missed you for the first time,

wanted to talk about you but no one would listen.

When I phoned you in my eyes there glistened

a sparkling expanding circle that disappeared in half an hour’s time.

So glad was I that two poems you had written –

for one day you’ll certainly outpace me.

It’s as much these poems as you who’ve smitten

me – not mere compliments but complementary.

Elementary my dear, elementally mentally sound,

the evidence has been found:

a case of requited translation and poetry,

a hybrid wheat grain grown into a spreading tree.

17/18 July 2003

It’s not only the poems but the quality of transmission

and distribution is a different fulfilment of the poet’s mission.

Though the ground is thorny and stony,

the sower’s hands horny and bony,

the seed must be broadcast on air,

then one day there’ll be a sea of rippling waves,

the golden corn will be like fair hair

and no one will stop this poet’s stare

as he weeds out the brambles and tares:

harvesting is a different activity…

18 July 2003

… that the world is vicious and cruel,

that happiness comes short pool after pool

and easily is overwhelmed by viciousness and cruelty

and comedy is of the gallows variety

and modern tragedies do not bring with them catharsis

and there are modern weapons rather than the Bacchante thyrses.

18 July 2003

THE FAR SEA

I’ve been waiting – to be alone with my notebook writing to you.

It’s the nearest I can get now to being alone with you.

This sea, compared with my recent poem is disenchanting,

whereas you in reality are ever more enchanting.

In this seaside café I’m camped,

in the evening would light poems’ hurricane lamp

in a wooden hut with you on the beach,

but know that idea is out of reach.

We are certified city dwellers.

On the bus going down Eminem and the yellers

intruded on my snoozing.

Here I’m not inclined to boozing.

By learning Farsi I believe I’ll see further into your soul,

though she (your soul) expresses herself brilliantly in English;

of course fluency in languages is never the whole

picture – more expressive feelings’ flash.

Sitting so close to the sea

with billions of ancient pebbles,

I am able to deal with troubles

and get a little closer to you and me.

Richard Pollock, my old school maitre,

who gave me early my Russian raison d’être,

continuing after my jump from the fenêtre,

told me, I, if anyone, Farsi would master.

If I could be as confident in life as in my poems,

as disciplined and brave at the same time;

if I could click on connections as in rhyme

I would have had different sort of homes.

Yet they say it’s life that dictates lines

and not poems life,

but the closer the integration

the less the threat of disintegration.

I wonder whether you’re writing a poem as I write:

like letters crossing, or a simultaneous email on line.

It might have happened today and it is a good sign –

though much poetry is done at night.

Now it is the evening of the day –

I sat and watched the young people play,

but unlike the pop song I let no tears go by:

there were many languages with feelings for saying.

19 July 2003 Hove

ON LOOKING AT SHIRIN RAZAVIAN’S POEMS

I read again your dozen poems –

but I have privileged information,

couplets too can demand explanations

of their feeling life in homes.

I try to establish why they strike

such resonant chords in me – like

I don’t know your language

but feel I’ve known you for an age.

I know what the Ashayer soothsayer started to say

but not the recent reader of your coffee cup.

I’m writing poems to you without let up,

combing through my feelings and yours in a way.

Suddenly I found the injured knight metaphor

for a bleeding sunset in Isfahan – for

me that means a great deal more

than my visit to the blue mosques of that city.

I met you late in my life: more’s the pity.

After childhood there are a limited amount of rainbows –

and have you ever seen before a white-knight-crow.

Anyway your poems (you write like me, Ma said) hand on

to me a peace that passeth all understanding

of mine of them – you retain your rites of mystery

in that you have achieved a vital mastery.

Perhaps there is no feminine for Ustad –

in my firmament your constellation is dozen-starred.

20 July 2003

I find myself running the bookstall in the Ocean at the Hikmet Cantata,

I called your mobile to say for two days tata,

though we’re not really out of touch, here I can’t attach at a

click a file for my new poems for you –

and there are quite a few.

I’ve got a bottle of Guinness on the go –

I know well whether I’m coming or going,

in fact with these poems’ assurance

written to you alone I feel I’m taking out their insurance

or even mine as though I’m giving you an inheritance before time.

20 July 2003 Ocean, Hackney

They are singing a plaintive Armenian

melody, my friend, Shirin Razavian,

in Turkish with spirit, oud, tambour and violin.

I am outside the hall but the music wells well.

You and I, too young, or other poets, who could tell

I doubt that we could have stopped any massacres

with poems, any more than we could stop the wars in Iraq, Re

this I still believe the road to peace is through the hearts of the young.

20 July 2003

Ocean

This train is running late

but the client is going to be later.

I have a love/hate

relationship with trains – er,

was once accused of translating

Gumilyov on them. His ‘Star Terror’,

it’s claimed he wrote on a train –

how they skate the quatrains

skimming the surface on the right track

but I’d take your arm while we’re alongside,

cross over the line to be more than just parallel.

After this summer we’ll wear autumn apparel –

I’d like you to be my poet for all seasons,

to find August in icy winter of the heart.

This is only the start…

NOTEBOOK POEMS

Two thirty in the afternoon –

I don’t want to kill time

or suicide it.

I decide it’s

time to liven up with some rhymes,

to enter the Dionysiac swoon.

I am interested in your 50 Persian sonnets

more than the latest whodunnits.

Sitting at one of the metal tables

on the sidewalk in Kentish Town,

these five or six hours enable

me to take stock and share with you

the selected poems I choose,

avoiding a catnap or snooze

and staying off alcohol and booze.

(That slight feeling of flatness

that comes from being without money.

You’d never know it, your Royal Highness,

the mere mention must sound funny.

The price tag of the Collected Robert Lowell

is forty pounds – you just have to howl.)

Turning in and out of the flow

like a rowboat in the current,

yet I am the stream,

the wind that teases your hair

and we both have our hands on the rudder,

the helm of our friend-ship.

Writing poetry demands fine tuning,

even obscurity must have clarity.

Olive trees too need pruning.

Rhymes need a comparative parity.

The run up to my reading day

and Robert Graves’ birthday.

The Coffeehouse Poems will be read at Tolli’s.

I only hope the event will be jolly.

I feel in our friendship there is no folly.

Poet owes it to poet

though it’s hard to make any lolly.

Oktay Rifat once gave me his brolly,

the one that had a patch of blue sky under it.

Like any other umbrella I lost it

before a Christmas in Turkey without English holly.

Unusually today I have time for reflection.

My knee is paining me on flexion.

I am starting to collect a selection.

(Three Leos’ birthdays are approaching –

Elizabeth, Nathalie, Shirin’s –

forgetting any of them I’d be reproaching

myself, with my Scorpio they’re a dynamite combination.

They come from different nations,

but all serve the dynamic of feeling,

their impact happily sends me reeling.)

Happiness, you say, is overrated.

I, on the whole, agree but you activated

it in me in two languages, a rarity

and I found it in a variety

of simple things – a line here, a line there,

a smile, shared laughter, a tress of your hair.

As for kindness being kind of dated,

I note your ‘Kind regards’ terminating

your emails and with the former I’m sated.

I know the difference between compassionate

and passionate and would rate them both highly –

we never deal with each other slyly.

These long free hours are coming to an end.

Incline your slender ear, let me bend

mine to hear these poems you’ll read aloud.

Even in freedom some things are not allowed:

the coarse, the vulgar, being overweeningly proud,

and later I learned by fate:

you are unbalanced by the emotions hate – and love.

21 July 2003

Last night you taught me,

how some rhymes rise

and some rhymes fall:

a thing I’d never noticed,

as a result my spirits rose

and any doubts fell.

*

Under threat from outside

but still the poems did not hide

or go into an almighty slide,

supported by a dozen people,

not by minaret or steeple

but by a social conscience.

Prophet poems demand prescience.

?22 July 2003

HIP REPLACEMENT: EXPROMPT BEFORE MY READING

I’m a pinning my hopes on being hip

not hip as in shooting from the hip

not as hip operation

or new hair creation

but in my peroration

in my poem’s creation

in my presentation.

A little bit of rap

a few rhymes’ traps.

Ageism, sexism, I throw them out

I’d deliver my words with contemporary clout

Eminem can rhyme Seamus Heaney says

but his philosophy’s a crime says I:

they say his crime pays.

Here’s one in the eye for an eye for an eye –

no truth in a tooth for a tooth.

Many friends can’t be here or have had to fly,

but welcome I say, twice welcome.

24 July 2003

THE PRIVILEGE GREEN

Green is emerald, green is jade,

green are the leaves that cast the shade.

Green is for go, green is for grow,

the transparent green of the waves’ undertow,

the lawn of grass to be mowed,

the skin on a frog or toad

by a pond with bright green algae.

Green is the grass that makes others high,

green is the green of a greenhorn,

like a hornless calf when it’s born.

Green is the green of the greenback,

the crisp five pound note from the bank.

Green is of jealousy they say,

green is a fruit when unripe,

green is of the laurels

of the shirt I wear for reading.

Green is the new leaf we turn over.

25 July 2003

The needed boost from an espresso,

the chance to express, oh,

some of my feelings in a free conversation.

See, the trapped bird flies to liberation

from my ribcage on winged words.

Pessimistic moods disable, are absurd

and though I may never be a knight or sir,

no fur will fly yet I will still stir

the hearts of the people

and relax taut nerves to supple

and sense the echo of the ripple.

25 July 2003

A cold sweat on my brow

as though I’m having a row.

I’ve smoked too many cigarettes,

they are our modern ziggurats,

the province of Ahuramazda

and Zoroaster.

The pace of life is getting faster,

fire is burning at greater speed.

If Jelalledin Rumi is the Master,

who is my dost and who is the asker?

On what divan will I first read his Divan

in the original and take a break from the Russian Ivans?

I swear this pen is lucky,

writes poems strong and plucky.

One day it’ll run right to left

and my eyes will follow

but my English poems will not be bereft

or the vowels grow more hollow.

It will be a rest day tomorrow,

a surfing the waves’ crest day.

Perhaps I’ll catch a breaker,

not to be a giver but a taker,

relax for my own sake

so that I can soothe any ache,

yours and mine and get up after nine.

25 July 2003

Bless William Bell

for inventing the telephone,

just five minutes of your call

and all is right as rain.

What anxieties within me reign,

that it needs poems to rein

them in, then they build up again?

I hope though to remain sane

without seeing you for a week.

It’s not that I am weak

but have the strong desire,

like an eternal fire,

to reflect on my moon, my sun,

on your paradisal  mind and body.

27 July 2003

I am a misafir on this train,

in Turkish a guest, in Persian a passenger

but today not a commuter

going to my work to relieve pain.

Now it’s the tube I am going down

for the long drag to Stamford Brook.

I’m not reading a book

but writing in my notebook.

Last night I read Rod Wooden’s

‘Seven Armenias’ in one long draft.

I wonder why he left out all mention

of the non-Colombian massacre, was it by intention?

He being politically committed and fearless.

27 July 2003

A pretty pass the world’s come to, but I don’t pass,

don’t opt out, my vision is clear.

Our poems are brave, sweetheart,

and they are from where this friendship started and starts,

products of our brains, our old souls

generating power like burning coals.

See, the train has passed Battersea Power Station,

what electricity that produced for the nation!

Now ghostlike the four towers loom in dereliction,

let them give us two power to generate an edition.

27 July 2003

Not like the pedestrian

passes a statue set up on a pedestal

do I worship you, but ship words in

to immortalise the whole

of your body, mind and soul.

Not like the old master in the studio with the model

which has become wholly traditional…

27 July 2003

(STARTED NEW NOTEBOOK)

Viktor Krivulin, you’ve gone, Ken Smith too.

I’ll deal with death through you two,

but I will offer you my hand

for a short handshake

when my hand does not shake –

I am sure we understand

each other and life is for living –

less taking than giving.

28 July 2003

On this sunfilled day

the train forges through

a cool couloir of green,

before coming to Loughborough Junction.

At this juncture as the cumulus

clouds fleecily accumulate,

you will be starting your accounts

for the day in North London.

Perhaps being actively busy not business is what counts –

see, for a moment my financial worries are undone.

I think our prophetic poems,

profitless though they may be

will enter peoples’ homes

more to their profit, more actively

than the paper money in their sky rockets,

chirpy as a Cockney sparrow,

my poems fly in formation like the Red Arrows’

display – and I show off for you

wearing your colours of green and blue

as a knight at the tournament

happy to win your smile of approval

with peaceful words meant

and written for you alone, but I would be in denial

if I didn’t appreciate that they are for others too.

Oh my swallow, my hirondelle

let’s fly out of the blue above the green,

create heaven, banish hell

on earth, it is in our power, Shirin del.

FOR JOHN SCHLAPOBERSKY

Two strong men and true, at the Lido opposite MF,

we talked about our perceptions of the War

inherited from our parents.

The unspoken things rather than the spoken.

He said they might have been a huge factor

in my breaking down in 69.

His father took him and his brothers and sisters

to the battle theatres in Northern Italy

and that was the first time he gave a commentary.

‘Which river was it then’ he asked ‘that your father

crossed in total exhaustion?’

I’m reading ‘America’s Children’ by James Thackara

about the nuclear bomb and that war.

My swallow, honest tiredness is upon me,

I may not write a whole poem to you tonight.

Sometimes even the best fighters get tired of the fight,

but then the miracle of relaxing sleep works on me.

You know, swallow, in your flight from Persia

you had to touch the earth sometimes.

While I write these lines, even while I sleep I am not in inertia:

my best connections are coupled in rhymes.

I look forward to your 50 gazels, the Persian sonnets,

I bet they’re chok guzel, as you who are so on net

with your words in two languages.

It seems I have known you for ages

and this presages well for our friendship.

The youthful green light of my vision,

your desire that we should be hip,

all these things make me envision

an enrichment of your poetry and mine.

Now on the train it’s fifty five minutes past nine,

my swallow, my hirondelle, my parastu,

let me run these lines past you.

28 July 2003

The hirondelle will be perching at her desk,

will have opened her Pandora’s Inbox

and found my midnight email.

In her inner ear so acute

she will hear the lines of prose,

a little bouquet of gul-e roses,

to make her feel so cute.

29 July 2003

*

Are you sitting comfortably at your screen?

Then I’ll begin.

Is it blue, black, white or green?

Is your fairy password some variation of Shirin?

This morning I feel lethargic

not the hero of tragic

events I have to interpret.

After 15 seconds I interrupt –

that way my memory serves me better.

Since email came I have written almost no letters,

my friends offline have a right to complain,

but not everything not from this computer is plain.

These handwritten Notebooks prove that again and again.

29 July 2003

Asiye has got political asylum in Sweden!

Adam and Eve were the first refugees, chucked out of Eden

for dissident action – eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil –

how weak a metaphor even given the role of the snake-devil.

Who gives a fig for that pomegranate or apple?

Yet since it’s Genesis it retains its appeal,

and talking serpents for evermore are crushed under heel

and even the Emperor without clothes wore a fig leaf.

30 July 2003

It’s good to be writing in Tolli’s Café again

rather than struggling against the rhythm of the train.

A customer on his own declares that he had:

2 double espressos. a single espresso,

a bottle of water and ‘possibly a croissant’.

That’s like saying ‘there was possibly a crescent moon.’

*

You escaped me into your green garden

of the mind when I was right in the city.

I read your poems now with positive envy,

I, tired sustainer of exiled words, want to have written

them and that is my highest compliment.

Now I have only ten minutes left to walk to work,

but when I read them again your poems will be supple, pliant as a plant.

31 July 2003

‘I’m on the train.’

This is how it sounds

the mobile phone refrain,

but it’s different in verse,

muted, not so adverse.

I’m on my way to Golders Green

to visit not you but the Russian poetry scene,

Daniel Weissbort and Valentina Polukhina.

I’m not looking for grass that’s greener –

our multilayered friendship suffices.

God bless it as you said and God bless

and keep us evermore in the spirit that addresses us.

1 August 2003

FRIENDSHIP

We are bound by friendship and poetry ties,

love and adoration entail different responsibilities –

you are intuitively right – I will honour our handshake,

such an English gesture it surprised me,

but one day when we are together and your head aches

I will take my palm to your temples – a prize

for me who makes part of life unscaring people

and all this too I interpret as friendship.

Pub by MF

1 August 2003

You said ‘Perhaps we have to wait till we get home to write this,’ so we wandered the Camden Lock Bazaar, wondering at liquid honey amber and the lapis lazuli blue you love. A cake of soap looked good enough to eat, herbal, ‘like helva’ I said. We didn’t really pause at any stall. I remember the feel of your arm in mine.

Now I sit at Golders Green station patiently waiting for the train. It’s come and I board. These days I’m never bored – opening up my words’ hoard on board. At the Pub I had given you my Yeats and James Thackara’s ‘America’s Children’. In Turkish ‘childirin’ means ‘go mad’. The pact we made to each other was to pull each other out of  bad moods as we ascended Hampstead Hill to find a long queue outside the station. So on to Golders Green and as I got out  of the car whom do I meet if not Christina from Amnesty International. I show he Asiye’s book.

The reason I’m not at home by 10 is I bumped into the Arab poet Ouais at the Café in Victoria, sitting drinking coffee in a low mood. After a brief conversation which keyed in so well to your poetry I read him ‘Web of Wind’ and ‘Dying Young’. His praise was effusive and genuine – I know he is a stern critic. I read the poems as though they were my own, of my family of poems, loud above the station noise, pausing to repeat lines misheard or especially praised. Then I read him my ‘The Sea’ and he certainly liked that, his arm gestures emphatic. Why is it a chance-met Arab poet can give such positive criticism?

I’m feeling wide awake on the train. Our laughter ebbs and flows in my brain. We talked about more than doubling memory when two people are together, like piggy-back computers. Now of that memory I have less than half, as I return home alone. I can visualise you quite accurately at the café where I bought cigarettes from the machine. I remember ‘mashin’ is car in Farsee. I am so serious about learning Persian and am so happy I have come up with the novel phrase Shirin del. This is my first prose to you outside emails, my Hirondelle.

Surfing on the crest of the wave,

in the middle of the hot night

it broke in a titanic panic attack,

silent as an iceberg. I shuddered

at noises from the street:

this was great terror

and at first the radio didn’t help.

But I had many lifeboats available

and I baled out the seawater.

All waves break – that is their nature –

and I’m back in the saddle: to ride another.

All waves are joined, all waves are individual –

there is peril on the sea, but it has to be crossed

and lives have to be found not lost.

‘Women and children first!’

the cry goes up and though this is no shipwreck

I have to think first of my women, my child

and the child inside me,

perhaps all of them I’ve been prone to neglect.

3 August 2003

It’s not a case of reading our minds –

suffice it to read our lines:

they are true lifelines

faithful to our spirits,

lifelines but metaphorical.

Abandonment of rhythm and rhyme

is not at issue.

A more accurate reflection

of the thoughts’ tissues

is what I’m driving at.

Rhyme is always internal,

though at the end of the line,

inherent, often comes infernally

easy for me. Plucked reverentially

from the huge referential

cortex of my right brain

but ordered too by the left.

Last night I made some paranoid

connections in the depth of the night

and gave myself a helluva fright,

but I recovered swiftly

as I recognised their origins.

If I have any genius

it is in languages and their connections

but I am always open to correction

from you who cherish feelings and words.

Before I came to this café

I plucked a stalk of lavender.

There’s a big display of it

outside our front door.

I pause to smell it.

I’ve been writing this

while the patron hoses down the doors,

not ready yet to make my brunch.

This café is a few paces away from home –

for in the last few weeks it’s turned from flat to home.

My £800 bridge cracked and caved in on

a minced lamb kebab

with Neil Belton of Fabers.

I failed to get a Royal Literary Fund grant.

Last night it wasn’t the neighbours

who disturbed me but voices in the road and memories

of what I’d translated and written.

Suddenly inordinate dangers,

not exactly child’s play to your powerful verses,

the ones that curse Satan,

arose from the risks I took in Coffeehouse Poems,

in the Russian poets on Chechnya,

in Asiye’s prison memoir,

in the daily grinding HR interpreting

though these may be my finest hours.

The neglected child in me needs protecting

by the full grown adult.

I will plant and cultivate

a whole bed of childhood lavender

for you for that simple statement on the child inside

when I was beside you in the car as we rose up Hampstead Hill

and cut back translation, ultimately vicarious yet still with its thrill.

Long live our originals!

3-4 August 2003

POEMS’ SPAN

You said it was sweltering hot as you went out for coffee

and here I am sweating with inspiration in the carriage, but I offer

you this poem in this deserted train

and I’ve got the rhymes back on track

and I am training the words into lines.

I hope I’ll always have something to say to you,

some poems to write to you, mail to send you,

friend in fair weather and foul.

Little swallow, who wears no cowl,

don’t migrate,

neither north in summer,

nor south in winter,

you are so great,

your wings’, your poems’ span is without end

for this poet and this friend.

4 August 2003

???

I’m missing rereading my Russian poetry.

This evening I’d like to read Khlebnikov

in Iran. It’s not that I’ve had enough

composition but before I start Persian I want to try

my remaining teeth on something equally complex.

As far as I know poetry is my biggest complex

and rhyming, some would say, my obsession.

I’m good too at the one hour session

interpreting Turkish and Russian.

I’m not good at dusting and plumping cushions

or keeping my room tidy, though these may be easier.

The computer chipper and paperless inside seems

to produce paper like there’s no tomorrow.

Suddenly I’m writing this on the train

surrounded by bearded men,

uncomfortable as in my nightmare again.

‘Because you’re mine, I walk the line’

Johnny Cash sang in San Quentin Jail and it registered,

though none of these poems will activate the cash register.

4 August 2003

Our bravity, our specific gravity

demands treatment without fundamentalist mentality.

Have you noticed how we play – with fair fiery fairy

words and concepts? It’s like someone

who has come to a language late, one

who is a friend to the language talking to a friend

they trust – letting them read volumes

between the lines. Nothing looms

dark as an iceberg at night

and fireworks – which I don’t like –

remain fireworks with green orange and red light.

And we traffic and take not drugs

but pure poetry. It does matter that yours comes from the East

and settles in the West

and mine looks East through Western eyes.

4 August 2003

RED SUNSET

When you see a red sunset

when I am long gone,

think of me as wounded but fighting on,

as your injured knight of Isfahan,

united in Erfaan, perfect and whole,

gleaming a smile there in the night of the soul,

then smile back at me and let a starlike tear smart:

I loved you from the very start

but I bound my love in friendship

so we would never part.

5 August 2003

LONDON BRIDGE

I bought a chicken sandwich

for the beggar with the stomach ulcer.

‘I don’t give money these days’ I said,

but while I bought it someone unseen

threw half my espresso against the sandwich fridge.

I retired to smoke and drink the rest

feeling fairly noble.

On the tube train I wrote ‘Red Sunset’

and couldn’t stop my tears – true sign of good poetry.

The first two lines came on the escalator.

5 August 2003

On the train to Victoria,

it’s an either or I er

day. Do I go to the Saqi

launch, hoping there won’t be sarcy

people there and collect my Asiyes

or do I concentrate on my West and Shirin’s Asia

and write the preface I’ve promised us.

Both could be the ultimate plus.

*

A cool verandah over a lavender bed,

somewhere the Mediterranean comes into my head

where thyme is abundant as time.

Ancient Greek poetry is metered not rhymed

but that is no reason to jettison it:

but how not to sound old fashioned in a modern sonnet?

*

Hunkered down in the tube.

I’ve lost four of my Russian zubs

not in a fight but on a mince kebab

when I was talking more than rhubarb

with Neil Belton the editor.

‘Love thy Faber as thyself.’

After 6 August 2003

HEATWAVE

1.

So hot, but not the dry heat of Iran,

sleepy, bewildered, but I still can plan

a few lines of poetry. ‘Let me run’

the poems cries. ‘Even in this hot sun?’

The poet replies. Well at least in the evening

though that is not cool either.

The seasons don’t seem to be evening

out, but we maintain a buoyant mood

about our book, though we are sweltering, baking

a few miles from each other, still taking

in and giving out the breath that inspires,

though we are far from academic dreaming spires

and further from the activities of ‘jasus’ spies.

10-11 August 2003

2.

We’ve not really talked about the effect of this heatwave,

in the olden days we’d retire into a cave,

or go higher into the mountains

or strip off and bathe in fountains.

The fish just go deeper in the sea,

for them it is vertico-horizontal simplicity.

I took the record heat of yester-

day in long horizontal siestas.

It was truly a Sun-day.

How were you, I asked on phone and email?

I seek out shade, remain pale,

try not to let thoughts go stale –

when my or your words fail

the other’s will avail.

That’s the beauty of our two poet book,

more than double duty means we’ll hook

more readers.

11 August 2003

3.

There can never be shade on the sea

(except from clouds, boats and sails I thought retrospectively)

and Caspian, Mediterranean even North are far from us.

In this heatwave I’m not making too much of a fuss

though the heat does drain

and there is a desire for rain

and for the emotions it’s not that hot.

When we were having our photo shoot

at the old Bull and Bush, I swear I could

see big black birds migrating in formation

and all this is for your information.

11 August 2003

FOR SR

It’s good for us to be settling in to working with poems again,

it’s good to be feeling feelings other than distress and pain,

it’s good to be a human being and humane,

to pick up the slack and strain

of conversations that are far from plain.

It’s good to hear from firm friends

yet to save abi-hayat on a hot day

for the one friend with whom this poem begins and ends.

11 August 2003

TRAIN ON HOT EVENING

I have never seen faces on the train

look so blank, stunned, stoned with the strain

of weather and work. Through the year it’s like a refrain

but I work with poems against the grain,

harvesting their crop of grain.

11 August 2003

Freedom is a rare state of mind,

for most people want to be bound.

Freedom is sought but hard to find:

it may be the seeing of the blind.

I hope we won’t blunder ourselves into an abyss

by stumbling over an emotional risk,

for we balance on a rope fine as a hair,

the lines that will take readers across to there.

12 August 2003

I should be translating a Turkish article,

but not a particle of me wants to do it.

I prefer to tickle these canticles

into action than run my mind through it.

We didn’t feel too hot on the hottest day ever:

it fell on a Sun-day, a day not of rest in the heather,

when a bee from the lavender patch

came through my unlatched window

and alighted on the sheet below.

12 August 2003

Elle, this wonderful Hirondelle

has migrated into my heart and mind,

a swallow for all seasons, kind rather than unkind.

I can’t yet read her ‘Crow and Nightingale’.

To restrain a Persian ‘asb’ you need a farthingale.

So far we have done without nights in gale

either metaphorically or in reality:

we met up for poetry

and got something more:

a sea of feelings lapping the shore.

13 August 2003

BREATHING  THE SONNET

Just ten minutes to craft a poem

in the Greek Café off the Walworth Road,

where daughter works and the Thursday traffic zooms

not observing the highway code.

Maybe my last visit to Maya my CPN –

I’ve moved on – perhaps I’ll never be here again.

I am the MD of my MD,

always able to manage my interpreting sessions

and bounce back out of the abysses.

Our friendship with the two-cheeked kisses

more than supports my addiction to poetry,

inspires it from the depths to the heights with all their variety

till it is natural as walking or breathing

in health, forsaking nothing.

14 August 2003

For me this summer is what the taxi drivers

call ‘the kipper season’ when work takes a dive.

With that in mind I am going to eat a kipper

at Bromley North station where the trains don’t run on Sunday

in – ideally for me – somewhere between a bar and a café.

Clean out of tobacco and tired

of the rhyme ‘back oh back’

I’ll smoke oh smoke these lines in my pipe.

In Iraq they’ve exploded the pipeline

into Turkey, something I talked about

in the novel I gave up in 79.

It makes me think what fictions

of mine will come true in 2029.

17 August 2003

The train is going not from anywhere but to you,

this is the half full cup syndrome.

I will not stop writing to you

when our book, launched, has left the aerodrome.

Tempting isn’t it, to take flight in another craft together

and launch the rowboat and not rowing, row through

                                                             the fair and foul weather,

through anti-poetry’s oppressive atmosphere.

Perhaps to rope together and ascend Mt Rumi

into translation or to squeeze into the bathysphere

and escape deep into the ocean of languages so roomy

there are no obstacles except on the seabed.

17 August 2003

POET FOR POET

I’m an hour early, Hirondelle,

so I pause at Victoria, ma belle

and start another poem that dwells

on us not alone and two poets departed.

It tolled, the knell

for Kathleen Raine and young Ken Smith,

the latter helped prisoners as a wordsmith,

the former to read I’ve not started.

I’m sure they’re not in hell

but whether they’re in heaven

is debatable. They kneaded words with leaven

and lived not by bread alone. Parted

with this everyday world,

the sails of their friendships are furled,

but their poems must continue,

be more than fans retinue.

Kathleen’s poems for me will be new,

Ken was one of the strongest poets I knew.

Victoria 12 noon

17 August 2003

‘WHAT IS AN IDYLL?’

Id ill: ego well

After Freud

You asked this question, Hirondelle, as we sat on a bench

by the Thames opposite the good boat Salient.

‘Idyll’ was then to you something alien,

something less English than French.

So we started working and now I ?read

idyll of childhood, idyll of summer

and now add idyll of you, idyll of me, idyll of you and me.

Of course the rhyme riddle came freely

like a gift from my ‘complex’ brain,

now I decide a truce as I catch the 7.05 train

and as I resume without restraint

to play this cheeky word game

I realise a pang of loneliness

that you, my fiend, my better than half

are driving up to Finchley North

and I’m heading to Bromley South

then I realise our poems are living together,

sleeping in notebooks and files together

and this our collaboration is unique for poets in the West.

‘What if they think we’re in love?’,

you say after you’ve read your poem to me

and I pause for a long silence

and say: ‘They will think what they think’ hence,

conscious of Iranian and English gossip

I just hold up the model of Mandelstam Osip

and his friendship with Akhmatova consummated in verse –

we could do worse than following their example,

and yes, I would say our friendship is a miracle, an idyll.

17 August 2003

I am open, not as an open wound

but as the lips of an open mouth

mouthing words to befriend not wound.

With you, Shirin, I am not uncouth

and I hope you see the chivalry

of these old, fashioned words

and that I’m not hung up on jealousy or rivalry

though fiercely loyal to you and your and my words.

I find in the week I need a little top up,

perhaps more than a phone call or email,

but I’ll make it to next weekend with a stash of poems without fail

and I notice a big surge after we meet up.

We talked about whether the poems write us,

Pasternak and Tabidze believed this*,

but even Muse’s dictation or automatic writing are not for us,

for we inspire each other there is no doubt of this.

I can only see plus signs in our friendship,

we push for the end, the finishing of the book

while both of us are secretly planning the second,

just once simultaneously an abyss beckoned

but we turned our pens into shepherd’s crooks

and hooked out the black sheep as it fell,

an acrobatic feat, and all is now well

as well as an idyll this afternoon by the South Bank

of the Thames, strolling arm in arm and we drank

a pint each of McAffreys – I have to admit I have some blanks

of memory – hence poems – but I remember the feelings

with nostalgia of a few hours later:

the wonderful feeling of our book already half achieved

and your back-up doesn’t require us

to panic about your menacing computer virus

although it leaves us aggrieved.

Here I am not reeling but relieved

at the realisation that our poems will be freed,

not undercover but under book covers.

It’s like recovering from a depression

that didn’t exist: ‘id ill, ego’s well’

‘and all manner of things will be well’

and this is the definition of an idyllic afternoon.

17 August 2003

Many poems have I written to you:

they’re like dresses in your wardrobe,

predominantly blue but not the blues.

How did the crystal I gave you

match your jeans top

even down to the striations of colour?

For us blues and greens have a definite allure.

Lapis and turquoise I would rob

rather than diamonds,

they are in our world, notre monde.

Without pleas or demands

I’m tidying up my act,

tightening my poems – and that’s a fact:

only when they’re shipshape can I relax.

18 August 2003

BIRTHDAY POEM or is it ‘birds’day poem’?

I

Shirin del, you remember the green and black Persian bee-eaters

and the rollers bluer than the Isfahan  mosque tiles

and I remember the red and white gul and black carpet

I bought in the bazaar in Shiraz, a bizarre true abbreviation of your name,

a Baluchi bargained down to £18, I remember still ‘si sat panzda tuman’.

I little knew then, carefree and young as I was, this was an omen

and that I would often fly off on the carpet,

my pet-named, Hirondelle, and that one day we’d land up friends

and you’d suggest a walk across Camden lock on an arched bridge

but then asked sweetly, Shirinly, if I suffered from vertigo.

There is one country, your homeland, where you can’t go

and you are in exile in this sceptred isle,

completely at home flying like a bird in air in this English language,

while I make tentative moves towards Farsi,

aim my sights at seeing far in it:

but this is your Birthday poem innit,

enough of me, nuff said,

sweet day Shirin, to your heart and head.

18 August 2003
BIRTHDAY POEM

II

What can I give you Rich as I am?

If I were beside you we would drink a dram.

If I were a rich man I’d give you a car

but as I am I give you – what we are.

What can I give you though you’re near not far?

A goldplated contract to make us stars?

A horoscope to follow a course through the stars?

But as I am I give you – what we are.

18 August 2003

BIRTHDAY POEM III

1.

An extra poem, an extra gift,

a little more word-energy to give you a lift.

Sometimes a tiny earth tremor

is enough to make the plates shift,

what makes our worlds move is serious humour –

often that’s found at the playful end of the line

like a fish hooked on schoolboy twine.

I hope you included our book in a secret birthday wish.

2.

It’s good writing to you at the end of the day

with my interpreting and your accounting out of the way,

relaxing in a pub before sunset’s rays,

invisible in this city, go from orange to reds

then sink into the twilight, crepuscular bed

and it is not shared speech but what the poems say

that with a delay will make its way homewards.

Sometimes I have to be a little bit forward –

to anticipate the storyline’s motion onward,

to jump into the arms of our second book

and to search for a new hook,

to tackle the themes we formerly forsook.

3.

Giving up translating poems from Russian and Turkish

releases a spate of energy in my good old English.

I read Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas

as though for the first time, but still have time as

it goes by to gather thoughts on Akhmatova for Elaine:

they seem familiar these garden paths and lanes.

I don’t lead you up them in the metaphorical

but the literal sense – here a bed of Persian gul-i rose,

here a patch of lavender, pause while we pose

for a photograph in which you can just spy a bee.

The questions are less literal than rhetorical

and I am searching for what will be perennial, permanent

for us in poetry and life, through the years renascent,

evergreen and ever green in our so recent friendship,

which we so don’t want to stumble or slip

but gel. I believe implicitly that we influence our fate,

that’s why I said humour can move the earth’s plates.

It’s as if we’re mentors to each other,

a thing I couldn’t be to my lost, dead brother,

who died when an earthquake shook his heart.

Shirin, I’ve strayed off your birthday theme

into I hope not an irrelevant scheme.

Do I carry you with me? – the meaning of metaphor –

and can I detect when I’m becoming a bore?

One and a half of my notebooks are dedicated to you,

your inheritance, my shoring up that we will never part,

happy birthday sweetheart, from your lionheart.

19 August 2003

GIVE, NOT TAKE LIFE

We change in lifegiving moments,

we change as a result of omens:

I’ve changed as a result of this woman,

this poet – perhaps reverse the order –

and my poetry is easier and harder,

brain and heart food stored up in a cool cellar

and we go out to campaign to do battle

with the swords of our words not tittle tattle,

poking fun at sacred cows and cattle

in the quest for peace we’re on our mettle,

waiting for the world to catch up with us – and settle.

20 August 2003

FERTILE CRESCENT

I’ve come a long way in the last dozen years

but still I have to take precautions

too easily panic could come from real or surreal fears,

so it is wise for me to be cautious,

to shepherd poems onto the page,

to keep human rights’ road rage

to a pilot lamp strong as a candle flame,

to walk and work against being lame

especially in my brain which Peter Levi called ‘radically sane’.

You certainly pass the ‘rain in Spain’ test

and chose the best accent models off the TV.

For lines I am always on the ‘qui vive’.

I am having one of my sparkling dotted crescents

in the eyes. I’ve got used to their ascents and descents

but never get the lightest pain of a grain of a migraine.

The crescent scintillates and expands

till half an hour later it lands

up outside my field of vision and

the watery pool disappears

till a few weeks later it appears again.

You may ask, Hirondelle, what this means to you and me –

well, in the last of these episodes I was on the phone to you, you see,

so any remaining sting doesn’t touch me, like our furry friendly bee,

for which simple healing, my friend, my thanks.

20 August 2003

The only poet in English who wrote two or three poems a day

was Sylvia Plath, said Elaine,

yet I am not practising escapology

just writing in lyric sections a eulogy

to you and where’s the harm or self-harm in that?

Time on tube or train as I write passes rapidly –

the current of transparent poems flows limpidly –

better than staring at fellow passengers vapidly

and I have to tell you candidly,

apart from the times when you’ve driven me

and we talk, I’d rather be singly

travelling on these modes of transport.

Fast walking now is my only sport,

swimming pools don’t beckon me

and I feel a gym would con me,

but my smile glows fit as a candle flame

and occasionally, you say,

a poem of mine makes you smile all the same.

20 August 2003

Waiting for my poet friend Nolan in The Ship

where once I wrote some Coffeehouse Poems in one hour and a half.

I’m drinking a pint of London Pride not a half

and dwelling on the principle of friendship.

Nolan and I have been buddies for decades,

probably will be till I need a deaf aid.

I had to ask him for a big favour,

to borrow his Akhmatova so Elaine could get again a flavour

of my translations. Now I’m at London Bridge:

the book is in the bag, sandwich from fridge

eaten and the memory of a good conversation.

Nolan is a contracted gardener in the Royal Park:

as to my interpreter’s contract the benefit is still in the dark.

20 August 2003

ANYONE FOR TENNIS?

Selchuk is a generous support,

a doubles partner at the sport

of translation and interpreting.

I call our humour supportive

even in Turkish ‘sportif’.

Both of us feel threatened

by diminishing returns

though our service remains ace.

We don’t want to retire hurt out of this place:

we still want to play opponents not the umpire

and neither of us is running an interpreter’s empire.

Through the film of perspiration

we want to draw inspiration,

not to withdraw into our shells at night

into post interpreters’ stress disorder.

If indeed we are under orders

give us the right our corner to fight.

20 August 2003

Hi Shirin, here am I sitting with Akhmatova’s Notebooks,

not watching the clock but the cook

making breakfast for a man in overalls.

I can say that over all

life is cool and if I can’t be interpreting

and working there’s nothing better than writing

to you in a Café of my choice,

having given up translation, now finding my own voice.

22 August 2003

Sitting in the Arcola Theatre foyer

I practise Le Boyer

on my poems – natural childbirth –

and the theatre is more earthed

than most – the sweat of the sweat shop

it was still hangs in the air. Stop.

Think about the rags they traded,

the workers exploited and unaided:

not unlike the slave labour force

that built Greek Theatres by force.

23 August 2003

The week stretched like an age

and we both had other things on our mind.

I couldn’t do my lessons on the Persian language

but despite or because of everything I find

and you found time to write several poems.

It seems all roads lead to poem: the eternal city,

in drought and flood, in blood and when down and out –

and in peace’s integral entity.

23 August 2003

‘Terry and Julie walk over the river’ Waterloo Sunset: The Kinks

But now you and I walk over Waterloo Bridge

thirty five years after the song and you edge

into the pre-sunset conversation:

‘Can’t (or was it ‘shouldn’t’?) you write something more general

about our friendship?’ Sabir, be patient,

your words always move me, Hirondelle.

Initially, what, I thought, is general about hearing

the dramatic synopsis of ‘Farhad and Shirin’ sitting

on a bench with a couple of cappuccinos

below the Hayward Gallery?

Then I thought: the bench, the river, the coffee

and then realized, yes, the English language,

the couple of us, two birds freed from the cage

of a hard week – for I saw your head bowed

for the first time as we walked and pow-wowed.

Between smokes we sucked half a packet of soft mints,

you put your bottom lip out when I said I’d bought hard mints,

purchased two cassettes of Teddie with his silver clarinet and vocals

and later I gave the rest of the royal mints to a beggar-local.

But here we are again sitting by the river,

rubbing shoulders and I am my poetry reader and you the storygiver

and magically tell of Farhad and Khosrow and their almighty cross rows,

Farhad, who constructed a milkaduct to bring Shirin shir (milk)

                                                                             from the cows.

Who stabbed Shirin and who died by their own hand?

And I can’t say that it’s general: reader, do you understand?

But we walked by the water on dry land,

and pow-pow the words played like ping-pong balls

and I applauded but chided you for writing a poem – all

on a scrap brown envelope.

Now two or three weeks of hope

for our Rainbow of Memories Manuscript.

Let’s light candles in crypts

and in the crypts of our hearts

as the poet said: ‘This is how it starts!’

Time ago, Julie Christie and Terence Stamp walked in song over

                                                               this bridge from the National.

I’m proud to walk over it with you intentionally

mentioning the parallel –

here it is the poem: but is it more general, my Hirondelle?   24/8/2003

My eyes contain the colours of the rainbow,

its span is nature’s beauty,

a little sun, a little rain on duty:

you are the rainbelle, the arc de ciel si beau.

26 August 2003

POEM FOR JOAN’S FIFTIETH

I’ve decided Joan is not a journalist

but a Joanalist wordsmith,

add that to my dreadful puns’ list.

I’d like us to forge her a horseshoe for luck like a blacksmith,

half century achieved but there’s been some not cricket

from the imprisoners of our writers

but she’s nothing if not a fighter,

with a sense of humour that’s wicked,

with a loyalty fierce and intense.

Her past has been brilliant and resolute, her present

ties us friends here. As for the future tense,

will you settle for another fifty years daring recompense?

26 August 2003

RAPSONG CHANT FOR SHAI, THE STORYTELLER

Cain and Abel at the family table:

one eats lamb the other eats veg,

one farms livestock, the other farms arable,

a push a shove, a shove a push and both of them are over the edge.

So beat him and beat him and batter him to death.

Abel draw his last breath.

First murder’s committed and it’s in the blood

and we’re so very close to the flood.

‘Biblical, Koranic justice, Milud?

I couldn’t see the rainbow for the cloud,

après le deluge there’s a sea of mud:

I claim self defence: is that allowed?’

28 August 2003

So hype it up and belt it out

the beat must go on,

the old rock stars still have clout.

Jagger is the trigger – he is the rock,

for ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ he’s in the dock.

So if you don’t believe in the Status Quo,

for it’s rocky all round the world,

be careful what seeds you sow

and to which ears you cast your pearls.

28 August 2003

Sitting in the deserted Pub

where they play the ballads.

I’m not out with the lads,

and our shoulders don’t rub

as in the Old Bull and Bush

where our photo was taken.

I’ve done the pull and push

of interpreting well today

if I’m not mistaken.

This summer that did not burn us out

is emphatically on the way out,

but the warmth of the last two months is in our hearts

and we have a thousand lines to prove it

and they give us more than a head start

for our first book together: to move it

towards a publisher – by the way this coffee in the pub is reasonable,

though not with you but in public, quenching thirst and tiredness

as the ballads play tricks on my memory,

floating in and out of this poet’s reverie.

28 August 2003

Back In Tolli’s Café after a break

of over a week. I’ll take

a late breakfast, eat it rather fast.

On this particular table

I’ve written more poems

than I thought I was able.

It’s become my home from home.

At my reading you sat here

and I read your Web of Wind

and my poems on The Sea.

Poetry must be dinned

into this black wood

on which I now rest my notebook,

though I doubt that a blue plaque

will be erected.

At school I read plaque as plague.

The long years before we met

seem to make it easier to be parted

from you for a week. But still I seek

your spirit to raise morale with poetry

so we’ll both walk round the abyss

and kiss like friends on both cheeks.

29 August 2003

(There are several variants of this unsent poem in notebook)

FOR HIRONDELLE

I loved you from the very start.

I didn’t want to scare or startle you,

just let Heart heal with poems and the act of friendship.

Now I feel in not saying it aloud my tact or cowardice

has wounded*. Fate does not toss the dice – we do.

I could have said it yesterday as you ate the sticky rice

or before as we drank pints of lager in pubs.

For years my heart was shrivelled – you enlarge it.

Live, write, my love, now I will love you   better.

31 August / 1 September 2003

* Completely the opposite turned out.

*

Our capacious friendship held many emotions from the start.

I don’t want to scare or startle you,

just let our Hearts breathe with poems and acts of faithfulness.

Shirin del, for years my heart was shrivelled –

you fill it with poems, with spirit.

Live, write, my love, and I will understand you even better.

*

We were friends from the very start.

I don’t want to scare or startle you,

just let our Heart breathe with poems and acts of friendship.

(Same end)

As I returned from Bromley North station in the late afternoon I noticed a dead pigeon lying at the foot of the brick building and it gave me a premonition.

Monday 8 September 2003

I turn over a new leaf of this notebook every day

and indulge myself with fun and serious play.

I have found an outlet for my thoughts and feelings

and the result is a sort of spiritual healing,

which, however, depends on my moods’ well-being.

When I am buffeted I struggle back,

searching for white areas in black.

Most clouds are white enough to not need a silver lining

and lightning borders the black storm clouds

and delayed detonation of thunder is always loud,

the loudest sound the ancients heard

panicking the dogs, flocks and herds,

but its incomprehensible rumble

now mimics military strikes and trouble –

Zeus’ thunderbolts never left such rubble.

June 2003

‘THE SEA AS METAPHOR OF THE SEA’ W.S. Graham

For Shirin R.

1

A few birds chortle as the sun comes out,

meditating as to how life will turn out,

somnolent but happy at my poem’s surge,

I feel like lying on the beach by the edge of the surf.

Your wave lifted me and carried me shorewards:

each of these waves moves my life forwards.

I record their crests, bodies and troughs,

the fact that they’re not swings that cast me off.

2

How much pain have these sand grains gone through

to become so tiny, fine but gritty too?

Sky and sea are blue, but not yours truly,

in nature I eulogise you duly

with lines and rhymes not vulgar or unruly.

Though my energy is on an ebb-tide

even now I don’t want the words to hide –

but to praise from weakness into strength,

from shallows into depths.

3

Honest tiredness is not exhaustion:

more the wave that has worked without friction

lapping up the beach with caution.

These days in me there is a sea of emotion –

feelings energise the intelligence quotient.

We didn’t meet by accident,

our getting on well is not coincidental,

for within us both poetry is inherent,

yet the rest is not entirely incidental.

4

I write many poems to you – it’s true –

that’s because I’ve stored up an ocean

and because we share a passion

for languages and words of every hue.

I will not let anyone pour cold water on these,

anyway I am swimming in a kind of kind sea,

my feet not of concrete or clay but ‘rosy’.

See I whisper your rainbow words under my breath

and they don’t cramp me but give me breadth.

July 2003

Oh Lord, who created bird, beast and flower,

in this city where Big Ben tells the hour,

grant me my soul’s power

before injustice not to cower.

July 2003

Yesterday Shirin taught me,

how some rhymes rise

and some rhymes fall:

a thing I’d never noticed,

as a result my spirits rose

and my doubts fell.

July 2003

THE PRIVILEGE GREEN

Green is emerald, green is jade,

green are the leaves that cast the shade.

Green is for go, green is for grow,

the transparent green of the waves’ undertow,

the lawn of grass to be mowed,

the skin on a frog or toad

by a pond with bright green algae.

Green is the grass that makes others high,

green is the green of a green horn,

like a hornless calf when it’s born.

Green is the green of the greenback,

the crisp five pound note from the bank.

Green is of jealousy they say,

green is a fruit when unripe,

green is of the laurels

of the shirt I wear for readings.

Green is the new leaf we turn over.

July 2003

They are singing a plaintive Armenian

melody, my friend, Shirin Razavian,

in Turkish with spirit, oud, tambour and violin.

I am outside the hall but the music wells well.

You and I, too young, or other poets, who could tell

I doubt that we could have stopped the massacre

with poems, any more than we could stop the wars in Iraq, Re

this I still believe the road to peace is through the hearts of the young.

July 2003

Before the Nazim Hikmet

Songlines Concert at Ocean East London

TRAIN LATE AFTER TRANSLATING

I come away tired but with understanding and admiration

and without any vexation

but I doubt my old age will be this fruitful.

I try to be son dutiful

to my aged mother devoid of my younger brother.

Now I really appreciate the beautiful

not just in women, but, say, in this summer evening –

grey sky, wind in the trees, a crescent moon leaving

a refrain to the Turkish poems we’ve been working on;

this level station platform.

But it’s not such a level platform after all –

a young alcoholic-looking man is on the prowl –

his name is Billy and he is an expert on trains

and asks me if I am a trainspotter.

He hates fast trains but his greatest hate,

his detestation is the changing of the clocks:

this is why he is not proud to be British.

Booze but not excessively hangs on his breath,

he’s been to his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

His parents he says are both alcoholics,

though father ‘one drink and he’ll be dead’

has an enlarged heart. His hands can’t roll his cigarettes

and I attempt for him a thin, straggly stranded one

and we try to light his roll-up and my pipe

in the breeze. He was on twelve Tennants

a week ago and blacking out on the twelfth.

He told me of his mother saying:

‘Go on and have a drink’

and how she’ll be cross with him being out late.

I give him on the train a two pound coin

to phone her in Clapham Junction

and for a sandwich.

He acknowledges: ‘It’s a matter of life and death’.

My legs tingle as though I’ve written a good poem

and I remember saying to Musa:

‘Take some strength from me:

I’m all topped up.’ Billy

gave me this poem.

5 June 2003

THE THORNS PROTECT THE ROSE

Perhaps I am writing too many poems to strangers,

not concentrating enough on my friends,

in writing to people on the street there are dangers

of giving preferential treatment that sends

the wrong message that I am not friend-wise but street-wise.

But everyone knows

the thorns perfect the rose.

The poor are always with you was Jesus’ refrain,

when the bloom has gone the thorns remain.

8 June 2003

*     *     *

Slipping in and out of sleep,

verging on unconsciousness,

but it’s a quantum leap

going bye-byes

for one who’s sleepless.

8 June 2003

POEM OF THE HUMOURS*

Something is happening and I know what,

my brow feels cold, my brow feels hot.

In my stomach is a swarm of butterflies,

my life is swiftly flying by.

My skin feels moist, my skin feels dry,

give me a hoist, let this cup pass by.

Something like triumph, something like despair –

I can’t wash these feelings out of my hair.

I’ll never scalp my own scalp

so no Samaritans need help.

My blood is red not blue,

like the ink of this poem I write for you.

The printed page is black and white,

the rhythm – blues, the rhymes – tight.

At times like these I have to write,

to emerge from darkness into light.

4 June 2003

TIME WAS

I loved you in all your movements,

your speech patterns and your gestures.

Time was divided into moments

only we two could savour.

I catch now your spirit,

yearn for the love within it.

They say the soul’s eternal,

its essence green and vernal.

Three times I woke one morning

to behold without warning

my whole room filled with green light:

I felt a radiant warmth, no fright.

In five seconds every time it cleared, my vision,

like my computer screen comes to life and goes into action.

15 June 2003

TO BEAD OR

The sky blue bead against the evil eye,

the bead a sniper trains,

the old man’s beady eye,

the worry beads, the prayer beads,

the rosary that’s told.

The Hippy beads

and a string around a dog’s neck.

Beads on an Abacus

and the Venerable Bede.

Acorn beads on a Quercus,

Hesse’s Bead Game to read.

A colourful list – you must admit –

there is even a bead shop in Covent Garden

where Juliet bought then strung

beads by the dozen for herself And for her cousins.

Beads are childhood, beads defy ages

and round tender young necks and wrists,

not to mention piercings in innumerable places.

Beads are creative

but still there are colonial beads for the natives.

30 June 2003

In the Old Bull and Bush

a man sneezed like a dog barks,

for both of us it was like the shock of ambush.

A sunny day, but our shadows were not dark,

the world had taken the black out of chiaroscuro.

Our poems are not old fashioned curios,

today the ghazal and sonnet can be avantgarde

though writing them is getting even more hard

as time goes by and fundamentalism applies.

Our craft of spontaneity we ply:

the deepest abysses are under the sea,

buoyed up we can observe them comfortably.

If we invite each other, as your buddy, I’ll dive with you

and as for your mountains, though I have a fear of heights,

I’ll certainly overcome it for you

and take turns to lead and keep the line tight.

13 July 2003

BIRTHDAY POEM

II

What can I give you Rich as I am?

If I were beside you we would drink a dram.

If I were a rich man I’d give you a car

but as I am I give you – what we are.

What can I give you though you’re near not far?

A goldplated contract to make us stars?

A horoscope to follow a course through the stars?

But as I am I give you – what we are.

18 August 2003

RAPSONG FOR SHAI, THE STORYTELLER

Cain and Abel at the family table:

one eats lamb and one eats veg,

one farms livestock, the other arable,

a shove and both are over the edge.

So beat him and beat him and batter him to death.

Abel will never draw another breath.

First murder’s committed and it’s in the blood

and we’re so very close to the flood.

‘Biblical, Koranic justice, Milud?

I couldn’t see the rainbow for the cloud,

après le deluge there is a sea of mud:

I claim self defence: is that allowed?’

28 August 2003

RED SUNSET

When you see a red sunset

when I am long gone,

think of me as wounded but fighting on,

as your injured knight of Isfahan,

united in Erfaan, perfect and whole,

gleaming a smile there in the night of the soul,

then smile back at me and let a starlike tear smart:

I loved you from the very start

but I bound my love in friendship

so we would never part.

5 August 2003

‘Terry and Julie walk over the river’ Waterloo Sunset: The Kinks

But now you and I walk over Waterloo Bridge

thirty five years after the song and you edge

into the pre-sunset conversation:

‘Can’t (or was it ‘shouldn’t’?) you write something more general

about our friendship?’ Sabir, be patient,

your words always move me, Hirondelle.

Initially, what, I thought, is general about hearing

the dramatic synopsis of ‘Farhad and Shirin’ sitting

on a bench with a couple of cappuccinos

below the Hayward Gallery?

Then I thought: the bench, the river, the coffee

and then realized, yes, the English language,

the couple of us, two birds freed from the cage

of a hard week – for I saw your head bowed

for the first time as we walked and pow-wowed.

Between smokes we sucked half a packet of soft mints,

you put your bottom lip out when I said I’d bought hard mints,

purchased two cassettes of Teddie with his silver clarinet and vocals

and later I gave the rest of the royal mints to a beggar-local.

But here we are again sitting by the river,

rubbing shoulders and I am my poetry reader and you the storygiver

and magically tell of Farhad and Khosrow and their almighty cross rows,

Farhad, who constructed a milkaduct to bring Shirin shir (milk)

                                                                             from the cows.

Who stabbed Shirin and who died by their own hand?

And I can’t say that it’s general: reader, do you understand?

But we walked by the water on dry land,

and pow-pow the words played like ping-pong balls

and I applauded but chided you for writing a poem – all

on a scrap brown envelope.

Now two or three weeks of hope

for our Rainbow of Memories Manuscript.

Let’s light candles in crypts

and in the crypts of our hearts

as the poet said: ‘This is how it starts!’

Time ago, Julie Christie and Terence Stamp walked in song over

                                                               this bridge from the National.

I’m proud to walk over it with you intentionally

mentioning the parallel –

here it is the poem: but is it more general, my Hirondelle?   24/8/2003

RICHARD McKANE

POEMS SEPTEMBER 2003-

FOR PENNY, BILL AND GRACE

You, who know my poems well,

have seen their inner struggle

need to have an update

on my internal debate.

Where do I stand on friendship?

Have I climbed to love?

How is my state of worship

of the Muse, of God above?

Is the earth flat again?

Are the bridges sound?

In the heart is there sun or rain

and do lines frolic and bound?

I ask the questions for you

and answers give you none,

for I am the interpreter

so my voice now is undone.

But I don’t wear a blindfold,

the interrogator wears no mask.

The sheep are in the sheepfold,

the sheepdog’s done his task.

Today I ate lamb stew

in my favourite café,

spoke valuable words but few

and was not prepared to play.

At home I did domestic tasks

with an energy unknown

and to myself I ask

if this fate I own.

Anchored at this table,

autumn in the soul,

but strangely I feel able

to contemplate the whole.

A clarity like clear sea water

over sun-dappled pebbles.

‘Move on’ said my daughter

but that was on The Elizabeth Poems.

After the turmoil comes the calm.

‘Bien sur nous eumes des orages’:

the Jacques Brel song is like balm

and I turn my notebook’s pages.

12 September 2003

WAITING GAME

Climbing a tree to the crow’s nest

where I’ll always spy ‘land ahoy’,

I’m far from stealing your nest eggs

or being a mischievous man or boy

since I haven’t read any of your Nest of Crows

but I think Ted Hughes’ Crow was a good present

for your birthday, one that makes sense,

though both books embody the raw power

of human nature at their essence.

These days I’ve been working on my poems’ selection

for our Rainbow and my Selected,

opening my inbox to check mail from editor Mitch.

Hold in mind that the agent said

though ‘gorgeous’ it wouldn’t make us rich

but it is so powerfully Shirin, so shockingly Rich.

13 September 2003

SONNET IN THE FISH AND CHIP SHOP BROMLEY

I ordered in Turkish – a fish in water –

but my English looks gave me away.

None of us could find the Turkish for ‘batter’

so I said give it to me with ‘salata’ ‘batter-siz’ today.

This was the day I added another string to my bow:

I wrote and worked on poems in the dining room at home:

don’t confuse Bromley with Bromley-in-Bow:

the last weeks this flat has become my home…

Dysoning and three washes have occurred,

this frenzied domestic activity has cured

as I wait any maudlin introspection –

when my daughter comes back all is ready for inspection.

If you want you may call this sublimation

but how wonderful that it’s combined with creation.

13 September 2003

FOR FUNDA

When I myself was down, self-wounded

but knew it not, you teased it out

and by the time you left the café

run by the Chinese, self-doubts

that had hounded me

were cast to fate:

two friendships that had come late

were resurrected. This early morning

I put James Taylor’s Fire and Rain

on a treble repeat on the CD player

for us too Funda who are still able to burn

and tailor this poem at the dining room table

as a woman alone cries into her sewing,

self-pity gone, but swallowing,

a gentle attempt at role reversal.

You ruffled my hair as you left

and made a strange noise ‘ooogh’

of empathy beyond language.

This is how we make the universe lighter

and carry a torch for more than us three

and the tortured Russian women we see together

and the men too with fears

and rarer tears.

14 September 2003

FOR WILLIAM HOPKINS

After the silent session:

‘I don’t want to force you to talk,’

when I’d interpreted only a hundred words or so –

mainly the repeated: ‘simply’,

we found again that psychiatry rhymes with poetry –

or probably it’s just us two,

spinning words and images,

interpreter laughing, doctor laughing,

digging deep into our pockets

(‘that’ll be fifty quid’, you said)

of humour and association –

and I am happy I have some colleagues

who’ll walk the extra league.

*

During the session I had seen the wire mesh fan and realised that it resembled the static windmill vanes in my vision. Then you whirled the windmill sails into action round their axis and ground the grain, ground the pain out of it, out of me.

         You say: ‘I wouldn’t say: ‘I love you’ to anyone except a child now, not even my wife. ‘I respect you’ is a different matter.’ We are hoisted by terminology and I remember the doxology of another doctor: ‘Can you love God then?’ God knows He needs our love and help.

         The vision we concentrated on:

14 September 2002

RED SKY

My night was wedged between

shepherds’ delight and shepherds’ warning –

I know when I am coming and going

and that, good shepherds, our flock

of poems is safe in the folder.

Thus Mother Nature gives a double message,

permissible for she is the ancient of days

and I too must become a wise sage,

grow up like the planet and mend my ways.

14 September 2003

FOR MAIR

This pen and this poet writes a farewell to my CPN

in gratitude for more than Cockney rhyming slang,

written in our Turkish café not the jump –

may we never get the petrol

or my smoke too many Camels

or you too many of my Public School Lights.

I always spell your name Maya:

on on to higher things.

It was not the depot injections that kept me coming and going,

though Modecate was perhaps a mood moderator,

but our meetings that kept my mind going.

When I was one track you pulled me back

to reality – not with one of my thudding window jumps

but you earthed me in Walworth sense –

perhaps you sense your worth to me?

The only claret we shared was a drop covered by a small plaster,

after we worked out left and right on which side of the moon.

I was not just a Guy’s guy often impatient

bursting to get on with life –

and when it came to love and emotion,

which couldn’t be dealt with by any psychiatric potion

you saw my fantasy from my reality.

Young friend, when my heart was in my mouth

and I put my foot in it, you remained at your post in South-

wark – a little island shelter:

a friend in fair and foul weather.

What beckons us in the future –

you have more mental wounds to suture:

I’ll continue being a poet, translator, interpreter,

your friend rather than your suitor.

15 September 2003

‘Let me get back to the ocean,

Let me get back to the sea.’

The Who: Quadrophenia

The sea is a vast theme –

I couldn’t cover it on reams

of paper. Awake and in dreams –

it means a lot to me.

The sea however deep

always has its bed –

the deeper it is the calmer its sleep,

where it rests its many heads.

And what of its waves

that wave at me like Stevie

Smith, drowning, pleading to be saved,

a poet’s cry for help believe me?

It’s green grey blue and white,

reflecting faithfully the colour of the sky,

though I’ve never seen that in a green light,

but algae may trick the eye.

The waves shout, the waves roar

beating up the shingle shore.

Did mankind learn anger from the sea

and likewise study its tranquillity?

I remember in Galway an estuary joining the sea –

fresh water into the briny,

surely the fish retrace their tracks

to there though what sense leads them back?

But I researched the Eastern Mediterranean,

or rather its underwater terrain,

its littoral entered my literature,

rocks, sand every possible sea creature.

The man in the rubber mask:

my early morning task

was to shoot enough fish

for the dinner dish.

Later I got pangs of guilt

for the fish’s blood I’d spilt

but they tasted good, they tasted fresh

and they weren’t deer killed by a flèche.

Pipe smoker Captain Cousteau

once snorkelled with harpoon

but he gave it up soon

well before the rhythm of the good ship Calypso.

I miss most the buoyancy,

the depth of the world of silence,

the feeling of truancy

of escaping hence

from lubberland,

the dream quality, deep breathing,

friend reader, I know you understand

for the sea is within us, calm and seething.

15 September 2003

RAIN AT SEA (A fragment)

After a storm at sea the land can hardly be dry,

for the rain doesn’t know that boundary.

Does rain top up the sea, or is it drops in the ocean,

scarcely worthy of the Vast’s attention?

Stoked by smoke from funnels, the rain is acid –

will pollution one day decide

the fate of life on our planet –

as a boot crushes an ant?

17 September 2003

I’ll tell you later

what it’s like to be a translator:

the words aren’t really yours.

They’re given you on a platter,

you don’t dream them up

and they don’t give you silver,

they don’t give you gold,

in other words no plata.

You have to be cautious

then you have to be bold,

then they’ll be litigious

and you’ll be sold down the river:

you take then you become the giver,

you are not their liver.

Author, author the crowds shout.

I’m the translator and at times I want out!

18 September 2003

HOW IT STARTS

A blank notebook page: this is inevitably how it starts.

Then the pulse beats: the servant of the heart –

left to right or right to left the calligraphy

begins to reveal the secrets of the craft, to defy

the vacuum of the page: handwriting

with the left or right hand; illegible or legible

the eligible words inexorably enable

the poet, empower her or him and add the wings of rhyme

in, for instance, this pub, to give life to time –

the opposite of killing it. Breathe lion heart,

beat sweet lungs, fear not stomach,

along with our complex minds you all play your part.

As yet no eyes other than mine have read this – it’s not on PC or Mac:

when this notebook closes its lodged between its hardback.

18 September 2003

And I want to say to you

that it is not rhymes or structure

that rule my poems:

the greater fraction

is that of sense and meaning

and never demeaning the language.

It is the spirit-level and the soul that gauge

the balance of the building blocks,

only later will doors latch onto locks

to ensure the privacy of the poems,

their space, their intimacy,

their possibility of being homes.

19 September 2003

‘And if you think I’m continuously rambling’

actually it’s closer to wandering in wonderment

through the eyes of my inner child who’s lost and found.

My day was made by the little Kosovan boy saying: ‘Keep your hair on!’

but that was before you came back from America.

And that night in your bedroom

we talked about the old days at Shalford,

the white rat, the goldfish Boris and Anna

and the one that scampered across the tank

hitting its head at either end,

of Tony, thin Scots Tony and his Penguin dog Teddy –

dog died then Master followed him,

of Suleiman Ali – a convert to Islam,

of Selwyn and John who pushed my wheelchair,

of the plate set I’d forgotten

and the orange and green plastic

plates full of baked beans

and fish fingers. Yes, these memories linger

and it is only with you I can revive them.

Now you police this area that you grew up in.

The Long Shop, the Dirty Shop, Secular the fishmonger

are all long gone. Many of the folk

at the South London Mission

will have passed on. Vivien

Flaxman with his alien hair

moved on. Nolan, the poet is still there

on his Council Estate, now a gardener in the Royal Parks.

It was there I didn’t unpack my first Amstrad computer

for a month – my 40^th birthday present.

These my years of poverty I don’t resent

for we companioned each other.

19 September 2003

My secret darling to whom I can’t write that –

these words don’t come out pat.

I write them about myself for you,

yet never to send to you,

though they are heartfelt

and long in my heart have dwelt.

This is not Leonardo’s mirror writing,

nor is it with narcissism I am fighting,

but I do break our code of behaviour

and mention the unmentionable and savour

the word love on my tongue,

but I will not do us the wrong

of communicating it to you,

though you are certainly the addressee.

Strange that it is especially you who will not see

this but it is not just written for me –

I fold, put in a bottle, cast it into the sea

and by doing this I avoid wrecking our companionship.

20 September 2003

FIGTREES IN EAST LONDON

The fig trees have shed green and yellow fruit

on the flagstones by the Arts Café.

I’m as old as these fig tree roots,

hair no longer fair but white and grey.

I feel invincible to death this late summer day,

confident in constant friendship on the way

and as though my whole oeuvre has been well published;

come what may I’ll not self-punish or be punished,

for, roots too deep, I’ve become my own good parent figure,

topped up by companeros’ and my companionships’ vigour.

21 September 2003

It’s all about being comfortable:

whether at the address or in one’s clothes,

at rich man’s or poor man’s table,

in conversation with those you like or even loathe,

in delivering a poem at a reading or to the post,

in taking or declining the communion host,

in being humble or pitching a boast,

in breakfasting on caviar or on dry toast.

23 September 2003

SONG

We were a splinter group in the family

so I composed this homily,

sang it out loud to myself

to the strains of an old harmony.

Juliet is about to leave the nest,

these last years have been the best,

her quest has ended for her friend

and I feel I’ll make it in the end.

The years tick by inexorably,

time and tide wait for no one,

age adds on its autumn plenty

and I don’t look back to when I was 20.

So toss the dice and they turn up 6.

I adopt psychological tricks,

the techniques are simple and have to be effective

for life is getting increasingly hectic.

24 September 2003

This sunfilled day I sit waiting for my ham noodles

in the Chinese Café next to the Medical Foundation,

after interpreting where no words are needless

and each emotion is examined as the foundation

for a therapeutic action or intervention.

‘Necessity is the mother of invention’

they say, but here we practise venting rather than invention

of feelings. I sometimes wonder whether our driving here for expression

in words has led to my oververbalising and messing

up the positive elements of my English reserve,

though it may endow these poems with a certain verve.

24 September 2003

THALASSA

On this metal table outside Andy’s Greek Sandwich Bar

I’ve written three poems on the sea,

but there are no dunes here or sand bars,

as I’ve remarked: the sea is in you and me.

So it is then in our minds a constant feature,

a uniting fact of our past, present and future.

First you knew the Caspian

and I the Channel and Med,

where the boats are like Thespians

exiting and entering the harbour orchestra, I said.

On the foreshore the pebbles

are as individual as people.

They have tiny idiosyncratic rock faces –

over how many millions of years has water left its traces

on them? If the sea is a universal archetype

what part do pebbles have in this type-

casting? And why did I see you in a waking vision

walking down and sitting on them on the shore,

smoking a cigarette which you hardly do any more?

26 September 2003

LISTENING TO THE CONCH SHELL HOLDER

Sometimes the conch shell passes so swiftly between us

that our voices overlay each other.

If anyone could have heard and seen us

in the Pub and they had bothered

to listen to our conversation,

they would have found an English version

of the Persian ‘sohbet’,

and I bet they would have found it strange

and sheer in range and rich in spontaneity.

Coming back on the train home I feel a powerful energy,

enthusiasm topped up, my crop of poems harvested

and the grain approved by you, not to be bested.

And you, I will you in English to be well and write well

and draw your water of life from your deep poetry’s well

for us, the lucky ones, to drink,

so we may rise again not sink.

27 September 2003

(THIS POEM IS IN DRAFT)

I

How can I not learn a language

that has Lion and Milk

as the same word ‘Shir’?

The milk of human kindness is strong as a lion!

Deep research into your first name,

my sweet, reveals the ore’s the same.

Milk is in the stomach and in the heart

and Del rings like a rhyming bell.

But there’s more to come –

for she’ar means a poem,

that comes from the Chinese

and into Turkish and Persian,

or rather, a more likely version,

from Farsi into Turkish and Chinese.

I thought at my age

I’d never add another language

to my quintet of English, French, Russian,

Turkish and a bit of Greek.

But when I met you

the vocal fascination of your mother tongue,

in the pub the gestures of your hands,

your words spoken and half sung

chivvied me, for I love to understand.

The play’s the thing in which I’ll catch

the conscience of your tongue;

expression in languages keeps us young

for words never get tired and old.

I grandly see in me the renaissance man

we’ve created with friendship in words, Shirin Razavian.

Though the form is sophisticated and

playful with rhyme and assonance

the kernels of our words are not nuts.

I joke to hear your laughter

for our humour is infectious

and I like to hear that after

but simultaneously Russian literature claims there are tears,

(and these months I wept for us from words too bold)

but I’d like to break down that fractious combination

and banish all but the fears

necessary to act with caution.

It is the stomach where I feel my emotions

especially fear

and it turns out it mean’s the heart too.

The balance of the line, the mind is always delicate,

I above all can appreciate.

I would listen to the music of our spheres,

your beginning to describe our other worlds

and not burst the tender bubble of our atmosphere,

encapsulating a universe of words,

God knows it can be cold out there.

Let’s warm ourselves by that fire:

bleu, rouge et noire at the same time we both wore

and we’ve reached a pitch where taking care

is second nature and we nurture

each others poems and inexorably our readers.

27-28 September 2003

VICTORIA STATION

Come sit at the table of inspiration

where Ouais the Arab poet writes.

Take to yourself a poem for interpretation

and make the lines nice and tight.

*

The Hirondelle has flown to her office.

In the country her crows are in the coppice –

these random words barely suffice:

will they disappear like crushed ice

in summer when I close this black notebook,

or will they be like pressed herbs or flowers?

?28 September 2003
AHU’S CAFÉ AGAIN

Behind a no entry sign the plane tree leans:

this Café is Turkish – you know what that means:

knock down coffees and meals for this poet,

chats with the waiter and Ahu the owner.

Three poems written here started Coffeehouse Poems.

MF will be leaving by the end of the year.

Désolé, I’ll have to find new Cafés to write in –

I wonder what effect that’ll have on my writing?

*

Is it possible I now have too much meditation time?

For long I have written in tight corners,

now the hours are much slacker,

perhaps this means I should abandon rhyme

or attempt comparatively prolix prose:

did you know it’s a Persian word: rose?

*

Recently too many minor sketches:

I long to reach for a major theme.

On the surface these are scratches,

krokis, maquettes not sculptures it seems.

But the mute marble waits,

the lump hammer and chisels too:

the stone is in a vulnerable state

and it will crack creatively soon.

In this pub owned by the Kosovan fruit seller,

here there is no poetry cellar

like at the Troubadour Coffeehouse,

but after my book launch at Tolli’s we caroused

a dozen of us till late,

Shirin, Irina, Selchuk, good new mates

foul not just fair weather friends,

though the real fair weather is now at an end.

I’m alone here, a half pint of Guinness,

an order of Lasagne on the way,

but I concentrate my loneliness

to write this uniting play

and drink a solo toast to friendship

like Veuve Clicquot launches a ship.

After the reading I had a burger with a beggarman

at London Bridge Station

and felt on a level platform

as much at my station

as on the ICA stage.

Poetry burns in me as does rage

against poverty. Our reading was political,

I tried to explain to Azeri BBC –

throwing stones at women, I meant,

but she couldn’t concentrate, the correspondent,

and I felt my Russian words, eloquent

as they were, were lost on her.

It was a unique sell-out event,

people were moved – I could gauge the extent.

Then I thought to myself: what am I doing at the midnight hour,

alone, getting the last train back to Bromley – I’m obviously not a star!

But a little bit of me knows that you and I are

to each other. Before the show

the organiser came up to me and said your brother

is asking to get in: he’s thin and has got a beard.

I said: ‘Let him in free’.

Andrew, thank you. You’re dead but

you came to our reading. You had no

need to rise again, your spirit would have been enough.

But thank you, my younger brother, my friend

even though I didn’t see you there or at the end.

30 September 1 October 2003

At my metal table where I write my sea poems,

on my mettle, I’m drinking a large bottle of spring water.

This evening Michael and my daughter

will make a meal for us

and we will pow-wow and fuss

over each other like a little family

and will not be flat but homely.

The reduction in interpreting often leaves

me stranded, sandwiched on this café beach.

It’s autumn. Soon green leaves

will turn brown and I will reach

for my jacket and father’s PC Macintosh,

reader don’t take this wordgame as tosh.

My father Mac’s ears may have burned on the other side

as his office was mentioned in more than an aside

before the poetry reading at the ICA.

Danger, danger, don’t make talk with strangers,

but I see in me a greater openness developing

and Evian water of life is transparent

and I am hoping to remain open

for our friendship is apparent,

our souls united in your word affinity:

let them and our poems reach into eternity.

1 October 2003

AUTUMN VIGNETTE

Sitting on a red metal bench on the platform,

feeling slightly in flat form,

cold in my red sweater,

it’s almost wintry, the weather.

Just eight minutes to go before the train –

it looks like it’s going to rain.

Now you’re probably driving in to work.

We’re both waiting for the green light for our book.

I’m smoking a pipeful of black cherry tobacco,

only I’m writing here like a white crow,

yet I pace myself with the pulse of the crowd

but don’t broadcast my croaky voice out loud.

So this sonnet is landed in the keepnet:

for you I wrote this autumn vignette.

2 October 2003

For a year the B had dropped

off the sign at London Bridge

and it became London ridge,

perched slightly up on the hill

a haven where among the commuters the beggars dwell.

Some I got to know quite well,

others remained strangers,

exposing themselves to dangers

of the street. I no longer give them cash

but if I’m not in a hurry I’ll lash

out for them on a coffee or a sandwich –

perhaps more for myself. It’s a twitch

that comes from my dead brother who begged

though for baguettes and extra bread

in Paris and wrote ‘A Feast of Beggars’ a novel

before his council flat hovel

burned down. I failed to counsel

him – at the time I was not able,

now only these words and our memories bring him back.

2 October 2003

HEALING HANDS

How the lungs expand

after my friend Mick’s hands

cup my cranium,

and the fluids in my complex brainium

move in harmony

with my visions.

It’s as though the elisions,

all the disharmony,

the negative collisions

have shifted away down a country road

and the loaded revolver*

I saw has been hurled over

in the dark into the sea.

2 October 2003

* Archbishop Tutu: if you are offered a gun, walk a long way to the sea and throw it in.

CELESTE PUB AFTER WORK

Very hungry now, I take the edge

off with a pipe and pint of extra cold Guinness.

I feel a tad lonely but a certain highness –

though emphatically not the sort of on the ledge –

possibly an ideal state of mind

to reach our poetry’s soul.

Mick’s healing hands felt brotherly and kind

and treated not just top half but the whole.

I think above all you’d find it an experience,

full of poetic experience and inference

whether you swam, walked or flew

or just roved your camera through

stills and movies. I told Mick

about you, my friend, and mentioned the Thames

that unites us – flows through a poem or two

of ours. The Lasagne comes in the nick

of time. The CD plays – all the same

I’m a tad lonely tonight:

that loneliness when you know well

whom you’d wish to be beside.

2 October 2003

MY SWEET HEART II

My heart beats in my brain

and is in my stomach.

It plays its pulsing refrain

down the bone of my back.

Sometimes it slacks

and I relax,

at other times it races

and I can’t get it back.

But it takes me through paces

sixty seconds a minute:

the origin of time: innit?

2 October 2003

Celeste Pub, Kentish Town

Cleverness is a lever for funniness.

The Queen’s jester is not always the Fool.

Pints of Guinness may fuel

the stand-up’s vulgarity, the poet’s finesse.

People talk but do they listen?

I notice their eyes glaze and glisten

and they go off to a faraway place.

A pity, for when I get a head of pace

the exchange of wit within

is often a winner.

Exuberance is not everyone’s pint of beer

but the two of us hit the target, no fear,

and as the weekend comes near

and I am left alone at this café table

I am happy about having been able

to restrain myself to him on the tenderest issues,

the ones that are exciting me or awaiting me:

Scorpio, I just hug them to my chest.

3 October 2003

CHOLESTEROL

Earlier a long siesta with the radio on,

a pain in the shoulder coming on.

I guess this is of no interest for you to read

even if you’ve got this far in my poems’ screed.

I’m having breakfast No 3 at dinnertime,

accompanied by Irina Kovalyova and Paul Muldoon  –

their poems I mean. I’ll return home soon

though I can’t resist turning a rhyme.

Irina and Paul are not banal at all –

I’ll translate one and read the other –

that’s what makes this take away café bearable,

that’s what makes the short walk worth the bother,

and that’s what I take away with the cholesterol:

the inwardly digested poetry is the best of all.

SOMEWHERE OVER

A blue autumn sky

demanding to be flied

as a blue sea

demands to be sailed.

The trees are not quite turning –

no bonfires of leaves burning.

In our souls there is a yearning

to learn the editorial decision.

The leaves on the trees are too old for turning over,

but still we write new pages –

we already have a good cover,

the waiting lingers for ages

but as the seasons turn on not back

someone is turning over the leaves of our Rainbow pack.

5 October 2003

It’s easy to wait in Notting Hill Gate

with a Cappuccino in Coffee Republic,

to smoke my pipe in public

when I am early not late.

In 2 plastic bags I have 5 white shirts

and some DM duty boots for my daughter.

She, Michael and I are visiting my mother,

who in June will have to buy a new shirt

when the wedding will take place.

Now I must make tracks to the pub by the police station

after visiting a hole in the wall:

in my heart a mixture of pride and elation,

no longer the poor relation,

richer in work and feelings and not snobbish.

Today, Ma, you too must forget that rubbish.

5-6 October 2003

FOR HELEN

‘You’re lucky to emerge from this life

with a few friendships’.

I said to Helen from the back of the car

and she pounced: ‘Why do you say that now?’

and I pronounced: ‘Because I guess I am better at friendships

than relationships.’ ‘That goes for many of us.’

was her reply.

There are poems in what Rod Wooden,

my playwright friend, would call ‘unlived life’

that are not just prose fiction.

For instance take the Garden of Eden

and if Eve had not been forced to be Adam’s wife.

Think how many feelings are not in the dictionary –

war and peace, trouble, suffering and strife

are all inadequately expressed –

guns and bombs speak and boom out authority worst

and are unflinching in their hit or miss,

the either or in their ammunition rounds:

they can’t afford like words to play around.

Shootings in Baghdad, suicide bombs in Israel,

revenge and bloody reprisals:

how many lives unlived, how many unlived lives

and people disappear and are disappeared

and torture goes on about which we sure know much –

at MF we offer healing for feelings which sounds like barter.

The Foundation has become my Alma Mater,

from which I’ll never graduate. It’s impossible to treat martyrs,

them being dead, but the mentality of martyrdom,

given a basis with Christ’s kingdom come

and its prevalence in Islam and an eye for an eye

and tooth for a tooth must be high

on our understanding’s agenda:

bombs from either side respect no gender,

no age, no language except that of the avenger.

6 October 2003

DAY OF ATONEMENT

For Moris Farhi

A six hour gap without interpreting

and on Wednesday I have no bookings.

I don’t want to phone you without the good news:

St James’ is still empty for our reading, no one in the pews.

I turn to poetry not just to fill the blank

but to fill up my think tank.

We’re firing lives not blanks,

wish words could stop tanks.

If all the stones in the Holy Lands

could be turned into bread

and not to bread alone but to feed the living,

then there would be no need for them to be thrown.

And if the pasts could be forgiven

there would be no need today to atone.

Yom Kippur 6 October 2003

Our man in Uzbekistan

distanced himself from the Uzbek authorities

by becoming an authority on the imprisoned writers,

peaceful freedom fighters:

Mahmudov, Bekzhon, the Solikh brothers.

This impressive, diplomatic human rights action

got him into hot water and a serious depression.

It’s comparatively easy to be sitting

after human rights interpreting

writing in a café here in Kentish Town

and commuting to Bromley, Kent

than to be in the Embassy in Tashkent

or to be anguishing in jail in Uzbekistan,

but our fellow feelings shrink the distance.

Unlike Mamadali Mahmudov I don’t write epic destans*

or like Bekzhon and the Solikh brothers journalism.

I’m not in a country where censorship stands

on your shoulders and your bilingual tongue

is ripped out, pen and pencil broken, computer smashed,

prisoners of conscience tortured and lashed.

News of you by email penetrates my screen in a flash,

in particular the Guardian article by Nick Coleman from Tashkent:

this line too is poetry:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1056694,00.html   

and to you in your prisons’ isolation

I tell you there is a world-wide writers’ coalition

who may in the West be comparatively

at ease but are most uneasy too

at the barbarous treatment meted out to you.

We believe we know what we can do

from similar campaigns in the past,

but it’s a race against time – your health may not last

and they tell us it’s not our words and demos that act

but geopolitical and economic factors,

but we are your brother and sister writers,

pen pushers not button pushers.

The jury is still out these days as to whether

‘the pen is mightier than the sword’.

Swords are still melted down

into arms shares rather than ploughshares.

If the pen can’t write – the sword makes mayhem.

Tyrants like babies with not-so-plastic weapons in playpens

babble their political speeches of propaganda –

freedom of expression is banned from the agenda

and from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe

and antelope to zebra the writer species is endangered.

7 October 2003

With the black stripe of book rejections continuing,

I decided on a savage haircut and wearing

a suit and tie the next day.

Hectoring in the role play I played the doctor

and adlibbed and acted my way

through the parody of an interview

to the extent in some of my colleagues’ view

I could be up for the ham Oscar.

Whether the new image will bring luck,

in any event I shall turn over a new leaf.

With the seasons changing, outside the front door I shall pluck

the last sprig of lavender from the bed, relieved

that autumn is cool but not cold

that I am still not old

and that any road it doesn’t matter age

in friendship and can never be detected on the page.

9 October 2003

FOR REZA

With Reza you have to be resolute and positive,

to take out the black and grey from the white diapositive,

to oppose his past with the present and future,

to needle out the healing words’ sutures

and with these threads to deny the Fates their random Spinning.

Breaking the thread would mean their winning,

the death of a poet and friend.

In the end the language lends

us our words and they are free as air over our vocal chords,

but not cheap and for them we pay the price:

it’s our hands that cast Fate’s dice,

so life is a gamble, a Sufi blink of an eye, a trice.

10 October 2003

‘A FEAST OF BEGGARS’*

I see you in the beggars,

I see you in the tramps,

I see you in the photos

from the refugee camps.

But begging can be a stage in life,

like church going or going to therapy.

The fact that you never had a wife

doesn’t mean you were short of empathy.

But why do I pull you down into the gutter again?

I notice I have started to stutter again,

like a p-p-putter with the yips,

but it’s the news that alarms not the p-p-pips.

When Rusht, the Kurdish beggar, offered ME money

it was clever psychology as well as funny.

10-11 October 2003

* A Feast of Beggars: a psychological novel around begging in Paris by my younger brother Andrew John (McKane). He died of a heart attack aged 43.

FOR TWO BRAVE SHIRINS

I  keep my nomad fire burning,

light a little beacon for us at Victoria Station

so you know I’m alive like a shotdown airman:

no the analogy is too violent, not apt. I keep turning

these days to military metaphors of alienation

when I am really a peace-loving fair man.

Another brave Shirin has won the Nobel Peace Prize;

soon, dubbed Sir Richard of the People, I will rise

from this pub table on the concourse,

charged for a drink I didn’t want

and get on my Tube’s clattering iron horse

to Circle these lines further to my haunt

of the Pushkin Club in Holland Park,

thankful that a little light has been shed in Iran’s dark.

11 October 2003

CEASE STORMS

For Fenik, Sami – and Dirun

A rare shower in the morning has perked me up –

I bought two stone eggs for luck instead of breakfast,

had difficulty on the train holding my coffee cup.

My friendships, I need to make them even more steadfast.

Soon they’ll be fasting for Ramadan.

Which is more dangerous, the lone madman,

or the trained terrorist: surely the two of them combined?

The world is in a no win double bind –

even peace cannot be considered kind

as the cronies’ contracts are signed,

palms are oiled and pockets lined,

napalm stock-piled and rockets still primed.

What difference do they make these poems that are elegantly rhymed?

They are more than a bewildered cry in the wilderness,

more than an analysis of the world’s distress:

for my good friends in this gigantic city

they are an attempt to write music to the pity of war and peace,

to calm and arouse them and let the storms cease.

11 October 2003

CARRYING BYRON

I collected 7 dusty volumes of Byron from the Pushkin Club

but the irony is I may never read their marvels.

though more unites me with the noble Lord than his club

foot, his smoking and his expansive travels.

I am as prolific these days as any 19^th century poet,

though often my writing entails coit-

us interruptus – for I write in breaks

and, yes, I do suffer two century old heartaches.

But I never wanted to live in another age

and my pages are written with a present fresh energy

and the rhymes don’t always lead to elegies

but fly to freedom like birds from a cage.

If they drive the poems, what’s wrong with that?

They’re never quite clichés, never quite pat.

I MEANT AGAPE NOT EROS

When you feel love in all your bones,

yet it is not a love that will jump her bones

and you don’t want to be a wannabe lover.

When you know if you voice it the friendship should recover

but you’ll both never be quite the same again.

When you live rather than kill the joy and the pain

and walk round the mouth of the abyss

and don’t entertain a kiss on the lips.

Nonetheless there is no divide between

your East and West, your North and South

and your conversations are both serious and full of laughter

like the best poetry you’re both writing,

and you realise both of you are right to be thinking

of time present, the here, the after and the hereafter.

12 October 2003

BLACK SAIL WHITE SAIL

Blue skies and sun, yet it’s autumn.

Ham noodles fill my tum.

Rod Stewart sings: ‘The handbags and the glad rags’ –

my life is not in tatters and red rags,

by using the negative it implies

that something else applies.

I change the black sail to the white sail

to show that my mission has not failed,

to prevent my father throwing himself down from his tower

in heaven, but how many times do I have to slay the Minotaur

and play a role in this tragic rigmarole?

14 October 2003

EMPOWERING THE PHOENIX

Unlike earth and water, air offers little resistance

to my friendship flying the great distance

silently to you from South to North –

perhaps it is the true fourth dimension.

This is not proclaiming it forth –

it is also between lines that I quietly mention it,

for I know you read in more than is on the line.

Fire burns in air and water douses it,

then ashes are laid on the earth,

then suddenly a phoenix from the ashes

arises, flies and never crashes:

thus our poems are given birth.

Evening: Kentish Town-Victoria

16 October 2003

FOR ANDREW AND MICHELLE

You threw your love in a salvo of words,

like feeding a cloud of manna to birds

before arriving at the Promised Land.

Obsessed more than in love,

your broadsides were eloquent but scary.

The not-so-gentle white dove

for whom you thought you were caring and loving

was not in her warnings – sparing.

Then differences sparred

and both of you were scarred.

Your stars had crossed,

but not all love was lost –

and why?

For a meteor shot in the sky.

19 October 2003

MAMMON AND MAMAN

My mother raised an eyebrow

and said: ‘Richard, your poems are too highbrow.’

So in her 80s she used a term from the 60s

to demolish the poems that had started then.

Oh chère Maman, if there was some Mammon

involved with poetry perhaps one

of my crafts would be more approved by you;

as it is it’s as profitless as a hedge of yew

now that longbows are out of fashion

and few anymore can summon up passion

for knights, let alone troubadours

and someone’s left open the stable doors,

old Pegasus poetry has bolted,

the age of chivalry has long ago been halted

and with it some of my sentiments went out of the window.

Father dead, my mother is a widow

not as close as I to the golden age mentality.

I almost became a fatality in the 80s,

now I’m almost four years off my 60s.

19 October 2003

A DEEP BOW

A cold, pale blue sky on the Elephant platform.

It is not just the content but the form,

not just the colours but the arc of the rainbow

in poems that makes me make this deep old bow.

A bowl and a putt have a bias as they roll down the green,

but I bring no bias to the poetry scene –

unclouded my judgement or vision,

honed by translations’ multiple revisions:

in lines I have fewer divisions

than in life, more certainties and rejections.

If poetry moves me I declare it,

in yours are colours though the print is black and white

and I fight for my right to care for it.

Accept then this tribute as a bee

collects its tax from a blossoming tree,

pollen from what will be a whole poll of readers,

then you will be convinced I was right.

21October 2003

The Kurdish woman has cancelled our poetry and talk appointment –

no chance to spread our conversation’s ointment.

The extra hours at home make it less of a disappointment –

indeed I’ll snatch this poem in buoyant mood.

Incapable of making breakfast, I’ll eat the café food.

It’s not for that I am here but the poetry I’ll produce.

Now influenced by Don Juan, further rhymes I adduce.

From my HQ at the table it’s the tyrants I accuse –

their despotic cruelty in the 21^st century has no excuse.

Lord George Byron was a writer and a freedom fighter,

a Hellenist, never a terrorist – it would be an error to put him on that list.

His sword has rusted, his poetry not.

22 October 2003

You’re in your office up North –

I’m in a café down South.

I’m launching this poem forth –

words on paper, nil by mouth.

Why do you entertain doubts

that my judgement on your poems is in doubt?

Both of us are prey to self doubts,

but on that count we can rule them out.

My poet friend, my friend poet,

on this subject

I’m infinitely more loyal

than a guardsman to a Royal.

25 October 2003

Calm, peace, no racing heartbeat detected.

I am on suicide watch for a friend, my thoughts deflected.

My real feelings for us are not deflated.

Our book has not been slated,

but where is the feeling of strong elation

for two months pushing me to creation

of a whole body of poems full of soul?

But some unknown good has happened that I can’t reject:

I told you and you said: ‘Are you hiding it from me?’

I think it’s that I have to protect

in practice not Russian poetry but a Russian family

so my brain kicks into emergency mode

and in conversation I try to break the father’s code,

his constructs of self destruct:

I say: ‘I don’t want to lose you’,

like a son to a father on the near-death bed.

I don’t want to have to accuse you

literally of burning up the life you have led.

The provocation against you is intense,

harassment in past, present and future tense,

that cannot be avenged, nor recompensed.

Don’t murder yourself, my friend.

27 October 2003

A blank sheet of paper

is potentially full.

In that sense I feel empty,

no longer pulled

by flying emotions.

Peace need not be hollow –

another kind of poetry will follow.

To all intents and purposes

an engaging friendship

is all I can propose.

27 October 2003

It’s cold: I held my pee,

went for a coffee.

The perennial beggar:

‘Spare some change for a sleeping bag, sir?’

I give no money,

but I buy him a white coffee, three sugars.

He sits down before me

and I tell him the story

of my brother Andy,

then add: ‘Did I scare you?’

and ‘It’s the system we need to change.’

Beggardom has become a theme of mine:

they put their lives on my lines

and I, the privileged one, swoop in and out of theirs,

more corporeal than an angel,

a bit lonely too, my look ranging,

perched at my usual café table,

dipping my pen as ever into others’ danger,

stranger and stranger.

27 October 2003

Sitting on a blue bench on the platform –

despite everything feeling on good form.

A woman leaves a sheaf of documents

on the bench on child protection, is this meant

as a hint? The companion on my left enquires

then finds she left them not by design.

I interrupt this poem at line two

and join in conversation with you

who are attempting to get to London Bridge

and every day scale an even more precipitous ridge

than I: one on one with an autistic youth.

We swap anecdotes, gallows’ humour: it’s the truth

there is similarity in our work

and you announce: ‘Merhaba and nasilsin’ in Turk-

ish and by the time you have got out to change trains at Blackfriars

I have learned how to say: ‘Thank you’ in sign language:

as the train pulls away, through the window

we put our palms under our chins.

27 October 2003

WITH MY LITTLE I  2.

It’s not so much the unknown as the known we should fear:

this is what I concluded approaching my 57^th year.

There is more danger in the familiar than the stranger.

You may see a tail when you look over your shoulder

but the one who knows your file is a fish that’s colder.

They say it’s no use keeping emails in folders –

their penetrability is legendary.

Coded messages like ‘the cows are in the dairy’

are not espionage but the stuff of poetry.

We poets walk the knife edge,

perch on the window ledge,

making demands on our readers’ attention.

Some people want to see us fall and fail

to break down from the tension

and it’s the man with the loaded file, not the tail

who generates my apprehension.

28 October 2003

Just relaxing from the cold in the nearest snug,

no, I didn’t come for a half of John Smith’s but to spin a poem’s rug.

Here between strophes I can give my blackened lungs a pipe fug,

can boost then reduce my levels of nicotine.

I’m muddling myself and stimulating myself with Lowell’s

                                                                        rhymeless fourteen-

liners on top of reading Byron’s Don Juan’s octets,

where rhymes are absolutely essential tenets.

I see I am not yet ready to clock myself out

of their scheme, but, reader, if they start to shout

at you like CAPITALS in an email

I promise I will put them up for sale

and auction them to another poet

and he or she can make them their own tenet.

In any event they’re rough diamonds my sonnets.

29 October 2003

Popping into pubs into pools of poetry,

the success rate may be like acorn to tree

and yet I record the poems in the notebook,

seasonal records like the rings inside an oak.

This is my diurnal journal of our times.

Perhaps we are in the primeval slime

compared with the brave new future.

Who knows what fashion’s gyring vulture

will bring even in the sphere of poetry?

It might be cut down along with the trees,

for there is already the stench of extinction

and our lines are starved of recompense:

go to the novel if you want pounds shilling and pence.

29 October 2003

I write as Alev says: ‘on the hoof’.

At times I want to raise the roof

to soak up deserved applause

but that is rare in poetry’s laws.

I write no worse than Blur or Sting

but I don’t pluck the guitar strings.

My poetry is virtually unknown

but it’s there, like a glow in the twilight zone.

Whether it will dawn before I set

would not be a safe bet.

Yet I must help its fate:

it is still just not too late.

For my fortnight’s holiday

I’ll be exclusively a writer –

that’s what I’m saying anyway –

I’ll draw the lines tighter,

leave the pubs alone in my quest for a publisher

to score one would be as eecummings says mudluscious.

29 October 2003

The worker bees honour the Queen,

bring to the hive the pollen of flowers,

jigging round the sunfilled gardens for hours

they perch on lavender in this imagined scene.

Each time in the Pub that summer a rep’ was sent –

was it by Royal decree – to torment

us over beer, to bring in a pin-prick of fear

like a poem with a sting in its tail.

30 October 2003
SWEET SONNET

Shirin, I’m waiting for your Sweet Sonnets

recreated from your Ghazals –

how will you make fourteen lines out of eight?

Rewrite them in English don’t translate.

Formal rhyme is never compulsory

in my notebooks’ informal versary:

when it becomes like clutching at straws

is when it puts off and bores.

But I like the way you unclutter it,

half a dozen lines later you scatter it

so it just teeters in the eye

letting all images remain visual,

flittering as a film as a butterfly.

Brodsky reminded me that rhyme in Russian is ‘she’

and what’s before her is important withal.

The day before my birthday, 6 interpreting sessions later –

I can never put out of my mind that I am a Turkish translator –

I’m preparing for a supper with a colleague and Ruth my co-translator.

It seems to me that I am at the height of my powers,

those long hours of training and shared work flower

in these words arising to the surface like a trout to hook

and by hook or by crook I’ll have a first book

of poems in this country of cities, rivers and brooks.

30 October 2003

Bright-eyed and bushy tail up,

on my table a cappuccino cup,

haircut short, grey locks

not ginger as the city fox

at the bottom of our garden.

My resolve hardens.

I become very stubborn

if there’s a threat to suborn

the right to write.

I become vicious as a vixen

defending her cubs –

for my two beleaguered Clubs

that goes too: both PEN and Pushkin.

30 October 2003

I control the flow, not it me.

Psychological torture may yet hit me:

I am prepared as best I can be

and I know it will be no Jamboree.

What I may gain in solidarity

I may lose in nerve life.

This was always the way with the cell

and the cell – I may not be exposing a wife

to the repercussions but have to consider other close selves.

Risks can never be accurately calculated,

that is the nature of risk,

but courage and its opposite, even though belated,

in English often makes one brusque.

Rogue elephants too have valuable tusks.

Poet, dismount from your ivory tower,

hunt in your memory, though diminished its power,

attack the tyrants and fat cats that equip the torturer.

30 October 2003

BIRTHDAY

Sipping a particularly bitter coffee

in Tas the Turkish Café,

mid way between my old home and London Bridge.

Last year’s ridge I have mounted

clear into my fifty seventh year.

Sometimes in human (rights) terms the ‘fear you make

is equal to the fear your take’.

My new happiness started when I was an extra in The Lake

and inside me it’s continued almost without a break.

It’s connected my own recent poems prolificness

and undoubtedly with absence of sickness

and above all friendships’ richness.

Of the best gifts this birthday –

my poets, my close friends and ones in distant places make my day.

I will not enumerate you by name since you know who you are –

and if you don’t it is our loss and our failing.

One day I’ll only be open as a book,

will have passed on my shepherd’s crook

to other poets to tend the pasture and livestock

of poems. You will remember my slightly sheepish grin,

my cropped locks, on the cover of Coffeehouse Poems

that stands on your shelves in your homes.

Ah, you’ll say, we were all availing

of each others’ friendship and after it was launched

we sailed it beyond the red sunset over the horizon.

31 October 2003

ROUND ALL SOULS DAY

We met before in a metaphor

for truth and beauty,

so the Fates have performed their duty

but still we have to help them, for

our destinies as poets are not clear yet:

it was our souls met –

my understanding lags behind,

I search to find

and deep deep down understand

the meaning of what we met for.

1 November 2003

I am an old dog on fireworks

night. My Master forgot to give me

tranquillizers – they might not have worked

anyway. Every explosion scares me.

The colours I cannot see

locked in my black and white vision.

In my brain collision after collision,

these random bangs will kill me,

other dogs are ill as me.

I live near Hernia Hill park.

It’s dark, my Master is returning after work,

he feels the same as me about fireworks.

5 November 2003

FOR IRINA AND YVES

This holiday is harder work than my interpreter’s ‘boulot’.

My poems are threatening to smother me below

their weight of paper, heavier than a feather pillow.

No, this is the wrong image again: if I allow

myself to think like that confusion will follow –

rather let me look on them as stratigrafied archaeology,

a selecting task digging the true meaning of philo-logy,

friends of logic, lovers of the logos.

These words are written at this Victoria Café locus Classicus,

with my Birthday and Halloween’s hocus pocus

celebrated and out of the way. No roaring fire works

to be gazed into à deux at home and they are less the random fireworks.

Again the dogs can sleep and lie like logs.

I missed two Bromley South trains to catch

this poem, with one large black coffee down the hatch:

now not only will I not sleep on the train

but be up at 2 am. Still a successful poem is the best relief of strain

on my own as I am I know,

a form of friendship-love for you readers with a glow.

In this journal notebook I write my own leaders,

a sort of chronicle of my feelings and times,

though different from journalism not only because of rhymes

but because it is streaks ahead of the daily in the race of time.

8 November 2003

FOR LIU HONGBIN

I remember the word as ‘jizau’,

though I may have got it wrong,

little envelopes of filled pastry prepared by Liu Hongbin,

it was then that began our conversation’s see-saw.

We coupled two words as cardinal concepts

and one of them was ‘memory’.

I can’t remember what the other one was except

I did say boredom was our enemy.

You disputed that, in fact

with a laugh you turned many of my precepts

upside down, a hard act

to follow, but we were both perceptive

of the poetry inherent in our meeting.

We sat in the kitchen eating

the envelopes with their mincemeat filling.

I trust I did not trespass on your desire for forgetting

the past. Ah, now I’ve found the other concept:

it was ‘imagination’, so I mounted

my favourite hobby-horse and recounted

my ideas on flashback scenario changing – I find them apt.

After the Chinese ‘pelmeni’, for Russian

poetry was never far from our lips

we drank so much green tea to fuel our attention

that I had to make frequent trips

to the loo and in the tinkling silence

I paused to think: ‘Now, I’m in China, really on holiday’

and felt in the present tense less tense

than I had been for many a day.

As I left I realised I’d been abroad

in a foreign culture and language

and it was poetry and philosophy we engaged in.

No pity that we plucked the heart’s chords

and refreshed souls prone to tiredness,

on reflection this is the best cure for stress,

one to one, poet to poet, sowing seeds

of poems, voicing the words we need,

praying the ‘I believe’ the poets’ creed,

giving a deep bow to the concept of humility,

the egolessness that brings the tranquillity

of lines that will stand us in good stead when senility

strikes. We talked too about death and suicide:

the future of our poems we can decide.

I indicated my tendency to mythicide

to dismantle Greek and Biblical myths.

It’s best when this is an inside

job, when you feel in character

and know what it’s like to be Lot and Lot’s partner,

to be Orpheus and Eurydice

and you rid yourself of the thrown dice

and look back and there’s your bride, showered in rice!

By the candle light of the English Chinese lantern,

the bright light before had made my vision glisten,

neither of us reading from a lectern,

riveted, we heard and listened.

It was not an analysis of your long poem I proposed.

There was pain and kindness in the questions I posed …

I swim against the mainstream.

I plane against the wood-grain.

I’m killed and like my phoenix friend

resurrect myself again.

Fire will not be eternal,

rain drowns the wood ashes,

but the bird-poem has taken wing

and I write these entries like a journal of our times,

usually with no botched rhymes nor feeling-hashes.

When I reach the origin of the spring,

how good to turn back and swim downstream,

to float into the dream-flow,

the river bed like a pebbly ascetic mattress below,

slowly to fall asleep, an old man in his chair,

eyes dim, but the vision not impaired,

daring to hope that others’ eyes these lines will share.

12 November 2003

Early morning – it’s only the women who paint on

their make-up on the train,

but the men too their masks put on.

We all feel like going back to sleep again

and I’ll be late to meet her plane,

overslept, no alarm call’s refrain,

late to sleep is what I blame.

I stare at the closed eyelids of a made-up girl,

and I’ll be late to meet her plane.

If the Minotaur is really slain,

the labyrinth negotiated with Ariadne’s string,

then why, Theseus, did you buckle under the strain

and refrain from hoisting the white sail sign?

13 November 2003

AT ANNE’S

Sleep now, Asiye, this afternoon, no nightmares

as I sit on a wooden chair,

downstairs, crafting these lines.

I, showing less signs

of weariness.

Not my Princess,

not my Queen,

or any role in between,

not my either or

but my clear choice of author:

I translated you with the grain

in the harvest, in the sowing you were away,

in sun, snow and rain

over mountain and plain and sea’s plain.

I wrote this on the midnight train.

Dinosaurs and fossils,

big bones and ossicles

and humour near the bone.

I walk not alone

in the Museum

and you see – um –

monkey skeletons

hanging on

the ceiling.

There’s a fellow-feeling

of history and our prehistory –

I know Asiye’s story

better than she knows mine

and upon my English word

her friend Shirwan has the hair and eyes of a Kurd.

Our tragic-comic humour verges on the absurd.

The UK and Turkey have a tradition of satire,

is this how we use our national ire,

consumers all, out of the deadpan into the fire?

I am making a study of Berryman’s syntax.

My accountant has asked me to return my income tax.

I wonder how long US and Britannica pax

will last in distant Iraq’s

deserts and cities and oilfields

and when the country will be yielded

to the people as the gunmen and bombers

migrate into Iraq in waves

and Al-Qaeda may hang out in hide-out caves in Afghanistan;

nine years after my younger brother died in Islington

in a St Mungo’s Portacabin …

14-15 November 2003

INSTEAD OF A POSTCARD

Having left my Black Cherry pipe tobacco

at the controversial party the night before

in the early morning I go

to the shop to buy some more

and finish up in Auntie’s Turkish Café

not troubled by thoughts of autodafé,

the weak autumn sunlight outside reflecting

and I sit down alone with my pen on our poetry reflecting.

My inner holiday is starting near its end –

I’m taking it at home by myself with my friend,

the other me, my alter ego –

often he wants to go

build sandcastles and launch rainbows

that sea and sky will not wash away or make cloud grey;

at times he wants to play Squash again

as in his old young days,

but the core development is not in the way

his neglected body is no longer fit

but in his robust heart and mind

and the poems’ relevant relation.

It is in these café microcosms the two of us find

our city state, our polis, our multilingual nation.

15 November 2003

PAPER STONE SCISSORS

They try to blunt our pens,

to herd us like sheep into pens.

This is the stone age

for their hearts are of stone.

But stone can be covered by paper,

yet stone blunts the two fingers raised of scissors.

The senseless censors’ scissors

of editors could cut our book, this page,

but not the covenant of our rainbow

which you say is under black and grey threats.

We will not let it disappear,

we launched it in London, here

it is beside me in my black bag all the same

and paper, stone, scissors is a dangerous game.

Our enterprise is not mistaken,

every line written is an iridescent pearl or a risk taken.

One day soon this poem by me to you will be spoken.

I will not let our heavy hearts be broken.

15 November 2003

SONG

Ah, Uncle Veysel,

the ants are on the earth.

To the green brotherhood

you gave birth,

you saved me from myself.

Don’t go Veysel Uncle,

stay on in this world.

Wives and women don’t cry,

I’ve saved the words in my heart.

There’s a word, there’s a reed,

there’s a carp in a lake,

sometimes my bait it takes.

Do you hear my voice and understand

far far away in the desert sands?

Autumn is upon us now,

floods and storms ahead of us.

I wonder if peace will break out

and drown every last one of us.

1973, Translated from my Turkish 18 November 2003

I feel a drought approaching

despite the rainy weather.

I feel I won’t be broaching

the subjects I’ve got together.

Perhaps it’ll be a time for reading

for my heart not to be bleeding,

not for doing readings

but for nurturing poems’ seedlings.

I could have been in Istanbul

when the truck bombs struck,

instead I was being Guardian angel

to Asiye who brought me luck.

They say he’s dead, our Consul,

near the solid building I knew well:

he was blasted to Hell

before his life was full.

20 November 2003

The longest period of silence –

I fear you may be ill.

We must keep the power of will –

long years before we will go hence.

The train crosses the bridge,

on the left the light bulbs light another.

Father Thames to us is also a Mother,

a few steps more and we’ll mount the ridge.

This poem has diverged from its main purpose:

‘How are you?’ was what I initially proposed.

Now I’ve put it back on the rails,

I ask again: ‘What ails?’

Before winter locks its muscles,

freezes stiff our corpuscles:

the time now is post crepuscular –

I miss our two-cheeked kisses,

and the work we did together,

all through that hottest weather

on poems and on our selves,

led by white magic elves.

My belated holiday is over

and I am back to work,

now the autumn leaves cover

the tracks and the world is still berserk.

This year the days flew

now perhaps you’ve got flu:

please give me a clue…

‘If there’s anything I can do.

If there’s anything I can say?’

A cold wet day in England and Australia:

wish life was easy as an up and under down under.

Even at the bar they talk of Istanbul, but I’ll tell ya

not of suicide bombers that rend you asunder

but of a meeting about rape in custody in the same city

though it was held in Stoke Newington, North London.

That only two of us were there from the Medical Foundation was a pity.

Asiye is a taboo breaker, psychological shackles were undone

by her book – and I became her English voice.

I am not diminishing the triumph of our rugger boys

but every pass, every tackle is their conscious choice –

we were fighting in another struggle,

more physical, more psychological.

Physical for 10 minutes gang rape, psychological

for years – perhaps forever. Though we may hold a torch for

the English team, every day I deal with tortured

bodies and minds and mental illness in Russian and Turkish is of the soul.

So I am more concerned about dropped goals than the winning drop goal.

This morning we won the Rugby World Cup,

the other day we lost many lives blown up,

but my news is I, the Englishman, didn’t clam up,

supporting Asiye, my bravest friend

in Turkish as she tackles the toughest struggle

that man on woman and man can send.

22 November 2003

I don’t want to say farewell to our Rainbow

so I say au revoir to it.

The right climate conditions

will launch it again, this I know.

It came over us in the hottest summer,

in the heavens found its position.

We both were convinced it was a runner,

now it’s standing still.

Our poems we wrote for it with a will

did many notebooks fill –

I’d like to rekindle

that first fire of enthusiasm we felt

as each other we inspired and helped.

22 November 2003

Grey jacket slightly damp and dampened feelings,

I’m no longer walking on the ceiling

of inspiration,

instead feet firmly on the ground

I catch the rhythm and sound

of creation.

My jeans seem thin to the cold,

the inner exile will make me feel bold:

citizen of no nation.

But the notion comes to me of writing

a book in which to do my fighting:

poems need no explanation,

though they are always written into the red.

23 November 2003

When the pouring of the Guinness takes an eternity

and the escalators go too slow,

the hand dryer breathes hot air too long

and the cappuccino machine takes minutes:

you realise life is putting your patience to the test.

There are several other things you could add to the list:

such as waiting to get your poems to a press:

this latter can engender major stress,

lasting not minutes but years of fears

with no guarantee they’ll ultimately be laid to rest.

23 November 2003

Does a sail get exhausted by the winds?

Does a spindle erode as it winds?

Is Penelope the only woman who unwinds

her tapestry nightly? Are thoughts really sins

as well as words and deeds?

To each according to their needs,

with poverty heart and stomach bleed,

humanity with a cruel God pleads.

Have all exiles escaped

rather than run away?

Play these words on the tape

of your voice and make hay

though no sun shines:

only the black-at-night winds

that in the day are transparent,

blowing hot and cold like an unbalanced parent.

25 November 2003

BAGHDAD IN WIMBLEDON

Last night I met an architect

at a reading for Baghdad, Iraq.

The city may be in ruin and wrack

but our lives were not wrecked.

So we with our abundant choices

raised strong our voices

against tyranny in retrospect

and for the future prospects.

I read Buland al-Haydari,

mustering my daring

for his widow was there.

The architect, she was young, Italian, wore red

and the log fire burned that colour:

suddenly the winter and I were no longer sullen.

27 November 2003

Early Mandelstam is a challenge:

I’ve given it many a lunge.

Into abysses he was tempted to plunge

but flew up and out like a swallow.

I should take a leaf from his book,

see with his eyes how to look

at the world, like a black

sheep in society’s flock.

Years later he flew through the flack

as he sent a squib smack

at the forehead of the tyrant –

a sixteen line rant

that is still extant

but willed his own extinction.

27 November 2003

In these winter mornings I feel less well

than I do with two interpretings under my belt.

In the late evenings after train travel

I walk to the road where I dwell

and unfailingly attend to my email.

I trust my health will not fail

given this hectic schedule.

My constant, my golden rule

is to fire up my poetry fuel –

I am fecund but not a fool,

Shakespearean or otherwise:

this age makes me wise –

one is only old the days before one dies.

28 November 2003
QUICK THINKING RISK POEM

We talked about torture and treachery.

As the policeman cranked the generator handle

he had said: ‘Do you use that hand to caress your wife?’

But his bravest risk words were

when in suspension, naked,

a policeman threatened to shove

a truncheon up his arse

and he said to him:

‘It’s just like your mother’s bottom isn’t it?’

Thus he saved himself from being raped

but didn’t escape the enraged beating

by all eight of them.

This was almost the first time that I’d heard

words of resistance in torture sessions:

it means they do go on –

the victims can give back the torturers the fear,

these are the most potent words I’ve heard in years.

28 November 2003

LIFE OF A CLONE II

My jacket is wet and I’m chilled to the bone,

I’ve surfed the net in an unknown zone.

The car I don’t have is parked on a cone,

so let’s all drink to the life of a clone.

My virility is dead, my wild oats have been sown,

I lie in my bed on my side all alone,

my heart is wax and then is stone,

so let’s all drink to the life of a clone.

I collect my messages off the answerphone,

when I get home in the midnight zone,

then listen on my computer to the dialling tone,

so let’s all drink to the life of a clone.

Dolly the sheep was the first known clone,

now all that’s left of her is skin and bone,

as a double ghost she haunts the twilight zone,

so let’s all drink to the death of a clone.

30 November 2003

TROUBADOUR IN AUTUMN

Though I prefer snow and heat

I have to be a poet for all seasons,

for the Troubadour has to please ‘em

and keep up the harmonious beat.

In love or out of it he has to sing The Lady,

though he may be out of his mind

in grief and depression still he has to find

the words and play – not like a playboy

endpushing to get his end away.

There may be many mistresses of his minstrelsy,

who his Muses are is all Greek to the people

and his eyes may look deep into many pupils.

But he counts on the lute fingers of both hands his friends

and for him their inspiration touches him and never ends.

30 November 2003

In the Pub the ballads are blasting out,

at Kentish Town tube touts

tout tickets for the concert that evening.

My thoughts are with you even in

this long break and my feelings

which once left me reeling

are of friendship, calm but deep as the sea,

not in the doldrums of boredom,

still in a little bit of awedom

of what you mean to me.

1 December 2003

THE RATHER THAN ARTHUR MYTH

I’d rather be the Troubadour than the Knight at arms,

to use my heart, voice and fingers with my lute as my arm,

rather than joust in battle for loot and booty with a lance.

I’d rather be Fool than King, to look at the world askance

and cunningly and naively jest and joke

to poke fun at the nobles, the courtiers and folk.

Today perhaps there’s not a lot of sense in the myth of Camelot,

the best things was that it rained only at night, not

in the day, but it’s gone, whether Kennedy’s or Arthur’s.

The late Richard Harris of Macarthur

Park must have left his cake out at night;

but I’ve swerved and slid off the point

which was the superiority of Troubadour over Knight,

and all this I wrote between and after appointments

interpreting: a sort of application on a sore point – of ointment.

3 December 2003
Whether this pint of London Pride was a good idea

I have no way of knowing, my dear.

It’s made me feel a tad somnolent,

weak, as though I’d been fasting for Lent

or Ramadan. I’m talking tonight on Death and the Maiden,

chief of a discussion in Sheffield,

not so far from my field

as it is about rape under torture.

From interpreting this subject is familiar

to me and from Asiye’s Story…

4 December 2003

OUT OF THE DEADPAN INTO THE FIRE

I run from pillar to post,

from my pillow to my post

with scarcely a gap in between.

Things are bad at the work scene

and former rich pickings are now lean.

Straight-faced I mine the ore

without an either or,

in the pit at the coalface

so that even in the smokeless zones

you can warm yourself at my fire in your homes.

10 December 2003

The weights I lift are enough to make me ill with a hernia,

I think to myself on the platform at Herne Hill.

These morning pipes of tobacco show it’s addiction,

it’s cold and raining in addition.

My time is limited, my time is limited

yet I pack things in rather than pack it in.

Perced coffee from the Polish station café perks me up.

This morning I won’t wake on the train with a jerk

at Kentish Town. Are my poems very quirky?

I have a wider readership in Turkey.

‘I give you the freedom of the books’, my late Bromley

friend Feyyaz Fergar inscribed to me in his last book of poetry.

Like the roots that mirror the branches of the tree

half of me is underground and half above the surface;

half of me is soft and half a hard case –

even the sledgehammer of medication didn’t do my nut in,

censor, I forbid you to do the cutting –

I will not only survive but be alive.

11-12 December 2003

WITH MY LITTLE I (III)

I talk often of what is paranoia

and what ‘justified paranoia’:

this may seem to be a stupid Oxford don,

in other words an oxymoron.

The espionage tradition

was more pronounced at Cambridge.

Nowadays it’s not the Oxbridge diction

but the computer that sets up or breaks the bridge.

In Istanbul Kim Philby must have known ‘kim’ means ‘who’ in Turkish.

For the civil service an exam was based on an invented language ‘Ish’.

Counter, counter-counter under the counter:

what counts now is the loyalty of the bank account.

James Bond except for body- completely lacked languages –

he’d be better off now that English is even more the rage.

When the gun speaks it is internationalish

and it always translates into hit or miss.

Lips are mute, the air drawn in when they express a kiss:

Bond knew about this, but then so do the Judases –

the fear you make is equal to the fear you take.

Let’s get back to paranoia and how it gnaws ya.

These days as I get older I’m looking less over my shoulder,

cold war gone, daughter grown, I’m able to be a bit bolder

and yet I know the seeds were sown in my genes

and I have to own up that I avoid certain scenes

like the Plague – I can’t afford to be vague,

though avoiding the red alert. I am a nouvelle vague

poet, never recruited, rarely besuited,

having broken down frequently, never suited

to any secret service, cracking only the code of lines,

though once I lodged cryptograms like gorse spines

in my long poem, tormenting myself with dangerous puns

on Stalin’s Georgian name Dzhugashvili – it was not fun

I assure you – last year up at Oxford  looking over my shoulder

constantly but now I am older and bolder

and I know that ‘para’ means money

in Turkish and that’s not meant to be a funny

interpretation of the prefix to ‘noia’

and all this is not meant to annoy her

whomsoever she may be. I am attempting to extract the bee

from my bonnet with no one getting stung.

From Kandahar to London I am a morale raiser on a low rung

of the careers’ ladder and I don’t carry a gun

and am not a spy, but I keep exercising with ‘my little I’

gathering my intelligence together, loyally,

openly serving the aesthetics of poetry.

12 December 2003

I live in a roomful of poetry

and it is Russian not English,

therefore I am digging a double minority

though Graves, Lowell,Yeats and Hughes

lie on shelves in the living room.

I make no distinction between living and dead

as long as they are a good read.

They accompany me on this train

gingerly ginger up my brain,

symmetrical with their mirror rhymes.

If I should desert them,

consign them to the desert

of non-existence, something or someone else would assert

to fill the void. As it is we’re hand in hand,

travellers across the burning sands of time.

15 December 2003

Percy Sledge is singing; ‘When a man loves a woman’,

in the Café I’m waiting for egg, chips and gammon.

It’s cold. I’m on edge. I hope God is a better listener than Mammon.

For paying my tax I can no longer rely on Maman.

Christmas is skiing up like a black figure on snow,

the figures in my bank are only red now.

Poverty is a negative, a continuous ‘no’,

where white is black, black white. How

to make ends meet? It was like this from the beginning.

Against Mammon a poor salary means sinning.

On a thousand lines of Russian poetry I am pinning

my translation hopes and away I will be dining

on Christmas Day with turkey and trimmings:

and still with this year’s joys my cup is brimming.

16 December 2003

OTIS NOT OTIOSE

Sitting in the morning sun,

late trains are never fun,

a hollow in my stomach’s pit,

but I’ve got my poems’ survival kit,

I left my house in Bromley,

caught an early train without my Freedom Pass,

watched my reflection in the glass

as outside the view flew past.

Now I’m sitting on the underground

and the passengers don’t make a sound,

they can’t tell what I have found:

they only know we’re all Northbound.

?17 December 2003

NEW YEAR POEM

Soon now 2003 will be turning:

last summer is still burning

within me and my poems are yearning

for a publisher as well as a reader.

18 December 2003

It is a familiar unpleasant feeling of annoyance

as though all my buoyancy

has been deflated.

Some key was depressed

and my internet history was deleted,

but I am less worried or depressed

for all the emails received and created

are safe in their files like window-ladders –

then why is there this fearful feeling in my bladder?

19 December 2003

In the bar with a half of John Smith’s

my mind thinks of Wipc and Joan Smith.

Being a human rights’ writer

involves being a freedom fighter

for expression there is no doubt;

but sometimes we want out,

not back to poetry’s daffodils

but at least long walks in the hills,

a return to nature and its fortunes,

even to escape being the didactic teacher,

to be mentored oneself,

to enjoy being with my daughter, no longer an elf,

to understand the friendship of disciple and apostle –

even the twelfth, to write epistles,

rather than emails, to look after my health,

to earn a little portion of wealth,

and as for happiness I pray for a bit for you all, and for myself.

19 December 2003

FOR SELMA

The election went badly for my friends in Cyprus,

voters from the Turkish mainland were bussed

in. I have a little pocket of pebbles

from a North Cyprus beach: this means probably

I too had the right to vote. You may quote

me on this and we may ponder on Seferis

and his attempts to make peace

on the island. How long do the leases

last for the bases and what is the basis

that will bring the communities together?

These little pebbles you gathered

are not as valuable as our correspondence.

I hope you two are not too despondent.

19 December 2003

MY RARE COLD

I’m suffering from my biggest common or garden cold for years:

my nose drips continuously, my eyes are in tears,

every so often a sneeze erupts:

is it flu that my health corrupts?

Hot vodka and honey my Russian friends recommend,

the boredom of bed rest I just couldn’t stand.

In a day or two I hope I’ll be on the mend,

meanwhile I man manfully my interpreter’s stand.

22 December 2003

LEAVING THE AREA

The poems are getting shorter and shorter like the days.

The owner of the Café went down the street to buy honey

for my little metal bowl of yoghurt – a small sunny

gesture – for friendship in farewell it says

much. And the yoghurt was smooth, the honey brown and runny.

23 December 2003

DAY OF ATONEMENT

A six hour gap without interpreting

and on Wednesday I have no bookings.

I don’t want to phone you without the good news:

St James’ is still empty for our reading, no one in the pews.

I turn to poetry not just to fill the blank

but to fill up my think tank.

We’re firing lives not blanks,

wish words could stop tanks.

If all the stones in the Holy Lands

could be turned into bread

and not to bread alone but to feed the living,

then there would be no need for them to be thrown.

And if the pasts could be forgiven

there would be no need today to atone.

Yom Kippur 6 October 2003

EMPOWERING THE PHOENIX

Unlike earth and water, air offers little resistance

to my friendship flying the great distance

silently to you from South to North –

perhaps it is the true fourth dimension.

This is not proclaiming it forth –

it is also between lines that I quietly mention it,

for I know you read in more than is on the line.

Fire burns in air and water douses it,

then ashes are laid on the earth,

then suddenly a phoenix from the ashes

arises, flies and never crashes:

thus our poems are given birth.

Evening: Kentish Town-Victoria

16 October 2003

ROUND ALL SOULS DAY

We met before in a metaphor

for truth and beauty,

so the Fates have performed their duty

but still we have to help them, for

our destinies as poets are not clear yet:

it was our souls met –

my understanding lags behind,

I search to find

and deep deep down understand

the meaning of what we met for.

1 November 2003
I am an old dog on fireworks

night. My Master forgot to give me

tranquillizers – they might not have worked

anyway. Every explosion scares me.

The colours I cannot see

locked in my black and white vision.

In my brain collision after collision,

these random bangs will kill me,

other dogs are ill as me.

I live near Hernia Hill park.

It’s dark, my Master is returning after work,

he feels the same as me about fireworks.

5 November 2003

PAPER STONE SCISSORS

They try to blunt our pens,

to herd us like sheep into pens.

This is the stone age

for their hearts are of stone.

But stone can be covered by paper,

yet stone blunts the two fingers raised of scissors.

The senseless censors’ scissors

of editors could cut our book, this page,

but not the covenant of our rainbow

which is under black and grey threats.

We will not let it disappear,

we launched it in London, here

it is beside me in my black bag all the same

and paper, stone, scissors is a dangerous game.

Our enterprise is not mistaken,

every line written is an iridescent pearl or a risk taken.

One day soon this poem by me to you will be spoken.

I will not let our heavy hearts be broken.

15 November 2003