Poems 2004

POEMS 2004

POEMS January 2004-APRIL 2005

POEMS JANUARY 2004-APRIL 2005

11’OCLOCK TRAIN TO VICTORIA

It’ll take time before the poems come again.

In summer it’s periodic, the refreshing rain.

I’m halfway to Victoria on a Sunday train,

as the phobile moaners take up the refrain.

I’ve been asked to write on Kalpidi’s anthology from the Urals.

for me in this case blind and dead geography rules.

My own voice from pipe smoking is guttural –

I steal a rhyme from Mandelstam – poems can never utter all.

‘You and your poems are all’ I might have felt in the summer,

but now I’m not just writing my own poems any longer.

This is like acoustic guitar strumming

an impromptu exprompt but for that no wronger

than a warm-up for a poem in competition –

a work by an Old Master such as Titian.

4 January 2004

*

TO THE UNKNOWN READER

I would not alarm you,

nor do anything to harm you

yet would try to charm you

with spells of winged words.

Oh world I would disarm you,

do everything to give you peace and calm you,

change battlefields so I’d farm you,

the ploughshares from the swords.

My poems might disarm you,

they didn’t cost me an arm and a leg.

I am not an amputee, I don’t beg.

I’ll never mean to hurt you

or hurt myself again, though old habits die hard,

in the pack of life the joker is not the only wild card.

Suicidal instincts as opposed to suicide attempts in reality

still can die hard in a sufferer’s mentality

and little acts of sabotage could tempt

to fan the slow fire that should burn in the inner person,

which can lead to burning of others, even to arson.

‘You don’t need a doctor, you need a Parson’:

I am indeed my Methodist Minister grandpa’s grandson.

4 January 2004

I am in what they call in South London, the jump,

where the beer is pumped i.e. the Pub.

Where my neck joins my right shoulder I’ve got the hump,

the upper vertebrae click like a Geiger counter with no let-up,

but it only pains when I turn my head to the right.

By no means am I on my uppers –

American translators be sure to get this right.

I squirt milk from the plastic containers into my cuppa

tea and remember Daniel’s book extract on Brodsky’s rhymes

in English and still maintain that we are ahead of the times.

? 6 January 2004

FOR JOHN HEATH STUBBS

A cup of coffee, a pipe and thou – my reader,

always accompanying me over my shoulder.

By my emails on the computer they could tell

that I got up before four thirty – but I did well,

though my neck and shoulder are giving me Hell

and I would throw a coin in  a wishing well

if it could relieve me of the pain

and I’ve forgotten how the painkiller joke goes again

except the punch line ‘the parrot’s ate ‘em all’.

Perhaps I should give up serious rhyming poetry

and concentrate on lighter verse:

the twigs of comedy rather than the branches of tragedy,

but, reader, I think the effects would be adverse:

I am rooted in the grand Russian tradition –

promoting laughter through tears is my ambition.

9 January 2004 Costa Coffee, Bromley

DESPERATE MINDS

At the end of the night the dawn is in sight –

at the end of the day as they say

it has to be right that the dominant is light.

‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’

was the theme of the film starring Michelle Pfeiffer –

she saved her tough tender kids from becoming lifers

and rhymed Dylan with Dylan as never before

and watching last night I wept tears of many origins for

the teacher who broke the bounds

for the kids who married the Dylans’ words and sounds –

their minds dawning out of the dark – for life.

5am Sunday 11 January 2004

Before Piers Plowright’s Programme on Radio 4

‘In Praise of Shadows’.

FOR PIERS PLOWRIGHT

The time it was crepuscular –

shadows of dawn will be twitching

later. In the dining room my transistor

I had stealthily switched on.

Your programme threw light on shade

or was it shade on light.

It was a benign predawn raid:

I concentrated to the height.

I was up to write a poem

in the wee hours of the morn

and as on the black on white words I ho-hummed

this silent one was born:

a shadow of the heavier one

from the heavy film last night:

I include it in this letter,

though heavy precedes light

surely light and shade

are simultaneous. I liked

the part where you jumped on your shadow,

your old mother-in-law in her twilight.

You brought shades up from below,

gave them their specific gravity,

filtered out their positivity.

Delighted or deshaded

I write this poem to you

and pluck from the shadows of my memory

our lunch after interview at the BBC

and you declaring as I intone authorially

my poem ‘The Rose of the World’:

‘I had given and I had taken.

I had been given and I had been taken:

many mornings I thought I had woken

to wake for this true awakening’,

that really e v e r y morning was a true awakening.

It has taken me years to express my thanks

for that comment, but its spirit has shadowed me

all these years,

overshadowing our interview

on Turkish poetry. This poem’s for you:

a play of light and shade,

your programme was like a benign dawn raid.

11 January 2004

FOR MAIDE

The last days my pen and tough nut

have concentrated on clients, strangers

and beggars. We’ve had enough. But

every so often I see the dangers

of relegating my poems of friendship.

When one has lived with hardship

for so long, it’s difficult to let love peep

into the cells of the brain

especially when pain is revolving and sleep

disrupted. I was walking to the pub

when I heard a drumming and saw your face up

at the café window: ‘My Guardian Angel’

I declared though it sounded a prison bell

in Turkish, but with a little gloss you knew what it meant:

for you Maide are heaven-sent,

swooping down to lift me up when I am on my uppers,

to buy me in this Chinese Café apple pie and custard and a cuppa

tea and talk, for such is the angels’ ministry.

Before they were considered mute and a mystery,

menacing with burning swords and no words,

now I am able to look at you across this café table

as you talk about your child Melody and her tears on your leaving

for work, for this ‘ish’ and I say to you in Turkish:

‘Why do I feel such love

for you?’ and I use the meaning correctly of ‘sevgi’: friendship-love.

After you’ve gone, in pain from my cricked wryneck

I realised I felt like your little child

and a few big wild wordless tears with these written words

refreshed my brain, refreshed my pen again,

to be able to write this poem for us for you,

though this evening I can’t share the same train home as you,

but now I shall turn the tables and be your Guardian Angel,

Maide, my friend, my love.

14 January 2004

A half of Guinness revives.

If I was a black cat how many lives

would I have had since my alma mater?

The pain threshold lowers after traumata,

but I made it through the day’s plights

in pain but comparatively gracefully.

Now, oh Lord, help me make it through the night,

in my emails I try to remain light

though pain makes me irritable –

the playing field is not now level,

upper vertebrae click and are tight,

perhaps Mick’s healing hands will put them right,

but poems help too – now my main delight,

but it’ll be some time before to you they take flight.

14 January 2004

KING’S CROSS BUS STOP

The beautiful woman with orange hair:

I see her in my mind

and it’s somehow not fair

that I’ll never find her again.

She comes up to my bus stop,

face tanned and interesting,

then reads a Russian book.

As she sits down next to me on the bus

I take a further look, then just testing

address her in Russian:

‘Is that a detective story you’re reading?’

She says: ‘Sort of’. ‘Do you live here?’

I ask and she says: ‘No, I work here.’

I name drop my connection with Akhmatova and Pasternak,

she compliments me on my Russian, so I have the knack,

but she gets out at the next stop

and with her curling fingers

waves herself out of my life,

her red hair in a moving wave

which still washes over

me these weeks later.

15/16 January 2004

Just an espresso coffee’s worth of time

to express myself in a single rhyme.

*     *     *

Two stops on the Orpington line

to indicate to her that it’s fine:

our reflections can meet in the carriage window,

more muted than eyes face to face.

When I leave you won’t be my widow

but I will be gone, will die for you, once we lived

and the window’s shy reflections were our gift.

*     *     *

By chance I caught the train an hour early.

Here I ask for a decaff coffee not a cuppa curly.

At the Lord Mayor’s festival the Cockney Queens become pearly.

Mayor Ken is labouring again in this city of living stone,

the city that I ken and love, that’s become my home.

I feel well off if everyday I can put jam on the bread

with a cappuccino in a café and have time to lead

a poem across the page governed by my strongest organ, my head.

Now I try not to hang it, for Mick said I had degradated

considerably since my osteo visit in the summer:

he recommended I become a swimmer.

Alicia in the pub taught me yoga neck exercises

and my calluses under my foot are excised.

I should press this impressive new leaf

in my exercise book and look at it each time my head bows,

already it has given me pain relief:

a spring in my step I hear skylarks not cuckoos and crows,

though I am midwintering in London city

and out of touch with my best friend, more’s the pity.

22 January 2004

INTERPRETING LEAVING For Haji

Haji, Haji is leaving, will there be tears in our eyes,

like in his when we did the role play

and I played an aggressive doctor,

Annamarie the interpreter and he the bewildered client?

You and I at no stage spent

a long time in conversation –

we were interpreters not actors

though we felt we played our part

and have a part to play.

You were smarter than the rest of us,

often besuited, always computed.

MD of BJ, into those linguistic semantic

meanings, selling me anti-virus checker Symantec

and then everything except the monitor

and sending one of your gentle Kurds to install it.

You know that behind our screens

of jollity there lurks an everpresent grief

and the torture, Halapja, Kirkuk and even Saddam

are not symbols but facts of your life.

You come from near the garden of Eden,

Euphrates, Tigris, the cradle of civilisation.

Once I didn’t know you from Adam,

it seems a short time since I was writing

a farewell poem for our friend Berivan.

You drove me to Camden Town in your work van.

I imagine you now meticulously working on your life plan

that includes space for your homeland Kurdistan.

You are an exile much more than I am,

but wherever you roam and in whatever unknown zone

the Foundation will give you a foundation – a home from home.

Here you could exercise three languages,

could interpret across the ages and ages,

Arabic, English, Kurdish, you rule them,

but you mastered the strange language of businessish

and that finally plucked you out of this pond where you are a big fish.

To make some common rhymes, it is our fervent wish,

as they clear these Turkish dishes

that the bombardment of torture anguish

you have exposed yourself to these six years will yet stand you in

                                                                                        good stead,

my friends, a toast to Haji, to his heart, his mind, his head:

there’s no disputing they have more gigabytes than his biggest computer.

On a sober note your work was decreasing here as an interpreter,

a threat many of us face. I chose, was not deputed

to write this poem. Our meetings in the Staff Room –

perhaps we slapped each other on the back and boomed

too loud but our few exchanged words displayed our sensitivity

to each other and showed me a side of your gentle creativity.

Haji, little brother, too old to be my son,

I present you these present tears behind the fun:

a sure sign the poem is biting:

you know a few things about fighting back,

caseworkers, practitioners, interpreters all, we thank you

in English and many tongues for your struggle in words for the Kurds,

your peoples of Iraq and this world that is made up of more than words.

23 January 2004 Kentish Town-Charing Cross

DAWN OF CREATION

When the dawn comes after a difficult night

as if I’ve been struggling in dreams with an iffy cult’s rites

unusually for me sexualised rather than Platonic,

it’s good to remind oneself with simple neck exercises’ tonics

that the body is the shell of the soul

and that only here can they be fused into a whole:

the latter stretches into immortality,

the former suffers from its mortality

on earth way before death

(Oh, death where is thy sting, thy victory, thy nike)

from birth to the expiration of the last breath

and that’s what the Greeks call the soul, the Psyche.

24 January 2004

TRAINING MY EYES

On the train when I’m not reading a book

I’m reading and sometimes writing faces.

They take me to multiple places.

This earns me many an old fashioned look

for in England there’s no lore of staring,

but reader, observed, my eyes are caring –

voyeurism and vicarious conversations

in a good sense are poetry’s rations –

no one objects to the Old Master’s passions

as he lovingly catches in paints a young model.

To look is less intrusive than the yodel

of a phobile moan. So I prop my notebook rather than my easel:

I am not a stealthy weasel,

weaselling out these words,

trapping innocent, sometimes wounded birds.

Look and touch are the mutual senses,

my Freedom Pass means I have no expenses

training my eyes on the London trains,

reading the lines, writing the lines,

respecting the signals, reading the signs.

27 January 2004

Several weeks have passed –

we’ve been out of contact.

I’ve thrown myself into writing fast

to fulfil a translation contract.

I hope you are not downcast.

I believe our friendship must last.

ELEGY FOR JACK GURIN

Your death at 83 could not have been unexpected

as the months went by without exchanged emails I should have suspected

something was going wrong – for we were lively correspondents.

Now is not the time for me to be despondent –

I don’t think you’d want me to be that way.

After your stroke a new lease of life came your way.

You moved to Florida where the weather was torrider

and seemed to have forgotten that horrid time

when I last met you and you were mouthing incoherent

words in none of your tongues. Language was inherent

in our friendship: the English and the Russian.

You translated with your father Anna Karenin.

In hospital outside Washington by your bedside I never

knew you would recover to say: ‘I’m back, mean as ever!’

to go on with writing your memoirs, a lecture on Jenghis Khan,

to lift weights to strengthen your weak side,

to go on a family cruise in the Caribbean,

to be what you’d always been – a family man.

You had the ability to look at problems from all sides:

‘Let’s look at it another way’, you’d say.

Colleagues with my father at the place we don’t say,

your recovery in retirement meant a flurry of emails

from Florida, then it was me who failed.

We fell out of touch at the end,

now to you, Jack, I have no news to send.

Your father, Misha, too was my friend:

we met one rainy day in Washington or was it New York,

and of Chekhov, Tolstoy and Jack was our talk.

Perhaps you two are plotting new translations from the Russian:

they say language experts are in great demand in heav-

en, not just for Fathers and Sons by Turgenev.

If ever I get there – my own father thought it existed –

but on your thoughts on the afterlife I never insisted

in inquiring – I’d like to have yoghurt and honey

at your table and it would be ambrosia:

you two would make my afterlife a little rosier –

it’s not for nothing rose and paradise are Persian words.

This poem is getting prosier and is not meant to be funny –

I am trying to counterpoise your death

with memory. I see you playing the valve trombone with robust breath.

Audrey, I see you sitting by the hospital bed when, Jack, I saw you last

entering on your longest monologue which none of us could understand

and I am so glad we had our communication.

The track of memory is the shortest path in the world

for it is in the microcircuitry of the brain.

I will keep my memories of you fresh,

fresh as a rose, lily or carnation

and if I believed in reincarnation

I would like you to be called down again,

to be made flesh but with all your own senses intact.

When writing this I didn’t know how you went, another stroke

                                                                           or heart attack?

The distance between us has not increased –

we are still emotionally close:

but something has ceased,

there is a sense of  loss,

but perhaps in this instance you tell me: ‘Go on Richard,

dare in this life, you have nothing to lose.’

29 January 2004

BROMLEY SOUTH

Anger bubbling up as I wait in line to buy my ticket:

this is commuterdom and I am in the thick of it.

This Kent town links with Kentish Town via Victoria,

than old Southwark it is distinctly Torier,

but I settle for a peaceful street

though visitors at home I do not greet.

I write this poem on the train instead of sleeping,

for the Medical Foundation leaving there’ll be no weeping

but there are doubts about Finsbury Park,

especially walking to the Tube after dark.

This morning in an English way I am annoyed,

at least by being that I am not paranoid.

I don’t know whether I have torn a muscle

in my neck – my life is such a bustle

that I haven’t even time for an X-Ray –

I’ve just shouldered like a soldier the pain.

5 February 2004

The novel and the cinema: virgin territory for this poet:

my lines rarely pull off dialogue – they don’t tow it

into the substance of writing – always fighting

to express my self’s internal thinking,

to others’ voices I’d like to sink in,

to indulge in achronological faction or fiction,

to take the auto- out of autobiographical,

to revel in the romantic historical,

to have colloquy not with soliloquy alone,

but to put the flesh of speech on the bone.

In Russian the prose writer is ‘prozaic’,

but prose can be purple, aprosaic .

One day my prose will come as a surprise,

though I surmise I’ll never win the Booker Prize.

5 February 2004

ON LEAVING A CAFÉ WHERE I WROTE POEMS

For the last time I’m sitting in the Chinese café.

My hair is long, tousled, a bit fey,

long ago it’s turned white and grey.

I have run out of words to say:

parting with Loci Classici does that to people.

I ate my usual plate of ham noodles –

simple fare, well, time to say farewell.

Now it’s too late to put meals on the slate –

so I write two poems at a breakneck rate.

5 February 2004

FOR GILLIAN BALLANCE

ON THE MEDICAL FOUNDATION

LEAVING KENTISH TOWN

I

This lager and pipe tobacco makes me feel nauseous:

in addition the effects of leaving are hideous –

I’ll lose café and pub tables that I’ve made my niches,

God knows the poems I’ve written there won’t bring me riches,

but on my true self I’ve never trichéd

and the rhymes on the whole are not clichéd.

Though I write alone I struggle against loneliness

for the poems achieve a degree of homeliness

and will one day penetrate into your homes,

your hearths and hearts, when my coffin is long in loam.
Pavel, our Russian friend, told you I’d be famous after I die,

his unusual sentiment I am too proud to deny.

Jorene Celeste Pub

5 February 2004

II

A hollow feeling in the stomach normally interpreted as hunger,

from Airship to Zeppelin the Foundation is being wheeled

                                                                      out of the hanger.

The furnishings have absorbed so much friendship – and anger:

now comes the flight, the delicate transfer

to the new building in Finsbury Park.

Six hours I’ve interpreted until it’s dark –

I sensed the poems would emerge

and you’re still riding your human rights’ urge:

that Afghan client will be your last

in the room of yours that has cast

you in the role of psychologist for hundreds:

you and I, more than the others we may share a dread

which may have something to do with death,

but realising this we become more liberated,

the words become more concentrated –

we treat each other with great respect

for we can identify what makes up neglect.

So eventually, on my insistence, a hunch,

we phoned the Chechen lad we feared might be out to lunch.

We did not establish mobile contact

and both worried but we’d laid the track

so he would know he could always come back.

Next time we’d meet in the new building,

now of course to the sentiments of leaving we are yielding,

for over ten years we’ve been fielding

practicalities, questions and problems here,

dosed with shame, guilt, paranoia and fear;

why is it then, I ask, that we have maintained

our joie de vivre and each other sustained?

Three in a room is a dynamic cell

when the languages cross and gel.

Heaven and Purgatory are closer than you imagine to Hell,

they’re all contained in the triangle.

I overheard you’re not keen on angels,

so we can banish Azrael.

I’m not sure our departure, our flight

will be entirely smooth,

but in the new place we’ll still fight

against the cruel, the uncouth.

It’s almost eight pm – you’re finishing.

You are not Captain of the ship

but you leave the building last

and I write this poem of friendship

not swearing like a sailor with a damn and blast

nor launching the lifeboats, for the craft

is sound, there’ll be no shipwreck,

no Save Our Souls: we’ll make the trek

for those before and after.                 5 February 2004

AFTER READING FADHIL AL-HAZZARI

WHILE WAITING FOR NAZAND BEGIKHANI

They go back to the flocks and herds,

the sheep and lambs of the good shepherds.

How many times on the lips of Kurds                             

these descriptions I have heard,

until I begin to believe their words refer

to some archetypal metaphor

of that country of hills and mountains

of springs and fountains

that does not count in

the nations’ Atlas.

6 February 2004

NAZIM HIKMET RAN

The train pulls out in the bright morning.

Prince Charles is mourning the victims of Bam,

then naively on to talk with the Government of Iran.

This poem is not wham bam for a poetry slam.

Nazim Hikmet’s family name was Ran.

He was familiar with poems on trains,

their rhythms fertile to the brain.

Mehmetjik Mehmet, Mehmetjik Mehmet

was the simple soldier’s refrain

and though Hikmet and I never met

our English book’s a sleeper, his lines on line.

Thinking of him gets my head on track

when self-doubt and selfishness turns the light black.

I take up the rope’s slack

though metal pistons and pitons I lack:

he’s high up the mountain, looking back

at me in the present, having a crack

at this poem – on the train it’s light work,

texting the message to an unknown Turk.

9 February 2004

I may be prone to backsliding:

the load sometimes gets me down

then all day I fight a frown

having left my goods in a siding.

I’m trying out new directions

in poems, translations and life.

While alive we must strive

for multiple rebirths, for reincarnation.

9 February 2004

I watched in reality not on TV

boys playing ducks and drakes on the Dead Sea.

It was in 1966, now they’d be turning fifty,

six years younger than me.

As for the pebbles, the ducks and drakes,

they live, if ever they did, cast from the shore

with deft and sure arm,

at the bottom of the sea called dead.

Perhaps it’s their children

who make the soldiers duck

when they aim stones and rocks,

terrible cousins to those flat pebbles skimming.

10 February 2004

FOR MY BROTHER ANDREW

The nature of the heart is to beat,

that of lungs to draw breath:

but I never met a better man

who willed himself to death.

It could have been drugs hard or soft or alcohol

or the effects of continuous years of mental hospital,

or the long years of tobacco smoking

that made his lonely broken heart burst.

He died from a massive heart attack, but the enemy

that launched it – was it himself, society, poverty?

I can’t accept that it was down to the family.

His life jilted: he left me with survivor guilt.

Black hair cascading in rivulets of ringlets

framing your sweet face.

Welcome to breakfast in Galway:

this poet writes poems and translates –

faithfully – for poetry only right time, right place

and I did not have eyes for you only.

Alone now need not mean lonely –

that can be more when together:

now I would rather gather

honey from many flowers

(and in the daylight hours)

than sleep beside,

than give up friendships

for a big single love.

11 February 2004

On the eve of St Valentine I was voraciously reading Young Turk

by my good friend Moris Farhi. I thought this might work:

a translated love poem for St V’s Day,

perhaps Pushkin to Anna Kern: ‘I remember that marvellous moment’,

or Arseny Tarkovsky’s ‘First Meetings’ –

even leaving in the shocking last two lines,

or Mandelstam’s last poem to Natasha Shtempel,

or Aronzon’s ‘Who loved you more rapturously than I?’

The list could go on but these would be my best,

but I wouldn’t be able to rest

until I’d decided whom my Valentine would bless.

13 February 2004

The valency of this Valentine is companionship – and love,

sailing out the ship of friendship with a bright sun above.

Being alone but not lonely is a position of strength,

distances can never be counted in length

of time or miles. Remembering you my heart smiles.

I would laugh out loud at our laughter

on the phone and after not feel stupid

for you said I don't have to excuse myself to you for anything.

I feel I should use the rhyme Cupid

but I'll not enlist his arrows that hurt,

for many years I've worn a shirt

of hair or of iron.

(Recently for the rhyme I've been reading Lord Byron.)

But I softened to your words' touch,

to your research on Vietnam vets -

in our conversations we shared much:

Albania, Asiye, Julia, PTSD, PEN, and life-secrets,

and hey, humour, suffering, ourselves and families

and we broke bread together,

com-pan-ions comfortable in each other's company,

these things I value, with love, this Valentine's.

13 February 2004

It seems that only with pen and paper I have a degree of confidentiality:

emails may fly from address books with consummate fatality

multiplying and multiplying with plurality.

You have to hold ten fingers as well as your tongue,

gone is the carbon paper we used when we were young

in the prephotocopier samizdat days.

Once we kept secrets of our sweethearts

concealing their names in a variety of ways.

*

SONG

It’s the songs and not the singers

that spread the fertile word.

It’s the bells and not the ringers

that call this pagan world.

And the soul so full of anguish

clings to the Mother Tongue,

and the brain beyond all language

delivers this song that’s sung.

And my heart – don’t ask, my Darlings –

is healed in the parting times,

and you hear my own voice calling

in my rhythms and my rhymes.

Far beyond the deep blue yonder

where the sky meets the sea,

abstinence makes the heart grow fonder

the ocean joins you to me.   16 February 2004

BALLAD ON UTOPIA

For Fadhil Al-Azzawi

On earth in the people’s heaven

where many kindred sprits dwell

is a sea that has a haven

from the troubled storm and swell.

No more crossed lines or gossip,

just gold coin of precious words.

Here lives Mandelstam Osip,

in harmony Turks, Greeks and Kurds.

In Iraq Kurds’ll come back to Kirkut,

Assyrians, Turkoman, Arabs should live there too

and the Colonisers will play baseball and cricket

back in their countries the summer through.

And the wars will be decided

before a single soul is lost.

Children not abused only chided,

tyrants not bred at such a cost.

There will be democratic wrangling,

the diplomats will have voices again,

politicians will be forced to go angling

without hooks, watching floats in the rain.

Time to think, on thoughts to ponder,

knees will never shake and jerk

and above in the wide blue yonder

bombers and fighters will not work.

And the bombers and the fighters

will give up their suicides,

the arsonists and firelighters

pre-emptively will take peace on side.

I don’t kick around a football,

but more pitches for Russia and Chechnya,

less soldiers aggressive footfalls

is my plea for each of ya.

This world so full of terror

hears now the alarm bells:

global warming is enough of an error –

for us the death-knell tolls.

And the future generations

crippled by our guardianship

of our warring nations

will ask: ‘Where lay the friendship?’

Where is the love of Christ, the mercy of Allah,

the strict code of Jehovah Yahweh?

Whose creed can we follow

to lighten the dark and day?

The 21^st century has started rudely

with multiple screams and bangs:

where are Nazim Hikmet, Pablo Neruda?

I don’t know where my hat can hang.

At work we indulge in gallows humour.

Human rights interpreting causes stress.

Malignant or benign this world has a tumour:

‘the mortality rate is a hundred percent.’

If we fight against AIDS and cancer

with bombardment, chemo and pills,

how much more should we search for the answer

to the world’s internecine ills?

It’s not enough to pose the questions,

eventually statements and answers must come,

but from the growing mass of information

come the reports, well, ho-hum:

it’s not just balls they’re spinning,

whole tapestries of suits are undone

overnight if it suits the winning

cause – and this is not Ithaca but London.

Somewhere there must be a backbone,

that is held upright not by stress alone,

of individuals of a nation

that doesn’t rely on future clones.

The search demands mobility,

moving sometimes in hostile territory.

I believe we have the ability

in spite of Labour, Liberal Ds and Tory,

to forge an alliance of people of goodwill,

will power – that struggle goes on until –

the end.

*

I break my journey for a coffee,

time to think and time to write.

In front of my eyes at this Victoria café

are the people with their tickets to ride.

On the train up I was reading

Selected Poems of W.B. Yeats,

now on to Langland Gardens

where Helen and young Musa wait.

I’ll try to hearten

this Kurd with poetry

in the Turkish language –

our hearts may bleed

but beyond all anguish

it still fulfils a need.

21 February 2004

FOR LOUISE

The train was twenty minutes late whether by design or

not. I spent the time talking to a designer

back from living thirteen years in New York.

I established her name was Louise and an immediate rapport.

She was looking for flats in the Bermondsey area

near London Bridge. She brought up the golden section,

the search for harmony in all life areas,

architecture, music and poetry.

There was an attractive American inflection

in her voice. Giving her my book of poems I gave it a try,

writing in my email on the bookmark.

Her hair and clothes were black or dark,

eventually the train pulled into Grove Park,

together we got in – a couple into Noah’s Ark,

representing a unit of the human race.

In our words there was an inherent grace,

no hustle and bustle or jockeying for position

and our questions were not like the Spanish inquisition,

a language you know and want to convert into Italian.

Oh, where do they go the strangers who quickly become friends?

To the elephants’ cemetery of memory in the end.

Since you mentioned it I should write in iambic pentameters,

but I do not want to confine myself to those parameters.

When we reached London Bridge I walked off to Guy’s

to have my thyroid checked, not an MRI

as you enquired. Why is it always I, I, I?

Why can’t you and I be we

as we were a couple for a wee

shared moment. No kiss, a handshake

and we’re off taking our lives in our hands,

others’ arms, heartaches,

all we could do was understand

that our Is and eyes by fate had met:

the beautiful designer and the ageing poet.

23-24 February 2004

I’ve yet to find a good café in this neck of the woods

and my own neck pains and is not yet out of the woods.

I think of friends and strangers

and there’s nothing stranger and more familiar

than the unknown reader of these lines.

Pushkin’s Onegin was played by Ralph Fiennes –

another movie that I gave a miss.

My poems are not subject to boo and hiss

or the clapping of hands, or one hand clapping

in the words of the Buddhists,

and Medical Foundation therapists are always unwrapping

my interpreted words of Russian-speakers, Turks and Kurds.

If in my poetry there are glimpses of the absurd

it’s because I suck them in from the environment

and every Sunday with Ruth I translate a simple sacrament:

the wine and bread of Oktay Rifat’s poetry.

Graves said poetry was his religion: does then the cross-tree

await me. Do I have to walk the via dolorosa to Calvary?

Or is this my privilege, to slap ointment on torture words

                                                       from a Kurdish village,

or to fill the pitcher with the water of life with no spillage.

24 February 2004

You walk free with our translators’ orange tulips.

Silence did not seal your lips,

perhaps you made no grave translation slips in Mandarin,

but now they’ll say you squealed, the Whitehall mandarins.

But there is a growing lobby against doing illegal espionage,

the Radio alleges the Americans do the dirty work here and we there.

Long ago I knew more than the acronyms GCHQ and NSA:

HQ, we used to call father. Silent in his grave, now what would he say?

Even Kofi Annan’s conversations are UNfair game,

yet still, they say, the transcriptions are produced,

your whistleblowing introduced

a new potency to email.

I’m glad your nerve did not fail,

now I hope your nerves don’t fail.

26 February 2004

A mind breaks down but who’s to say

when you repair it it’s not stronger

than it was before that day,

though it’s not a toy stuck with Araldite.

The same may go for the heart – broken

to heal again. But when the spirit breaks

now we’re talking shock horror:

protect its secrets for all our sakes.

26 February 2004

I write this poem after waves of somnolence,

teasing the English of a Turkish translation.

Perhaps sleep obliterates all sense

of the tenses, past, present and future’s relations.

Time lies still, telescopes, microscopes, both ways,

the night lasts an age, an aeon,

within it dwell comedies and nightmare plays.

Some plots don’t connect or tie on

to events and there is a tendency to oblivion

on waking as though against our will we are forsaking

what is the most vivid, the most aching.

29 February 2004

In the House of Lords met the friends of the Kurds,

in Committee Room Three, not enemies of the Turks.

What flew were only words,

not bullets gone berserk.

I didn’t let the lion out of the bag,

was it my heart speaking or my head

overcoming the fear in my stomach,

losing and picking up the thread

of my speech as I lifted off from the paper?

This was not a poetry reading caper,

for some claim it is light verse I write,

this was not the time to be polite,

the subject had no levity, had its own specific gravity ­–

a man had languished in prison for his words –

a Turkish sociologist who gave a lifetime in researching the Kurds.

Now, we are free in this committee room,

free to let thoughts whisper, speak and boom.

Over us no jets zoomed,

nearby, no mass graves, no tombs,

but the fact is Kurdistan is where Kurds live,

for Kurdistan is in their hearts,

perhaps one day it’ll be under the feet of these peoples.

INTERPRETATION

Right at the eye of the storm,

the News is hot not warm,

I could easily be overwhelmed

by a spate of journalism,

could allow paranoia’s schism

to tear up my cheerful chappy image.

And what if the paranoia is a real fear:

concern for the world here and this age,

for the kingdom a young Lear’s rage?

I don’t blunder through life like a loose cannon,

don’t hide behind the pseudonym ‘anon’.

The word asylum is bandied about:

it’s double meaning carries a massive clout.

Today I’ll talk about Nikitin and Pasko

for PEN at a day long conference at the FCO.

On the one hand part of me has to worry,

on the other hand I hurry

with my words lest they arrive too late,

no silver spoon lies on my plate.

I know the difference between bravery and foolhardiness:

but this morning, I’m interpreting everything personally

as though I’ve lost my skin’s thickness.

4 March 2004

Like a sucked lemon or a milked out udder,

or a cuttlefish bone washed up on the shore,

I am an insider but feel I’m a.n. other,

poorly and not rich but poor.

Explaining to the Russian and the German NGO

why to Russia I don’t go,

he says on my Russian: ‘Eto vash pervy yazyk’,

‘It’s your first language’ and without a creak

I tell them: ‘I am a translator of Mandelstam’

and add my human rights interpreting stamp.

‘But you speak the language so well,

I don’t understand why you don’t go’.

I explain about being in Leningrad with my pills

in Moscow and add that when my book of poems

is translated I shall definitely go.

What neither of them know

is how much I am needed here.

If it was just a case of paranoid fear

I have the savvy to overcome that there and here.

*

You would be right to be annoyed

by my still struggling with paranoia.

I wonder if it’s my brain’s default ploy

that clicks in like a child who’s lost a toy.

Let’s analyse this feeling of impotence and power.

Let’s try to write about it for half an hour.

Certainly Russian and Turco-Kurdish human rights ignite it,

but it is exploded by very English plights.

Security serves, insecurity oppresses

and I am not speaking about tennis services.

There is still a cold war in my heart,

but no I won’t break down and out. Don’t start,

don’t start the izdevatel’stvo, the mocking.

I can’t stand English sarcasm

but I can walk round the abyss, the chasm –

in Camelot there was a chair for rocking.

*
Was it experiences deep in the past –

lorry drivers on the desert road near Ararat,

or is it London shocks in the recent past,

that deliver a crazed rat

through a hole in my defences,

like a virus penetrates to the core

of a computer through all the protective fences.

I am trying to write my way out of trouble,

like a man digging away the earthquake rubble;

perhaps it wasn’t the Conference

that was difficult but the building up transference

of sessions with this meeting on top:

that latter is over and though I am not in clover

I feel a certain relief.

?4,5 March 2004

FOR REZA’S BIRTHDAY

Let this celebration raks never be axed,

let this dancing not be cancelled,

let workers have good jobs and be fairly taxed,

let angels be at every angle

of your existence.

Let your wishes be realistic,

stick to them, fulfil them yourself,

may your God grant you good health

but give you the right to dissent,

for anger against injustice is heaven-sent:

this is our insistence.

If, as I believe Kipling was wrong about the impostors –

how can one treat triumphs and disasters

just the same? Don’t let the latter pull you down,

rejoice in your former triumphs, work towards more in the hereafter:

the poem, the music, the rhythms of life you are laying down.

God grant you persistence.

In this alien sprawling town of London,

you have friends but your former life will not be undone –

you are the Master of your selective memory:

you are the gardener and the garden,

rose and paradise are Persian words you tell me.

May your heart, your del, never harden

and your stomach, your del, never reject

the fruit and veg of poetry,

selected by yourself and thus elect.

I hug you on your birthday like a young family tree

at this instant.

I write these words not automatically or too didactically:

my students will outrun this Master.

Perhaps you can use these words practically,

even translate them into life or language:

here at this café I am the net-caster:

more fisherman than spider.

I hope with these words I am a safety net to catch you,

for acrobatic swings I could have matched you –

between us there is no distance.            

6 March 2004

FOR FEDOR’S BIRTHDAY

The road could not have been much stonier

that leads to London from Estonia.

Here you’re throwing yourself into creating unity,

establishing a centre for the Russian Community.

Now your mayor is Ken Livingstone

and your residence is in Kennington.

Perhaps they are grey the tones of this town

and you are tired of promises of premises

but it was the harassment that brought you down –

those neighbours from hell you won’t be missing.

I raise my glass to your Millennium premise

at this your Birthday feast:

to make an omelette you have to crack the eggs,

to make bread you need a pinch of yeast

and to have your cake in England

do you have to beg and entreat?

6 March 2004

Zeynep will be in Moscow,

Daisy’s in San Francisco,

Nazand tarries in Paris

and London is overrun.

I have to be a lighthouse,

shelter to the seeking,

bound to my house,

through you emails peeking.

I come to cafés for the writing,

not for the reading or the coffee.

I find it most exciting,

producing silent effects.

The words fly off me

as page leaves in autumn

we’ll say we caught ‘em

only when they’re printed:

at present they’re only hinted

and might not survive:

there’s many a slip between MS and book.

6 March 2004

LE CROISSANT D’OR

So is this the best café on Seven Sisters Road?

A perch to roost, vegetables and mozzarella roast.

It’s possible that I’ll write a load

of poems here about which I can crow and boast,

that will give my interpreting-shattered feelings a boost.

It’s the sort of place that seems near the coast

in France or Turkey or Greece – no greasy spoon here –

now I play spot the waitresses’ language – not Turkish

but Russian or Polish I seem to hear

in snatched phrases behind the counter reaching my ears

which are hard of hearing for soft words of blankish,

a legacy of my bad cold yesterday.

As I’ve said before I’ll make hay,

sun shine, come snow or rain or high water.

You readers are my heirs not just my daughter:

now I have to prepare a Selected, be my own Editor.

There are so many people I have to give credit or

more too – dedications to friends are at the core

of my poetry. In this sense I translate life –

three decades ago Diana was right – but is poetry my wife?

8 March 2004

He was down, dejected, his life was wretched,

rejected, depressed and isolated,

ranting against the violent world created.

The pain in my neck was a pain in the neck

but I knew at work I’d say: ‘Oh, heck’

and don the mask to conceal the wreck:

a smile on my lips and a belly laugh

and I’d be tender as a cow with a calf.

11 March 2004

ENT

I blew my nose hard and suddenly my head was spinning.

My left eardrum seemed to have cleared or burst.

If I’d been on my feet I’d have lost my balance,

but I sit with a mocha and tobacco to quench my thirst.

Now I bide my time writing this poem,

deafness is the interpreter’s curse,

translation and poetry can be silent,

in the inner ear they can rehearse.

The diver too in the monde du silence

relies most on water’s touch and eyes.

I sit here in my isolated island

on this notebook resting my eyes.

Just two more lines and I’m home and dry,

onto the train and to home I’ll fly.

12 March 2004

This fox is eternally busy ranging from his burrow.

The hedgehog behind his prickly brow

concentrates on one big thing.

They are both examples for writers writing,

the concept from Archilochos of Isaiah Berlin –

perhaps he was a Camelot’s Merlin,

quizzical, radical in conversation and thinking.

Is civilisation really sinking,

not just global warming

but terrorist acts?

We have to feel the emotions behind the facts –

understanding can treat desperation.

I’d like to see a higher standard of oration,

the writers being foxhogs and hedgefoxes – new creations.

The hybrid attracts me in my demi-monde,

trilingual I speak two more languages than James Bond.

SPANISH EYES

And when the eyes are thirsty

they too can be slaked,

enough they drink in beauty

in profile or face to face.

I’m talking too about faces of lakes,

about nature as well as women.

I’m talking about the countryside that aches

for my vision in words in our separation.

The black-haired woman in the leather coat

at the café could by chance be Spanish,

two hundred dead in Madrid,

yet her beauty is not tarnished.

No, my eyes did not stare voyeuristically:

I wrote this not vicariously but realistically.

15 March 2004

These poems in a book might only have 200 readers –

it makes more sense to write prose,

or political speeches – follow my leader,

but sound bites get up my nose.

So poetry is a marginalized, minority art,

the cart before the house not the horse before the cart

and Nasrettin Hoja rode his donkey backwards.

These lines move down and onwards,

for some reason I press on regardless.

My poetry is only harmless

because it attracts not more but less,

but perhaps the few are more or less

those that these poems are written for.

15 March 2004

They put the lights out on the train –

the driver says: ‘Don’t worry, it’s par for the course’.

We sit in the station, engine takes up no strain –

we’re all a little tense of course.

But the man in the suit reads Boris Akunin

and several people speak on their phobile moans,

then I with swift acumen

detrain and head off for another platform zone.

Man in the suit follows me and as the other Bromley train leaves

we discuss the state of Russian poetry and prose

and my status – I don’t need to conceal or pose

and talking openly like this in the carriage is a relief.

His wife is going to a six course golf complex in Western Turkey

and the conversation runs as we talk turkey,

on translating prose as opposed to poetry

and I feel British and the roots of my family tree.

15/16 March 2004

In silent solidarity, with my half black tobacco,

I sit outside in a Spanish café drinking a black coffee,

having cancelled a plate of pasta,

knowing that at the Arab poetry reading I’ll have basta.

The bombers in Madrid I could only call bastards,

the acts were cowardly and dastardly,

but it is the lack of talk, the silence before the bombs

that actually sends victims to the tombs.

Blair speaks fluently, Bush has more of a problem

but both have speechwriters spinning for them.

Al-Qaeda have Bin Laden or not as the case may be,

cassettes and videos on Al Jazeera we see.

But it’s as though even with interpretation,

we’re not understanding the same language,

there is no point of contact or correlation,

no common denominator by which we can gauge

the road to peace. The majestic Koran,

the Hebrew Torah, the King James Bible,

the Communist tracts, these are not how the world ran

or runs – I think the dollar, pound, franc and rouble are more liable.

And how about the losing of face, the concept of shame,

which is always more potent than guilt:

I wish people could feel preemptive shame

to prevent them violently tilting the world

that has become so small that one bomb detonates

throughout its bounds where angry healing words could resonate,

wrangling more democratically, interpreted into many tongues

in understanding. I’m talking about a Utopian United Nations

we never saw and may never see

where voices could be listened to as well as heard

and the world would be a better place, for you for me.

16 March 2004

ODE TO A NIGHT IN GALE

What is this feeling of drowsy exhaustion

in which I often write my poems and work,

somehow it seems conducive to poems’ internal combustion,

a little further and there would be night dreams berserk.

It may be that poems always teeter on this edge,

coffee-driven not nurtured on fruit and veg,

pumped up like a golfer going for broke,

opening the club face, over the trees with the wedge.

Other people at the end of the day soak

up a few beers or talk to their wives,

but I have had at least two lives

and with my languages have a tripersonality

and I attempt to achieve a sort of parity

between interpreting, translating and this poetry.

17 March 2004

The argument will continue to the end of the line

as to whether modern poetry should rhyme.

It may be said rhymes are the vertebrae of the spine,

others may say they are way out of time,

an example of skipping on the disc,

not worth the tripping up or the risk.

I just like the challenge of finding a similar ending,

achieved when I am not immediately bending

the sense, just tightening the tension,

injecting expectation and apprehension,

guiding the poems direction down their path,

like the vertebrae in the hands of an osteopath.

19 March 2004

MOTHER’S DAY

You son is a dissident, mother,

your son is a dissenter. His disease is dissent.

He doesn’t pass the claret decanter

in the haunts of the establishment.

His life you would have meant to be another

without the pains and illness of his younger brother.

The writer’s lot is a lonely one,

sometimes he thinks he’s the only one,

it is his decision not to be the phoney one:

fiction and poetry still have to be honest,

though there may be troubles and unrest

the work by the gods and God is blest,

independent, bowing to no one’s behest.

Between joy of living and fear of dying,

searching for truth in a world that’s lying,

that is full of intrusive spying

and may be in terminal denial,

I remember in childhood making a sundial

with a stick that casts now no shadow:

the two poles I no longer visit

and though my poetry may not be exquisite,

truth is beauty, beauty truth, or is it?

21 March 2004

NOUGHTS AND CROSSES

Cold the wind easterly, easterly, easterly.

Easter will soon be upon me

with its chocolate eggs and Easter bunnies.

Will I be cross again at the martyrdom upon the cross,

how can such sacrifice be gain not loss:

he had thirty years more good works in him,

could have fished out more people to follow him.

For some the cross is a huge plus sign,

years later 100s of Messiahs were crucified line on line.

Those crosses too were not for nought,

with blood and sweat they once were bought.

The ichthus was caught and impaled:

sunset was red and dawns paled.

21 March 2004

Extra Quatrain:

His cross was to conquer death,

to cancel out millions of noughts:

who knows whether he breathed his last breath

in finding the immortality he sought.

Missiled in his wheelchair from the air

but was it legal, was it legal?

Did he send out his bomber eagles

to certain death, mass death out there?

Was he learned  in the tenets of Islam,

martyred when the rockets slammed in,

limbs chopped from the chopper gunship?

There’s still friendship

in Israel and Palestine today –

for peace that’s the only way.

22 March 2004

INTERPRETING THE SCAN

The world may be in an ugly time

but it has many beautiful faces.

There are still beauty spots in many places.

Every morning I shave with lemon and lime,

prepping my skin for the city’s grime

in my quest for understanding,

hoping that on the train I won’t be standing

with my boot. I specialise not in disarming

but giving two people at a time a hand.

I have to make my voice at once tough and calming

in the sharp triangle of listening and hearing.

It trickles through the hourglass, one hour of sand,

our three souls have perhaps been scanned.

22 March 2004

FROM A LONDON SEQUENCE

Battersea Power Station long has been retired,

yet still its massive hulk inspires.

The four erect lighthouse chimneys not yet wrecked

are a fine example of power and impotence,

it is not in the future but present and more past tense.

It is a modern ‘Look on my works, o ye mighty,’ spare

by the Thames not in the desert but powerless there.

Schemes are dreamed up of having it as a rock venue,

but it’s carcass does not lead to renewal,

though guitars are electric – for it nothing new –

it stands looming like a rock by the river withal.

Once the pride of the National Grid,

now bricks, but no dust and grit,

demolishable though undemolished:

an admonishment that power cuts both ways

and is still currency for nights and days.

23 March 2004

NON-MEDITERRANEAN CAFÉ MEDITATION

Unwinding now – long day –

no words now – just eyes –

take the words of this pen away,

though live on this page, they’re unpronounced,

silent, they don’t announce

themselves so their secret is safe –

with me, of course, perhaps never allowed

to be read aloud.

That suits – no words now –

today I’ve heard too many.

So I sit here poet and man,

looking at the back of a woman

in polka dots, buttoning my grey jacket

against the cold, not ready to pack it

in and catch the train.

This poem is different from a song refrain,

is different from a feeling,

yet presses its silent healing,

and I remember your soft hands stroking

the backs of my palms

and thought this is the opposite of harm

and this and our words I feel

are all this evening I need.

And I am happy to be happy.

23 March 2004

I’m in one of my anti-espionage moods.

The most sophisticated code is crude

against psychological glasnost’.

Is it from the motherland or childhood that nost-

algia is strongest or does the pater noster

foster the deepest bonds?

‘Buy Bond, get Bond free’ on the street amuses me.

Did Sean get up to French conneries?

Here I go ridiculing what is serious,

a reason to be taken seriously?

24 March 2004

SONG

It’s not the ship, it is the crew

that sails the dangerous seas.

It’s not the dove, it is the coo

after the olive twig is free.

And our ark is overloaded,

but the rescue dig is on,

the water is a-rising,

rain clouds shield the setting sun.

Pace the feet of the song,

don’t put a single foot wrong.

Climb Jacob’s ladder by its rungs,

respect all earthly tongues.

Round about the world is crazy,

terror blows bodies and minds,

here there’s bullying and hazing

to home the blind lead the blind.

24 March 2004

NEARLY TWO CITIZENS’ ARRESTS

It’s not that I’m getting jumpy

but when I saw ‘Gego Nazis’*

on the back of a rucksack

of a young German in a group

at the station, why did I not talk to their Leader?

Fear of being surrounded by the group?

Then I got to my café at Victoria and there’s a black

bin liner with contents on a seat at an empty table.

I tell the waitress. The man in the queue

makes a bad joke. ‘It’s freezing

and do you think I’m a terrorist?’

I watch him now as I drink my Macchiato,

my hand trembling. He sits by his black bin liner,

then swinging the black refuse bag he leaves his seat,

to my and this poem’s relief.

* The next day I asked three German girls in the train and they told me it meant ‘Smash Nazis’.

25 March 2004

Yeats’ ‘Inisfree’ is in the car of the Tube –

so lyric poetry can be written and read

in times of great stress.

Rubic’s name has the essence of his cube –

for its co-inventer, or so he said, I once interpreted,

to not challenge him was best.

So much has happened in three hours since waking,

shaving, pill-taking, the boiled egg,

a review of Nazim Hikmet to correct,

strangers to meet eye to eye,

dangers to defy…

25 March 2004

Again I’m stumped for words –

two hours 45 with a Kurd,

from the tragic to the absurd,

then I vouched upon my word

that she wouldn’t do anything stupid.

But death’s arrows are deadlier than Cupid’s.

At the end of the session silent and morbid

she embraced and left us.

I hope I am right. I felt I am right,

but now I don’t feel alright.

We got an almighty fright.

25 March 2004

I just sit here staring at yesterday’s poems

and the black lines on the white page.

I try to stretch my mind into homes

of friends, into their work places.

My brain sits not races,

physically I’ll never run again

but my thoughts can fly like a plane:

stare at many human landscapes

and I really don’t want to escape –

no prisoner am I but more my conscience makes visits

and I am not the Grand Inquisitor.

26 March 2004

FAME ACADEMY

Some talk of Seamus Heaney

and some of Paul Muldoon,

of Plath and Hughes and Levi –

but McKane is coming soon.

And he has perfect pitch they say

when the playing field is level

and he will always find a way

to rhyme evil with devil.

And oh his rhymes lead a merry dance

and he jokes up the garden path.

He’s accused of making unicorns prance.

Unpublished poems have no aftermath.

As the poems fill up the back-up disk

he works towards a Selected:

it’s only his vulnerability that’s at risk –

dear reader: I want you to be connected.

26 March 2004

The tannoy booms out to us

‘Owing to an earlier fatality in the Sittingbourne area’.

The voice is authoritative almost mellifluous.

It’s not that this journey is getting scarier

but the whole world is for us.

Thus, the service to Dover Priory is out of action.

A bigger crowd than usual fills Victoria Station.

Eyes down at the café, I am not oblivious.

I bring you my poetry live like Five Live:

the fact that I write commentaries is obvious:

one day they’ll be broadcast into your lives.

I wait for the throng to thin out.

Tonight again I don’t need to shout:

a whisper suffices – no, complete silence

on my part. But I hear the voice announce

time and again its tragic refrain:

‘Owing to an earlier fatality in the Sittingbourne area.’

26 March 2004

Is it possible to write and read too much poetry,

to be ‘poisoned by it’ as my friend Shentalinsky* said to me?

Then is reading or writing prose the antidote?

And do I have to abandon much of what I wrote

like seared leaves in autumn gathered in black sacks,

never to be in books shelved in library stacks.

* Vitaly Shentalinsky author of ‘The KGB’s Literary Archive’

26 March 2004

Furious at the eleven o’clock train being full,

standing room only – I wait for the 11.14 to pull

up to the platform. Not feeling in flat form,

but concerned that I’ll be late:

it’s uncertainty that I hate.

I thought I’d passed to freedom with my leap

but my new psychiatrist is keeping

me from getting my Freedom Pass –

is not £3,000 a year less a psychotic symptom?

Do survivors ever get a diploma?

Does the diagnosis ever change?

In a letter, forthrightly, I displayed this range

of questions: he’ll probably think I’m harping on or carping.

But don’t I too have the right to ‘carpe diem’.

27 March 2004

FOR JOHN RETY

If it’s the singer not the song,

why is it revisiting this café feels somehow wrong?

I wrote here so many poems and songs,

have I changed, man, poet, singer?

Am I my own doppelganger?

These days I have a burning anger

arising from friends in danger.

They have to rest too – Silver and the Lone Ranger.

Now they flow again the fluent lines

and this poet cherry-picks the signs,

pits his wits to positively refine

from his granary of words the most fine

until he has the essence and it all makes sense.

Now I serve it up to you as simply

as the beautiful Polish waitress plies

me with my favourite refreshment – coffee.

Few words can be spoken –

her English is broken,

but her smile is an invaluable addition

like an attractive cover on a first edition.

I now realise the café will be closed

when you the editor of my Selected arrive to talk.

Together we will have to elect to take a walk,

together the lofty disease of poetry we’ll diagnose.

27 March 2004

For Corinne

‘Glad to hear your writing poems and making lists’

C.

I wish, I wish I could make a fist

of putting poems in envelopes and in the post.

Sometimes I lift heavy metaphysical weights,

yet I still can’t physically carry the weight

of shopping bags to my temporary home.

I wonder what name they’d give to this syndrome?

Post Traumatic Shopping Disorder?

French helps, in it I can order

to myself aloud in tones that are more tender.

Perhaps I should try a bit of gender bending,

act it out like Glackson Jenda,

be my own wife and brilliant actor,

leaping over any homosexual factor.

The commandment should read: ‘Love thyself as thy neighbour’,

how readily I’d carry the shopping for him for her.

Yet I know my mother considers poetry as self indulgence,

then it’s 60 years since she basked in Rilke’s effulgence.

27 March 2004

My poems are flip and have a bit of side

and you’re always aware of their flip side.

A master of the colloquial, rarely the sublime,

scraping close shaves foamed with lemon and lime,

turning out poems, though seldom well turned out.

‘Return to foam Aphrodite’,

Mandelstam declaimed. And these are more than ditties

by John Clare I declare.

This is the generation or de-generation of Blair,

I think of his rock group years

at Oxford, now he leads a band

and I wish they were merrier men.

Politicians, from me you have nowt to fear,

for you the sword is ever mightier than the pen.

27 March 2004

THE GREYHOUND POEM

Of course I’ve read Berryman, Lowell and Stevens too,

but it’s the poets I’ve translated for you

from Russian and Turkish that see me through.

The list is too long to enumerate, many of them are women,

still it’s my poems not translations that face rejection.

One day I’ll burst out of the traps,

though my muzzle is grey, and course the laps,

I’ll hound fame’s mechanical hare,

tearing up the course at the track,

gone to the dogs, not the dogs of war –

I’m too old for that, grey is my hair.

I cannot rerun the race, turn the clock back

except in the action replay of flashbacks,

poems, dreams – and memory of course.

29 March 2004

It’s all a rush when the vibes are bad,

but our meeting today will make me feel glad

and at least I slept some extra hours.

The day is exactly long enough to exercise my powers.

Like a sculptor I’ll chisel at the stone,

their art too is always done alone.

*

At Charing Cross station I saw a scene –

a dozen young men and women

dancing to their Walkmen

with one eye on the departure’s screen.

One sparked off another

though their earphones

were more like blindfolds. Each in their

own world of music and dance,

introverted but somehow choreographed

and I thought

this too is a modern metaphor.

1 April 2004

This poem might come out in a major key,

for that the Shakespearean soliloquy

would seem to be the benchmark.

I search and find friendship’s landmarks:

a couple of hours at an Algerian café table

with you who the summer through enabled

my poetry to burn and sustain steadily

and record the poems in notebooks tidily,

more than notes as aides memoires

for they were full of grandes espoires

for your writing as well as mine.

Now the time approaches half past nine:

the full ripeness of the day is on the diminuendo

and I write this poem honestly without innuendo.

1 April 2004

ENGLISH LESSON

Too tired to read but still I can write:

the corner is narrow, the corner is tight.

I taught three meanings of light,

to attached Natasha and the teaching was right.

Here I was Professore, professing my faith in the English language.

Here behind my grey hair I hid my age,

back in my twenties but with the powers of a sage

and our lesson quelled tiredness, quelled rage.

1 April 2004

SONG: LET ME BE ME

When I find myself leading the life of a double

Mata Hari comes to me,

wafting waves of perfume –

let me be me.

And in my time of torture

there is still a light that shines on me

shine through the blindfold

let me be me.

For I am not an agent

but a talented English gent,

spying with my poet’s spyglass,

let me be me.

With my four languages

I take on different personalities

but today and throughout the ages

let me be me.

And through the waves of tiredness

there’s no time for lethargy,

repel the virus of boredom,

let me be me.

A dull headache,

no pills to take.

For Oktay’s sake,

peace we have to make.

Not to rake

leaves of poetry in ire

and burn them on the bonfire.

2 April 2004

Selma is maintaining email silence.

I think she’s more in alliance

with Robert Graves than this poet.

She’s been in England, I know that

from her last communication.

I don’t think I’ve offended her –

perhaps she’s occupied with the referendum

in Cyprus, that trilingual nation,

which is emerging from years of occupation –

I refer to the British as well as the Greeks and Turks.

And I just bury myself in writing and work,

my collateral is poetry and lateral thinking,

though vertically down these lines are sinking

their highs and lows have a definite breadth,

from birth scream to death’s last whispered breath.

2 April 2004

I love to play with words not just at the end of lines.

I prefer a good rhyme to sarcasm’s prickly spines.

Words are indicators and signs

but for linguistics I have no time.

When Creation emerged from the primordial slime

how could it know about the human voice

that it would rise above all the background noise

and that silent writing millennia later would follow,

the thyrsus of Bacchus, the lyre of Apollo,

the wrath of Zeus, the Pythia with her hollow.

Some poetry serves as an oracle,

in the case of Lowell and Pound, as a chronicle.

If the sonnet or ghazal are the pinnacle,

the limerick is the colloquial,

all in all creation is a constant miracle,

but would I be freer if I wrote free verse,

and does rhyming require one to constantly rehearse?     2/3 April 2004

FOR ROBERT LOWELL

My head feels muzzy, heavy but empty,

like a hangover when I drank in my twenties.

I have to write in all seasons and moods,

feelings, thoughts for poems are food –

they need not necessarily be extreme,

both in my case are channelled in the lithium midstream

so that I no longer know how I’d write without medication.

They ring-fenced your poems as confessional,

but you were high priest and petitioner in the confessional.

Does poetry have to earn money for the poet to be called professional,

or is it enough to totally profess to be in the profession?

You were a risk-taker in your translations,

relying heavily on friends’ literals for your imitations.

You took a menacing cocktail of drink and medication,

it would be wrong to call that drugs,

and yet you were able to write meditations

while in life you pulled the rugs

from under your feet. Stephen Spender

wanted us to meet but it never happened.

I think we share more than Mandelstam, Pasternak

and the psychotropics – we share a knack

for shooting a line of poetry.

3 April 2004

I don’t need total silence to write in Cafes,

but this intrusive La-La music has a way

of distracting me, derailing off the lines

my train of thought which usually runs fine.

So I work as though I am slightly sick,

against the grain of the airport lounge music.

Why should this trivia comprise a poem?

I could use this half hour at home

composing an email on PEN Writers in Prison Committee,

for from them a salvo of conflicting emails has hit me.

3 April 2004

GATE POETRY

Before visiting my mother I drop in on Coffee Republic,

where as I’ve rhymed before I can smoke my pipe in public.

The espresso coffee here is terrific and licks

that of other cafés and in the smoking area the girls are chic.

I observe as I write, good music plays but the clock ticks

and I must pack away my pen and notebook and quick

to my mother – I hope today she’s not too sick.

They’re behind her those prozac-withdrawal hysterics

she had six months ago but really with her it’s sic

transit gloria Materi.

4 April 2004

I slumbered between stations on the Underground.

If this was at work it would be grounds

for concern. I lumber from café to café,

from coffee to coffee, pipe to pipe.

It would be self indulgence if I

didn’t at each sitting have a swipe

at composing and thus imposing

on this nomadic life a little order

on a routine that smacks of time-wasting and disorder.

4 April 2004

People open up to me,

their secrets they divulge.

There’s a safe inside of me,

its code I’ll not divulge.

My wallet does not bulge,

but I’ve a store of words,

written, spoken, read and heard

that give my life a surge.

4 April 2004

LATE DEPARTURE

This delay at Victoria Station means

another poem of travel and travail is available

to me. If these poems were saleable

I’d be a man of extraordinary means.

If I was paid say five pounds a line

I’d earn as much as on the stock exchange.

Unfortunately of the times it is a sign

that in my pocket I don’t even have spare change.

This notebook fills up like a 19^th century poet’s,

my public they don’t know it’s

so hard to make a life and living,

but I do believe that in this overgiving

there is overtaking too – I write faster

than a stockbroker’s Mercedes

and I think I know my lines will last longer,

if only I can share their late arrival with these

readers, unknowing and unknown.

4 April 2004

BROODING

The riot of poetry has been suppressed.

Sleeplessness is a thing of the past.

Working was becoming sore pressed,

but with two extra hours sleep have I lost my edge?

I had been both elated and depressed,

the two moods vital for poetry,

now I am closer to my family tree

and they will be more impressed.

Will I sit on the garden fence,

or rather the prickly hedge,

will I once more not react to offence

and never launch myself off the window ledge?

I have to be a poet for all seasons and moods,

who like a hen on a clutch of eggs broods:

I must not kill the golden goose,

let my poems loose but not lose.

6 April 2004

FOR HELEN

It’s not often I have requests for poems –

this one was more extreme than all of them:

‘Get them together before I die’,

those ones I’ve written to you.

The ‘I die’ was spoken simply, no sigh,

like calling a spade a spade

in your room above the Langland Garden,

and I realise how renegade

I’ve been and that my will to print must harden.

Long have the hosts of poems been planted like bulbs,

unexposed in the underground in their friendship hulls

and I have wondered on them out loud

and believe they’re worth their words,

strict in rhymes, deep as lakes, not far from Ben Bulben

in some of their inspirations. If I am to stay in England,

not travel again abroad, I need a new angle and

more: I need to refresh my mother tongue.

For thirty years from Russian to Turkish I have swung

until I can be taken for either,

I, the chameleon character,

part of whom wants to be an actor,

a voice to the max factor

rather than an interpreter.

7 April 2004

EXHAUSTED WORLD

It is not the language that is tired,

it is the users and the abusers.

With mud the river is mired,

pure water is pellucid.

The lucidity of poetry

attempts to protect it.

The oxygen from the tree

counteracts pollution.

But the layers of ozone,

especially at the Poles

are holed by poisons:

humans not gods create the twilight.

8 April 2004

The sea is easy to envisage:

its colours are limited;

it’s always flat, its visage,

except when it’s broken by waves.

It is always more uninhibited

than its sister dry land,

its blonde waves are never bland,

they give surfers a wave and a hand

crashing down on the pebbles and sand.

8 April 2004

FOR JULIET AT EASTER

RITES OF PASSAGE

In the churchyard by the exceedingly tall yew trees

you searched for your mobile frantically

in your handbag and for the first time I thought:

you are a woman, no longer a girl,

and in this whirl of realisation I caught

myself saying it aloud in feelings’ swirl.

After the long vigil service with candles and incense –

the plain song intoning of the priest made perfect sense –

in the same churchyard with Father Tim we joked

about the yew trees, their poisonous red berries

and cows, bullocks and bulls were yoked

into our humour, them being not allowed

in yard or church and I brought in bowmen then Papal bulls

and one of us risked ‘in the church there’s a lot of bull’

and I warned him any word aloud

was liable to be put into my verse.

A collection to come but not much in my purse.

Easter with you, I rejoiced, for I felt far from the hearse.

10/11 April 2004

FRESH COFFEE

New day. Fresh start.

Time to examine

the state of the art

of poetry in

a few sketched lines.

Of life there are still signs.

I go through the emotions

gulping my Macchiato potion.

Are you dead when you don’t feel,

or is it when you are not felt?

Shoulder to the wheel,

tighten your black belt,

gird your loins,

rattle the keys and coins

in your pocket

and never say fuck it

to life or the spirit.

13 April 2004

SIGNING CONTRACTS

I

The news is full of Pecks and Bosh,

sex texting and all that tosh,

Iraq goes off the front page,

soon I’ll have papers’ rage,

though I only observe the headlines.

So a footballer and his wife are headlining,

known for their precision timing.

Every clod has a silver lining

when he hops onto the football pitch –

not strange that this rhymes with rich.

II

Now poetry is entertainment of a different ilk,

still, no use crying over spilt ink or milk,

but if I’ve acted improperly it makes me think

and worry. Delayed contact is worse than hurrying it,

I admit without looking at the contract rather than parrying it

that I committed a sin of omission.

Each translation is a mission,

to load the first fruits without asking was not my intention

so that the second book could come to fruition

and the first be consigned to perdition.

When I was on the phone, alarmed by the tone,

as though my father was scolding me I blethered for half a minute.

Your statement, old friend, I see the sense in it.

As usual I can put myself in your shoes,

though I didn’t at first.

This issue I will not shoo

under the carpet. I felt carpeted, worsted

and that’s a rare and powerful feeling,

but I’m on my two feet not kneeling.

Is not the poetry the main thing?

But I want to get it right,

honour the feelings, the contract and copyright

and salvage the friendship

that could tip over and capsize.

13 April 2004

PAVEMENT CAFÉ

I’m not quite striking right.
Hooked on slices of life

I never quite find the sweet spot.

At pavement level it’s ugly,

white and black impacted chewing gum,

butt-ends smoked down to the filter,

down here in the gutter one can only be glum.

But to dwell here means to remain out of kilter:

lift your head, o poet – do not be bowed down:

it’s friends that are the best thing in this town,

unlike the stone building facades their faces alter,

when they grow old their paces falter:

the population multiplies and replaces itself,

exhaust emissions are a hazard to health,

but I pollute my lungs with pipe smoke as well.

For poets it’s not common to have riches and wealth

in the traditional way, yet we are in a rich tradition

and I’ll add these lines to a future edition.                 13 April 2004

FOR MERAL, GILLIAN AND ME

I break no confidences with this poem,

it’s not written at work, not written at home,

here in this limbo-state café it’s neither of the two

and I concentrate on being true to both of you

and myself of course, for we are the most equilateral

of triangles and we work in the metaphorical and literal.

When I found out that daughter Selen wanted a case of Red Bull

I saw red. Eighteen cups of coffee, did you know, Meral,

that’s what this little tin is full of,

but it will be hard to withdraw her, to pull her off

the two tin a day addiction.

Sometimes it’s not words but their tone and diction

that is the art of interpreting.

Sometimes tears can only be interpreted with tears

but sotto voce we stopped before them with the late father’s hand

                                                                            that quells fears

which magically was transformed into your hand, Gillian,

as I gave a hand like a word magician.

The pills that had suppressed her last time

did not hold her back this eveningtime.

Her eyes flashed, her face was animated,

secure in the oasis triangle we had created.

On the radio in the morning I’d heard

how for Shelley the peak of lovemaking and dying

were linked in the apogee of his words,

but I’m not up for either now and I don’t think I’m lying

to myself or you to say that this session

of the three of us made several steps ahead in our mission

to each other and I am able to differentiate

to you, Gillian, what makes the difference

between ‘sevgi’ and ‘aşk’, the two aspects

of love that in Greek are the ‘agapé’ and ‘eros’ concepts.

We remain agape and aghast at the problems Meral faces.

I’ve always known she is closer to poetry

than drama. You two made me have a try…

15 April 2004

I

The announcer mellifluously lists destinations.

Here I am an hour early at Victoria Station,

have staked out my poetry pitch

and with pen, pipe and Americano see no hitch

against writing a brace of poems,

and fee fy, fo fum,

my blood is the blood of an Englishmun.

II

I like the children’s and young people’s poetry

and the book, I’ll give it another try.

What is our target audience?

The young or those in the know?

I still can’t make sense

of where we should next go

to get out of the refugee ghetto.

A few poems we have stand on their own feet,

a celebrity foreword could make a difference.

We must realise we are going to meet

with opposition and diffidence

and I am not Benjamin Zephanaiah

or a poet that bursts into schools,

poetry is still very much a pariah.

But I wouldn’t have pitched it – I am no fool –

if I didn’t think it would be a runner,

yet it remains the hardest book to place in context,

to place and for which to gather texts

and at times I’ve felt it was going under.

We haven’t found the right help:

I let this out not just as a yelp

but because of the state of the market

and yet I believe we have to mark it,

these years of the young people’s poetry of asylum:

one of the pluses will be pictures

with which we’ve never proposed together.

Their lines are perhaps creatively correcter

than their second language lines in English.

The combination is very moving,

somehow we have to get the book moving.

16 April 2004

CARRION PIGEON

Hours of waiting can be shortened

by writing poems, throwing caution

to the winds. The one precaution

is not to tread on feelings when they oughtn’t

to be trod on for they are feather frail.

I remember the day our book failed

there was a dead pigeon lying in the sideroad:

I’m not saying it was nature’s message in code

but it pulled me up in my track

and that evening I found out Saqi’s

poetry series was under the axe.

*

Tired in the day. Fired up at dawn and night.

They’d say it is a poet’s plight,

but that’s putting it too politely

or taking the issue too lightly.

‘You’re burning the candle at both ends’,

E.M. Kenber, my Housemaster’s words still send

my mind into a tizzy of memories,

but what if he touched on reality as he caught me

in my study writing on Orwell and Tolstoy after midnight,

due to (House Alarm Clock, my nickname) get up before six?

Thus started my anti-sleep antics:

forty years later I think and admit – his anger was right.

16 April 2004

GIVE US THIS DAY

If I could earn my daily bread

with these words that come from heart and head.

If one line of mine, as I believe, is worth more

than a fashionable line of cocaine,

then my name is Richard McKane, or

as a few friends call me – plain Rich.

But how difficult it is to earn bread

especially for a Russianist now reds aren’t under the bed.

Perhaps I should suck up to Abramovich @ Chelsky

rather than translating the unknown poet Velichansky.

Or should I become not an agent but an estate agent?

It’s quite something to have Russian and be an English gent.

So here I am knocking off these lines, while waiting

to interpret, in the café where the waitress

is my English student. I am a bit distressed

by my moneylessness, I am a man-in-waiting

as Pushkin was not to the tsar but to Poetry.

We are both caught up in courting the Muse:

that is why we never got involved in marketry:

‘When you ain’t got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.’

16 April 2004

Just half an hour left of free time

before I interpret for Nimisha and the Armenian teacher.

Robert Stanilov thought I should do a preaching

tour of the deep South – that would rhyme

nicely with my Methodist priest grandfather.

Little did he know his genes would go farther

than he ever thought when he presented

me when I was a toddler in Australia in absentia

with John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress:

in this poem I do not digress –

I’m explaining to you an unwritten tradition,

the birth of this writer’s ambition,

the generation of sacred poetry that skipped a generation.

16 April 2004

Bitter and black like a sloe,

I drink it down slow,

nowadays they call it Americano.

How the American, oh,

threw on parting the blue irises

one by one from the high balcony.

Now the memory arises,

it happened in London and Paris towns.

I didn’t kill the bird with falconry,

but separation threw its gauntlet down

and neither of us could pick it up.           18 April 2004

I’m circulating on the Circle Line,

notebook on knee and feeling fine.

By keeping the brain active

I can remain poetically productive

by shortening the time span of feelings’

and thoughts’ translation to paper.

I am an expert at the swift treatment,

as far as my poems’ publication caper

this seems to be wanting, the long term treatment,

but every so often my three or four selves make an appointment

with each other and establish some guidelines

to develop my cause outside time, tube, train and café lines.

I detect an element of Scorpio secrecy in my work,

not so much in the writing but like a dissident Russian or Turk

might write for the bottom drawer in self-censorship.

Why should I and a few friends only worship

the secrets at the shrine of my poetry,

go to the priest for confirmation and confession

as though my mentor Peter Levi SJ were still alive,

when I had long ago chosen poetry as one of my professions?

Even when my next book of poetry comes out, will I have arrived?

18 April 2004

Hunger in the belly and hunger in the soul,

hunger for the partial and hunger for the whole.

Then later when I am full of myself again

I shall brave the metaphors of fire and rain.

Melodies and words revolve in my head:

I play Olga Perry’s Akhmatova when I go to bed.

I steal tunes and rework the words.

I single out cattle in the herds

and brand them with my special mark.

If not the flood, no Noah’s ark,

if no Prometheus no fire would have sparked,

but the promoter of myths lost his liver to the eagle.

The rainbow is an independent symbol,

rain and fire of the sun’s ball.

18 April 2004

FOR ROD WOODEN

You will recognise me at the café,

hair a bit tousled and grey,

with my big head and Russian physiognomy,

drinking one of four or five types of coffee,

smoking black cherry blend

pipe tobacco not exactly blending

in to this my natural habitat.

It is my morning and evening habit at

these times to write my journeyman poems

which I am incapable of writing at home.

I read your prose Big Blue

you sent to me from Colombia.

You boldly reveal and conceal all the clues

to your life and loves and the paraphernalia

of the Journey’s travails.

Your selective memories avail

me to indulge in parallels

in my own life. So jumping in the sky

need not be as terminal as I

might have made it? You say

we walk in the sky – it reaches down to the earth,

to the streets, to this station where I stay

an hour to give this poem for you its birth.

I thought Petite was a pet name

and didn’t know she couldn’t go back to her homeland.

That’s a huge love, a very serious game,

more a play you write in earnest. I wish I could give you a hand,

could spirit you over to this café table,

to have a sohbet*, conversation for I am now able

to relate to all you write: my eyes acclimatised

to your underground, as underwater.

It’s a big book you’re writing, not a novel, I surmise:

one day I hope it’ll be read by my daughter

and will give copies to friends.

Most bonfires, thank God, burn in control –

they’re tamed. Bombfires though have different ends.

The world is in a helluva hole.

Let’s not jump into the abyss

but circle it with our loves like a kiss

walk round the abyss like lips

circle the mouth. Languages can dive

in, especially French. Today derived

from your prose, I will share with you

walking through our sky, whether grey or big blue.

19 April 2004

sohbet*: conversation in Turkish which often includes long silences.

*

Paper staring at the blank page

does not help,

but this page

already has horizontal lines

lest my handwriting waver.

Look, the writing period is over

and I write lines on lines.

My eyes read them

but how long will it take

till others do?

19 April 2004

Over an hour to fill before my appointment

at the hospital with the thyroid consultant.

My Graves’ disease is more common in women eight to one.

In ten days I’ll drink the radioactive infusion

and my overactive gland will cease to function,

instead it will be boosted with thyroxine.

I am assured that my mood will not change

and I am told my feelings will have full range,

I will have access to the bitter refreshment of tears, to rightful anger,

to the detonation of shared, defusing laughter

and I will retain my openness to love

both agapé and eros, sevgi and aşk, and above

all will still seek out the secrets of poetry that in their revelation

will cause you reader the aforesaid deep sadness and elation.

19 April 2004

People eat their burger dinners on the train,

the smell of them is like a lousy song’s refrain.

In to the hands come the phobile moans with their games,

thumbs pressing numbers or playing – it’s all the same

until the ring tone and the repeated announcement: ‘I’m on the train’.

I seem to be able to write not read when I am close to sleep,

the print hypnotises me whereas the pen’s motion keeps

me awake. This year was a leap

one but no one proposed me a peep.

Comparatively satisfied with my life as it is –

I don’t really envy hers or his ,

at poetry I’m becoming a whiz –

all poets are amateurs

with a few exceptions:

professionals for poetry earn

money and that today is a wild conception.

19 April 2004

DOUBLE TROUBLE

I tend to arrive at Victoria on the hour,

then write in the Ritazza Café for half an hour,

improvising my poems with Razza Matttaz,

more like freewheeling modern jazz.

I couldn’t resist joking to the stranger who sat down at my table:

on the back of his magazine was: ‘International

Spey Casting’, I dropped the ‘e’ and challenged the man with a smile.

For a time spying became mainly industrial and commercial,

the latter it never was not.

These days wars are gathering and hot,

the peoples swing between hyperactivity and inertia,

seeing trouble, the leaders suffer from bouts of paranoia.

And what of the intelligence community?

It seems within it there is disunity:

a real move against illegal espionage.

Poets should no longer play the Pan pipes:

they should blow the whistle. The time is ripe,

or are we going back to Mandelstam’s wolfhound age?

22 April 2004

PEOPLE WATCHING

People watching is free and fun.

You sit in the café on your buns

and stare at the people flowing

for all the world like the Neva’s icefloeing.

There’s a Victor Fainberg pun ‘blyadokhod’

that catches both the easy women and the ice.

Only in my imagination in a trice

could I be in Petersburg on the Nevsky Prospect,

but unfortunately, realistically this is not in prospect

for me, so with my dead poets I work on dead geography

and the taunts of graphomania I try

to ignore. My head will only be above the parapet

when I publish my own poems and hedge my bets.

I write this poem on a glass of water,

ten p in my pocket is not enough for a coffee.

Poverty bites – I haven’t even brought her, my daughter,

a wedding present yet and there’s no hope of poetry fees.

But – and there is a but, although on edge

I feel not content but happy

at times, as though my flight off the ledge

now flashes less important to my present situation

than these level platforms with their unlevel people at Victoria Station.

22 April 2004

Last night, penniless I had a glass of water at the Café,

it’s a lion’s drink they say.

Late from working with my favourite psychologist,

I say ‘Hi and good evening’ to the waitress

and she brings to my table a regular Latte:

whether because she thinks I am a poet or scatty

or just to restore my zapped faith in the milk of human kindness,

she refuses my money. Thank you, you are more royal than a princess.

23 April 2004

FOR JULIET

It’s when the tears start to smart in my eyes

that I know, no lies, an honest poems will arise.

Is it possible to cry at one’s own funeral,

when friends and companions are all

around? For, you said, it’s only then you know

the measure of your popularity, what you owed

and what you gave, what they felt

for you. The farewell speeches melt your heart,

you wonder on the wisdom that made you part

to face another destiny, another fate.

The guests will drink and balance their plates.

A part of you died when you left the job

but your funeral was metaphorical:

now preparations for your wedding are more topical.

23 April 2004

Trees in leaf by the side of the track.

We’ve jumped over spring into summer.

In Galway friends will celebrate the Cuirt Festival’s craic.

Work proliferates; tries to push me under,

but I pop up like a cork, clear my snorkel

on the surface, my lungs still powerful

that fully power these speech rhythms and my poems.

24 April 2004

I claim I’m an elitist.

I claim I’m a populist.

Who else reads Khlebnikov

in Russian on the tube?

Who else for his poems nicks off

form and content like solving a Rubic Cube?

If elitism means the abstruse and writing for the few –

that’s only till I publish, but then this book’s for you and you.

My neck groans, the pain is dull,

the sort of pain oxen feel after a full

day’s ploughing or Nasrettin Hoja’s donkey

after carrying father and son. NH is one of the keys

to my poetry and life philosophy

who opened up to me language and culture in Turkey.

I remember him going to a feast in his working clothes

and being thrown out, but then he returned in a smart coat.

He’s seated at the table in an honoured place,

the he leans over his loaded plate

and says ‘Eat, coat, eat!’

24 April 2004

SITTING WITH MOTHER

When memory speaks and you’re not on your own

it’s a little bit like being on the phone

to a distant relative who can prompt:

if recollection is not prompt

you can use piggy-back memory

by combining your two computer banks,

then you will realise that thanks

to your two brains very many

lost remembrances can be remembered

as the fires burn close to embers.

24 April 2004

Wedged on the train, nose dripping

but unable to reach in my pocket

but thankful to have a seat.

There starts the 20 minute silence

to Victoria. Here ends the first lesson

of non-communication and the second

is like it, namely this:

‘Do as you would be done by’.

So who’s doing me and what do I want to do

and do I love my neighbour

as the Samaritan did?

And what if I can’t love myself?

26 April 2004

So it’s feeling versus intellect,

but both write these verses –

I may have looked wrecked

but I could interpret the myth’s curses.

Many stories end prematurely

with the child going to sleep.

Before the age of maturity

we make imagination’s leap.

Do we lose it as the intellect develops,

as feelings become enveloped

by society or can we keep

all three: feeling, imagination and intellect,

the shepherd, the lambs, the sheep

where one of the three is elect.

26 April 2004

My coat is OK but the lining’s torn,

my forehead with worry-lines is worn,

the pain in my neck is a pain in the neck

and all I can ejaculate is ‘Oh, heck!’

I don’t know whether I shaved or not,

the blade is blunt, the razor not hot.

I felt like staying in my single bed:

this internecine fighting is getting to my head.

27 April 2004

FOR JOAN SMITH

After, the rain came down in torrents.

I found the expectation to resign abhorrent

if the motion was lost of no confidence.

It was like in Seventh Elegy Akhmatova’s writers’ trial:

I don’t know whether the poison was in phial or file.

Here it was happening in England, not Stalin’s Russia

and it seemed some people wanted to rush her.

They didn’t realise that the patent victimisation

had such a wide impact on the whole situation.

This time it was not ‘I shot the sheriff’ by Robin Hood

but at the whole merry band of us, who are people of good-

will. Joan may have gone out on a limb but the whole committee tree

is behind her and other trees in the international forest

and because our prisoners are on constant vigil we can’t rest

and all this as is my wont, I put down in poetry.

You blew the whistle, we heard it,

but this whistleblower’s fate must not turn out gruesome.

There are elements of the absurd, it

is true. To me, to us, you have always been true and wholesome.

27 April 2004 

Tomorrow is my last day at work

before I have my thyroid zapped.

For ten days I’ll be leaving my Russian and Turks –

some of them realize that I am handicapped.

Meanwhile purchase of a house for me is bubbling up.

It’s pretty empty my interpreting cup.

I spent all my salary with ten days to go,

my health now is only so-so.

Alev, the flame, and I will do a reading at Arcola,

this is an occasion to shout ‘ole’ or ‘hola!’.

In a review of her book I’ll find her soul,

for such a book is part of the whole.

27 April 2004

We speak of terrorism of errorism

of terrors and errors,

of bombers and fighters,

of gunship choppers,

of Palestine and Israel

and trains off the rails,

of shock horrors

and imprisonments

and living death,

yet amid this overwhelming News

we still draw hope and breath.

28 April 2004

 In Ampney St Peter churchyard by the yew tree

my younger brother’s and father’s ashes lie.

Long ago that immigration officer Peter

interrogated them for heaven’s asylum.

Andrew won his case for his ripaway goodness,

father for his intelligence in the Cold War,

so both have freedom to remain for eternity.

I’ve visited them rarely in their Cotswold village.

Now every extra year I live is a privilege.

28 April 2004

I’m on the sidewalk – no room in the Café,

coffee black, tobacco black cherry.

It’s cold, grey and about to rain.

For ten days isolation how will I stand home’s strain?

Is this Café Croissant D’Or

the golden crescent or

the golden croissant?

The owners are from Algeria,

the waitresses Russian

and it was found for me by a Turkish friend.

The cups of coffee, cheek pouches of tobacco smoke

blend into the poetry, the movement of this biro.

Seven pounds left in the Bank, before my pay not giro.

The same wind blows on prince and hobo,

cousin to the wind that blows the oboe’s

reed, and my neck it stiffens again in the wind, oh

but last night I slept like a lamb,

rolled towel under my pillow, hot water bottle

from my Turkish friends by my pyjama collar, tamam

it was, no nightmares throttled.

28 April 2004

I left my bag outside! How could I do such a thing?

Ten minutes before my alarm bell rang.

When one finds what’s been lost the heart sings

as strong as it beats in panic.

If they knew the contents why would anyone nick

it? Khlebnikov, Yeats, a letter from Tonita in Ireland,

they would be only of use in bilingual hands,

but it’s smart, black with aluminium handles

and many great poetry books it has handled

in sun and rain and Collected Lowell and Hughes

gave a helluva good excuse

for doing in my shoulder and neck,

but in for Thomas in for a Pound, oh heck,

but how the adrenalin flows: lost and found:

and I have in my pockets only pennies, not pounds.

28 April 2004

The day after your sleepless night it is tempting

to sleep in the day. I advise catnaps

and writing or at least attempting

to write. Insomnia is a mishap

that strikes most writers of sensitive mind

but one can always find rest between the lines.

Does the same adrenalin flow with worry and exhilaration

but the mix of the two is a devilish invention –

to sleeplessness the ultimate gratification,

but an opportunity as the thoughts rush so fast

to think things through at a Godgiven speed. And at last

when hopefully sleep comes the next night the mind is refreshed,

and the body, the spirit, the flesh.

28 April 2004
These little breaks between interpretings

have for some years now been serving

not as swerves from my main career –

for the poems do not bring up the rear

but are the avantgarde in the battle of life.

They are more than R & R,

so committed they are

but isolated too without a reader:

in computer files they bleed

their black print,

on no one’s eyes imprinted

and yet they are created and have a life

and one day a book will breathe

with them before or after death.

28 April 2004

FOR MAIDE

You stand there in the coffee queue

and I guard our table.

Unlike Orpheus I didn’t look back at you

but wrote as quickly as I was able.

Then two brown eyes from over a cup:

the girl that always cheers me up.

Now next morning I am drinking another espresso,

you’re no longer beside me to impress,

oh, I am more anxious than I admitted,

though to the hospital I’ll not be admitted –

another drink but this time radioactive:

they promise I’ll be less tired, more proactive,

but my thyroid has served me well,

now it’s hyperactivity will be quelled.

I couldn’t have written better on Graves’ disease.

Robert Graves, the ancestor, would be pleased

with these poems: well, here goes – it’s not hemlock,

but please let the effect not be writer’s block.

28/29 April 2004

LET ME BE ME

When I find myself leading the life of a double

Mata Hari comes for me,

wafting waves of perfume –

let me be me.

And in my time of torture

there is still a light that shines at me

shine through the blindfold

let me be me.

For I am not an agent

but a talented English gent,

spying with my poet’s spyglass,

let me be me.

With my four languages

I take on different personalities

but today and throughout the ages

let me be me.

And through the waves of tiredness

there’s no time for lethargy,

repel the virus of boredom,

let me be me.

                  RICHARD McKANE

POEMS MAY-JULY 2004

On 29^th April I had radioactive treatment for my thyroid so felt this was as good a time as any to close the file I had started in January 2004, especially as it had reached over 130 poems.

I am confined at home till 10^th May 2004. Since most of my poems are written outside home it will be interesting to see how this file starts: the notebook started on April 23^rd.

Passive listening to the radio

in my time of radioactivity.

But perhaps, Oleg says, it’s radiopassivity.

*                                                                                           

In this house I’m out of rhythm –

like a heart with arrhythmia.

I’m beaten into silence

but I’ll set up the alliance

of pen to paper to poem

and manage to write in my own home.

*

FOR ALEXANDER KOROTKO

If words are icebergs,

can they cause the crash

that sank the Titanic?

Oh, sensing them should we panic

or let them float to us

in the sea of the collective unconscious

and forget Scylla and Charybdis’ clash.

FOR NIKOS STANGOS

Kal imera, kal imera!

Morning, morning, I am not going to the circle

which means office in Turkish,

while I still have radioactivity’s girdle

of thyroid treatment to force me to be standoffish.

White lilac outside my window

stands in the silent garden below.

My world of poetry is your, Nikos, widow,

now you’re either above or below.

I will always be your creditor,

you who were my first editor,

who saw Akhmatova through at Penguin

when I was in breakdown’s anguish.

I marvelled at your Ritsos,

and you saying ‘OK, Richard’,

your astute psychology,

your Cavafian mythology.

We met at John Street in the sixties –

your hair was black, bushy and curly.

We met not quite early enough

for me to avoid despond’s slough.

As well as the Europeans you edited R.D. Laing’s Knots,

so held the key to family therapy,

at a party of yours I drank a few tots,

once your kidneys showed blood in your pee.

But I always thought you were physically

and mentally healthier than me, quizzically

looking at me at our rare lunches,

talking out our literary hunches.

Recently we fell out of touch:

that’s why your death was a shock, much

more than if we’d been in contact

and I’d known you were dying in fact.

David talked at the Pushkin Club

about his time as the Gorky Fellow

and opened up another side of Moscow,

to Russian literature you both show love.

And Isaiah Berlin wrote to me: Continue, continue, continue’

but now my friends comprise Death’s retinue,

almost fewer among the living as Aronzon said,

and one day I too will join you the majority, the dead.

Why is it I thought you were a barometer?

Not only with quicksilver comments on literature,

Greek and international but also of course on art:

By the Thames, not the Hudson, we visited the Hayward.

In the years when my thoughts were wayward

I felt your silent yet tangible support,

but also I felt a righteous anger

at the system’s inadequate retorts.

So I leave you now only because this poem is ending,

wave farewell, but you are still burning.

To you and David, a lot of my spirit I’m sending:

it’s as though you’ve turned the final turning

but remain in the friends’ gallery of my mind.

6 May 2004

‘FOUR LANGUAGES: FOUR PERSONS’

Turkish Saying

I call on one of my quadruplegangers –

the Russian that is most aware of dangers.

The English presses on regardless.

The Turkish will take over when it’s hardest

and the French will make it smooth and tender. 

Greek just fails to make it as a quintupleganger

but makes available a cache of mythology,

and tonight I am talking poetry not psychology.

So I declare that I have four personalities,

but I only know like the back of my hand two cities:

London and Istanbul: not Leningrad-Peter or Paris. 

Though in all four of them breakdowns harassed me,

I’ve lived in the first two and felt free,

much more expressive than manic depressive,

even, with Juliet, added a step down on the family tree. 

In my rich life, that and my poetry are the most impressive,

though my own publishing record would belie it. 

I have a kite – and I’ll fly it.

7 May 2004

FOR ALASTAIR COOK

Alastair, if I may address you thus?

This morning I listen and mourn your passing, as Radio 4 repeats to us your Letter from America from 2001, lasting only a few minutes

but with such wisdom in it.

Near the end you talked about coincidence

and the Lincoln and Kennedy co-incidents

in what you called a ‘combination of meditations’, d.o.b’s a century apart, innumerable parallels in the assassinations.  The two Johnsons following in succession, Kennedy and Lincoln as Cassandra secretaries.

Perhaps my poems are letters – for me accession into your zone

                                                                                    of political,

yes, commentary might be more realistic than the mantle

of poet.  I write a fifth column – some people know it –

and when I listen to you, Alastair,

I climb a prayer up the stairs

to heaven, though I never even met you,

now with recent dead poet friends Nikos Stangos and Ken Smith,

with Tom Gunn as well as many of my kin and kith. 

The elegant symmetry of the coincidence programme,

was like a perfectly blended whisky dram.

Drink one for me up there Alastair

and pass a malt one to my mentor Peter Levi. 

Your combination of meditations uplifted did not scare me –

outside in the garden the trees are green and leafy:

the eternal coincidences of fertile nature

remind me of dead people’s so human nature,

and I write a poem of celebration rather than an elegy,

celebrating your inexorable longevity, your words’ longevity.

8 May 2004

FOR ARIEL DORFMAN

My poet friend:

I heard your voice on the radio

this morning saying the words

I wanted to hear about the perspective of 120

torture countries. That things much worse

than the infamous photographs occur

daily, you and I know till our ears bleed.

At Medical Foundation work in Russian and Turkish

I hear snapped word photographs

more graphic and pornographic

than those pictures now displayed.

Torture is about power and control:

quite right that heads should roll.

These photos will set off thousands of flashbacks:

it is our duty with words and interpretation to bring survivors back,

not with interrogation but the triangle’s triologue.

This is more than an entry in an interpreter’s log,

behind these photos in interrogations, are there interpreters?

                                                                           Do they collude?

Though these are visuals, you can bet the words are even more lewd.

A picture tells a thousand words, they say.

I can’t provide you with a 1,000 word essay. 

Ariel, you said this could have a positive effect,

in the wide world torture’s cover in war has been blown. 

Bombs don’t work, but I’d like to see torture wrecked,

to give back the dignity to the piled naked bodies,

to the naked man led by the woman on the leash. 

Who is the bitch and who the underdog?

Once again woman has been victimised,

for the torturer will be humiliated like the tortured.

They say they were young, didn’t know what they were doing,

rogue elements, their power unleashed,

then that they were trained in RTI,

but it’s the system that should get it in the eye.

Now torture is in the papers,

let no torturers escape.

The woman soldier pointing to the Iraqi man’s prick,

was she traditionally following orders:

the order givers, the ordure givers,

let’s come down on them like destroyed prisons’ bricks.

9 May 2004

BEYOND BACK TO NOWHERE

So are we ‘back to nowhere’,

farther back than before,

are they tearing at their remaining hair,

pinned naked on the floor?

The blindfolded eyes ‘see no evil’,

but the body sees the pain.

‘Torture is the work of the devil’

is too simple a refrain.

Bodies and souls pay the price

for not yielding information.

In preparation for interrogation:

they are heavily loaded, the dice.

Nor would I distress you readers,

unless distress is justified,

no broken bones or bleeding

does not mean that a part does not die.

Torture is a form of multiple death,

of dignity erased.

Now I hold my breath

that the torturers should be phased.

For it is them who should be shamed,

should feel shame and admit it,

for each victim lamed,

for each unlawful hit – it

is against the Geneva Convention

that it now seems is the Unconvention,

but who reads that now, who needs it now,

when they can extract information.

Torture is power and control,

not gathering intelligence.

It angers the victim’s soul

and that is unintelligent.

You may ask why it continues:

the Turks say ‘the fish smells from the head’.

Are the perpetrators part of a retinue,

the question is are they leading or led?

Hard boiled eggs under armpits

defy the chicken and egg thesis.

Who came first, the torturer or the victim

powerless to hit her or him.

Even I, still not inured by torture testimony,

was shocked by the naked photos,

a macabre ritualistic ceremony,

live Eastern bodies almost in autopsy.

We heard no words in those pictures:

the other half to be understood would need an interpreter.

It is possible, desirable that new strictures

will be put on the perpetrators:

that is our hope. Or are we back to nowhere?

The gains of exposure of torture

of the last twenty years, will they go under,

or can we take the products of digital cameras

and get more than apologies’ chimeras

and launch World Peace Three against the perpetrators

and their leaders.

10 May 2004

The man next to me with hay fever on the train:

‘It can even come from silver birches’,

says to me as the train lurches

to a stop near Victoria, exciting my fevered brain,

that if you turn Battersea Power Station upside down,

you will have a perfect little table.

I was struck that he was able

to conceptualise so: my faith regained

in humanity. I paused in this café

to write this poem he asked for

though he remain nameless, a special stranger.

We talked and listened – the meaning of interlocutors,

and torture and electrocution,

that Al-Qaeda reprisal execution

were circumlocuted

to then flashback into my mind with a vengeance.

13 May 2004

I

At home at the dining room table, I switch off the radio:

a poem I’m starting to enable.

It’s not an autobio,

just a few rhyme-led jottings.

The t’s I’ll be crossing, the i’s dotting

and making the form shipshape,

but the content – will it escape

and the words be left unemotional,

peaceful, no commotion at all?

II

In the second half my tries score,

the waves will start to pound the shore.

The ocean will turn to riot,

nature’s violence will be unleashed

and I will flashback to the naked prisoner on the leash,

revealed as a worldwide symbol of torture.

Will humanity advance one iota?

14 May 2004

A COFFEE AT HOME

There must be something different in coffee at home.

Here I always have difficulty getting down to a poem.

It’s not the cluttered table,

but the complete absence of people.

Populist – I need them around:

not just for background sound

but for stimulation to creation:

that’s why I need my Café ration.

16 May 2004

I continuously repeat that I have a blockage:

that I have reached such an advanced age

yet not published a single poetry book of my own

in this country. I am therefore an unknown

poet but a well known translator.

Maňana – leave it till later.

But if suddenly I were to die

the poems in many files would lie

totally unextrapolated:

my attempts too belated

to get on poetry’s sublime staircase,

just another botched beginning, a burnt-out case.

16 May 2004

FOR SELMA

I

For the last four years, every year
you’ve broken a bone in or damaged your foot,
until you’re beginning to fear,
Nazar, the evil eye is at hand.
But I broke both feet to boot
and let myself quite out of hand:
one thud – and death was near.
So, Selma, I know what bone pain is
and know you’ll be more than in a tizz,
limping and lame, a terrible shame
when you should be taking Lucky for strolls,
down by the sea shore where the sea rolls in,
or up the slopes of Mt Hilarion.
But Robert Graves will keep you on
track. Was he a wounded soldier?
And I am getting distinctly older,
shouldering more responsibilities,
conscious of poems’ ties
to everyday life, till poetry
becomes religion and wife.

II

When a book is shut on the shelf
you can still read the author and title,
but it is closed to you and yourself,
like a horse without a bridle.
I’d like to take Graves out for a canter
and drink a malt whisky from a decanter,
but I am stuck in this dingy pub garden,
smoking my pipe till my arteries harden.

I never showed you my library –
I lack a first class breviary
and often try to construct the prayer of Francis Drake
about completing the endeavour for its own and God’s sake.
My books are mainly poetry in Russian
and Turkish, some English – no Ossian,
but Byron and Keats and Berryman,
Hughes, Lowell, cummings, Thomas R.S. and Dylan
and I glorify the day I met the poems of Hikmet
and the lyrics of Oktay Rifat.

The Guinness is now at half mast,
oh yes, Heaney, Muldoon and Yeats:
I don’t often go deep into the past
beyond the twentieth century’s gates
and you’ll notice an absence of prose
and might think it’s just a pose
but it’s an attitude over the years I’ve developed
in myself except for emails and letters in envelopes.
On returning home from the pub I could elope
with a book of any poet. But I have to have hope
in my own poems too, given just enough rope
and time they too will hang in there and climb the slope
to another reader who might even cope
with them and see them from a distance in all their scope
without the aid of a telescope.

16 May 2004

STRANGERS

I see them in the stations,

I see them in the trains,

I see them swallowing information,

see them taking up the strain.

They’re reading their newspapers,

they’re juggling their papers,

they stand and sit: they’re a crowd

and just sometimes they speak out loud.

But usually on their phobile moans,

often about finance, lebts and doans,

then there’s that familiar refrain:

‘Hi, I’m on the train!’

When does a stranger become not a stranger?

Is it at the first glance exchanged or word shared?

‘Danger, danger! Don’t take sweet from stranger’,

Pink Sly at the Troubadour declared,

and Billy used to wrap up the night

with ‘They coma from the left, they coma from the right,

all to see Billy’s delight.’

Strangers they came but fans they left.

FOR MILEN IN TAS CAFÉ

She ordered an espresso and a glass with ice,

added sugar and poured it into the glass in a trice. 

‘This is how we drink coffee in summer in Spain’,

she said.

Then we talked of Neruda and Gallio from Uruguay,

of Daisy Zamora, la lutta and feminists – which she is. 

I felt lucky that my Turkish friend had sat us

together in his café after admiring her earrings. 

Slim, stylish, talkative, sharp, sparkling,

something about being on an EU mission to Chile,

our conversation was neither plain nor hilly –

a one coffee stand – I could expand

but it would only become a paean to her grace,

her gracefulness – she made me want to know Spanish.

When we exchanged names with a handshake

and she left me sitting on the privileged ‘half sofa chair’,

knowing we’d not meet again I felt thankful just to have been there,

to have talked and I admit to have danced my eyes round her trim figure,

and I knew instinctively in my poetry she would figure,

though there were no vistas of hasta la vista.

Adieu, my stranger friend, I didn’t even need to kiss ya.

19 May 2004

If the eye of my memory

could regain childhood’s territory

as with prompting it can.

If poems and eyes could scan

and the rhythms of images could be caught,

if mankind was not so fraught

with daily worries and hurries,

with wage-making flurries

but could outside dreams play again

in the projection room of the brain

the edited films of childhood,

not only Moby Dick and Robin Hood

but also the scenarios with which we were acquainted,

then we would reproduce the pictures painted

by ourselves and make positive revisions to our visions,

but do it with discussion, gently and deftly:

it is always not the raped but the rapist

who should be shamed by the therapist.

21-22 May 2004

I am put off writing by the woman with the brown-red hair,

twisting a tress in her fingers.

Her red jacket she wears

despite the fact that it’s come, the summer.

As she smokes with her back turned to me,

speaking on her mobile, this poem courses through me

at the station, not of King’s Cross but Victoria.

For people-watching, all I need is the euphoria

of a cup of coffee and a table – I don’t even need to see faces,

but it’s not for coffee that I hang out in these places,

or to strike up conversations with strangers:

it’s for poetry’s Muse – I won’t exchange her –

and she is incorporeal, yet real,

and I come away, the lines reeled off,

a few pipes adding to my chesty cough.

As I write my Arab poet friend arrives for conversation and coffee                                                             

by chance and the real poem starts, but it too is not enough.

22 May 2004

FOR MY POET FRIEND ALEV ADIL

A lev in Russian is a lion

and this is your lion heart speaking.

It’s a pity that we met in an age of iron

when our livings we are eking –

small profits from our poetry composing,

but you in your University teaching,

I, in my Medical Foundation interpreting –

both of us an audience are reaching,

in a service that is not preaching.

Our poems are not didactic,

our writing is not automatic,

but both of us like to mix myths and confuse

rather than lead the reader:

a moist morning mist fuses,

but disperses with the sunrise, a bleeding

wound for we both are exposed

and investigation of identity is not a pose.

Alev Adil, yours is a lioness tongue –

we both fiercely protect our poems, our young

and we share not just languages but a thought process,

stacked to reveal right from wrong.

Reading your book at first was a revelatory process,

now it feels like an old friend.

It could last longer than us in the end:

I won’t let it be borrowed or lent,

but when I die, battered, it will go to another friend,

rescued from the coffin-skip that ends this life,

married to others’ eyes in the afterlife,

full of life, grief, love, mourning:

a Venus in furs rising again on a cold morning.

27 May 2004

I feel a dehydration in my poems,

unsatisfied by black coffee,

though last month from ‘the office’

I earned enough despite often staying at home.

Perhaps it’s the time for thorny prose,

to forget the nightingale and the rose,

but still to smoke Prometheus’ pipe,

rhymes forced or otherwise to wipe

from the slate: the odes never made me money.

Out of the black moods into the red sunny

ones, the balance regaining,

perhaps with my readers gaining.

Some people would say I write prose till the end of the line,

when suddenly there’s a fermentation of the wine,

the pearls cast before swine

the prodigal son gathers and threads on twine,

and there’s the arc of the rainbow, the Covenant sign:

colour, water and sky are natural,

but this man-made poem is a miracle.

27 May 2004

I’m writing for the reading,

I’m writing for tonight,

the words they are speeding

and I’m driving on the right.

I’m in a field that’s foreign,

in no-woman’s land.

I’m jumping over quarries

and fighting hand to hand.

Don’t take me to the trenches,

make me visit World War One:

I am a man of conscience

and I carry pen not gun.

Neither am I a correspondent

in peace or in war –

but I know the despondence

of filing a report.

The front of my lines is the spoken

word, does not go over the top.

Hearts and heads are broken,

the killing’s got to stop.

No deadlines dictate me dead lines,

there’s life in them yet,

I’ll not make the headlines:

this is a safe bet.

The frontline heads the struggle,,

gives the mood of war and peace –

usually there’s a helluva muddle,

millions cry for war to cease.

There’s not much beauty now in the desert,

build sandcastles in your dreams,

but for the young people we must make an effort,

already there’s gathering a head of steam.

And in this world so sorely corrupted,

where terrorism holds minds in sway.

Mounts Vesuvius, Etna have erupted,

metaphorically not in a natural way.

In the choking ash and lava,

raining, pressing down from above,

is it possible to keep loving?

It was after the flood Noah released the dove.

But now there are no twigs of olive,

let alone branches and fruit:

squaddies sink in mud that’s squalid,

in a war you have to shoot.

Partisans, terrorists and freedom fighters,

juggle for their real nomenclature.

All over the globe imprisoned writers

are choosing words that will endure.

We who live in comparative freedom

must write for those who cannot write,

bring heaven down into this kingdom:

for justice on earth we must fight.

27-28 May 2004

FOR PENNY, BILL AND GRACE

Early morning, not yet five thirty,

over five and a half decades

on, I woke up and the world is too dirty

for my daughter Juliet, your daughter Grace.

So we try to clean it up:

but it’s not like mess of cat or pup;

it’s not like tidying your room,

nor like wiping off from a rose grey bloom.

When a human volcano erupts

the ash and lava corrupt;

lovers will one day all become ash:

but the world is not designed to be a hash.

Bosh ver, bosh ver, arkadash,

the Turkish singer sang in the seventies:

‘forget it, forget it, my friend,

more fish in the sea’,

but friends dropped mean you lose a part of the heaven world,

though ballooned in the sea the sails in haven are furled,

‘and death shall have no dominion,’

which means we must not be Her minion.

The flash flood, the lightning strike

are not as simple as falling off your bike

and when my father said to me ‘Life IS hard’

when I was about twelve I thought he was being hard

and Spartan – I was already Athenian,

soon to study the Athens of the North,

and wars were colder though now they’re hotter

and living then under the shadow of The Bomb brought forth

a sort of remote insecurity

pasted over by the lustre of James Bond.

But there were fish in lakes and ponds,

walks with our St Bernard in the woods.

We had pigs to fatten, a cow to milk,

a reasonable amount of durable goods,

books, radio, gramophone, things of middle class ilk,

a garden with spacious lawn,

with cut grass to smell mixed with petrol

fumes of the lawn mower. At that time no stormy petrels

but fat pigeons and occasional pheasants sauntering,

and I can saunter that childhood garden

in my mind and that is a high form of gardening

and I didn’t realise I would smoke and my arteries harden

and that life is hard and hardening,

but in saying that you have to take it farther than my father did

and recognise the sensitivity of the child

that endures throughout one’s life though it may be wild

as nature: harness the power of the volcano,

a yes is more powerful than a no,

take tours round the edge of the abyss,

perhaps life does have an encore and a bis,

remember your first kiss

and don’t drop your friends,

return to a paradise that includes the serpent’s hiss,

where the fig is more important than the fig leaf

and all fruits can be eaten.

30 May 2004

WHO OWNS MY POEMS?

We had a talk about whether

the poems I write for friends

are mine or theirs

and whether they should even be given.

It’s not as simple as letters

though I can think of a case in point

when it would have been infinitely better

in a poem to have made my point.

Anyway, Maide, like Funda, you stressed they are mine,

but I am fishing with rod, float and line,

fishing for souls without a death wish.

The cast in the water makes a splish,

a cast of hundreds, many dishy

but this old man is not fishy.

‘I will make you fishers of men and women’,

He said: so I abandoned  my speargun

and lost the tackle of my marriage

and with poems for friends I engage –

and without them the lines wouldn’t be mine.

1 June 2004

PIPE: IT’S NOT, MAGRITTE

While writing poems my constant prop is my pipe –

it somehow controls my breathing spaces.

I should tear myself off a strip or stripe

for I left it at home in one of those unknown places.

Soon I’ll have to get on the case and buy some cigarettes,

poets used to smoke them for breakfast in garrets,

smoke rises from their fire cult as from ziggurats.

Their affect on me is not great,

they make my lungs gravel and grate

and my addiction produces a stertorous  diction:

not only cells but words I lose from my brain’s dictionary,

the garden of my dendra grows contrary.

3 June 2004

POETRY THERAPY

The idea is that thoughts turn into feelings,

that you are not so much in prayer kneeling

or making your confession in the confessional.

You may earn no money but for long you’ve been a professional

at shooting a loaded line with the arrow of words

at a multicoloured target not a sparrow or a bird.

I favour the Victoria Line for writing,

for usually for a seat I’m never fighting

and the journey is just long enough

to generate this hot stuff.

3^rd June 2004

FOR NATHALIE

So I guess this time it’s going to be a non-meeting:

I had known it could be fleeting.

We will always have a closeness.

Not quite a commoner calling you ‘my princess’,

but I am in a crowd of admirers

but the poet is head and shoulders

above when it comes to poetry’s highness

and as I resign myself this time to our non-meeting

I flap these winged words so the poem will fly and not be fleeting.

4 June 2004

FOR ROD WOODEN

‘Love the stranger in your midst’ Moris Farhi

‘Love the stranger in yourself’ Richard McKane

As the years go by the girls and women become more beautiful,

though most are ‘strangers in our midst’:

they are beautiful in the eye of this beholder.

It’s as though cataracts that veiled my eyes in mist

have been peeled off my apple eyeballs now I am older.

So let them say we are observers rather than voyeuristic

for recording visions is part of our aesthetic.

The eyes look out, the images flood in,

the beggars, the babes, the rich, the mass in between and the poor

mingle at this station: I take them in,

give them a home in my poems and more,

for my eyes lead to the heart of my poetry

and you, Rod, my good friend, in Cali, Colombia

are working on a more acute matrix

of writing about beauty and poverty:

we both know how to be a

writer, know all the tropes and tricks

and though our best work remains unpublished,

to the isolation prisons we are not banished.

Dead poets, friends and artists: take our eyes,

they can still see – and cry.

Life is a cataract, water cascading down,

through the spray, always in a hurry

we glimpse the life of our separate towns,

then write down first and final drafts in a flurry and a flourish,

and it’s the humanity of humanity one day our writings will nourish,

if only we can keep up our levels of courage,

hydrating, harnessing the water of life to our rage

against poverty of the soul in this cruel age.

9 June 2004

FOR JOHN RETY

I write my poetry left handed,

it has never yet been banned,

but I think my right hand

knows that my mind has planned it.

Perhaps Andrew, my brother, was right –

I write (catchy) ditties,

but I also write

about war and peace’s pity.

‘I have to get your readers

to accept the conversational’,

that’s what John, my editor,

says – I find that – rational.

It’s too late to break my mould,

only I must write even bolder.

The little stones have rolled

now it’s time to bring on the boulders.

But can any landslide be benign

or earthquake move us peacefully?

We try to change the world – but no sign,

little warmth, just the global one proceeds doomsdayfully.

It’s somehow more in your face to tackle terrorism,

but they say the mission against emissions

would be far less of an erorrism,

now it seems in third place, that nuclear fission,

that made the War Cold, yet the world curiously stable

on the wild premise of destruction being total.

There are many people more capable

than I working to confront global warming,

but I issue this solemn warning

that without a warming of all our souls –

Moris’s ‘Love the stranger in thy midst’,

the metaphor of carbon dioxide mist

will be a swifter risk, will pollute the whole.

12 June 2004

EAGLE EYE

Eagle eye could see through people,

could see into their souls.

Eagle eye was sharp as a needle

that injects then sews and sews.

The so and sos would be seen right through

and they’d have to mend their ways.

The impervious ones were really quite few,

resisted only a few nights and days.

Eagle eye is not you, eagle eye is in Turkey,

on torture duty in Evin, Vatan and Butyrki,

perfecting the terror of interrogation,

making the terra firmer,

making the captive all at sea.

The jump from victim to survivor

is a quantum leap indeed.

13 June 2004

Give me the information

that will set you free.

The English are patient

except for the bully.

He talked of happy laundry

people not needing coins in the Laundromat

and I listened through my interpreter’s hat.

13 June 2004

The most uncrackable code is the plain truth.

The most unbreakable hold is a friend’s embrace,

my two-cheeked kisses are not two-faced,

it’s not for casual rhymes my friendship with Ruth.

We’ve been turning words for more than ten years,

the light and the black of a poet with dark fears,

even out of this Mediterranean blue of early summer;

thank God he scythed not the alien corn, the reaper.

We’ll make a little more hay

and why not a reading one day

at Hay-on-Wye. Of course we’ll stay

the course – after us with our words their eyes will play.

13 June 2004

I’m a ‘dinosaur – with email’,

making rare rhymes male and female,

writing poems beyond the pale –

until I kick the bucket.

But the swan songs go on and on,

like Aronzon and Ariston.

‘Sometimes,’ Peter Levi told me,

‘you just have to say “fuck it”’.

He died but in us his verse lives on.

Graves too is mouldering in the grave.

W.S. Graham eternally limns his river.

The dead too have to be especially brave

and luck it

out for their poems can still intervene:

an intravenous intervention,

fresh blood in our art-eries,

they have to be a poetry transfusion,

more than bucketfuls of gore.

13 June 2004

IN OUR LIFETIME

I met a naked German spearfisher

on the Turkish rocks of Kash.

He said ‘You can achieve everything in this life’

and he was not on hash.

He dived deep from the surface

to catch his daily fish –

I can only hope that both of us

will fulfil that deep-felt wish.

16 June 2004

I

Pipe, coffee, people in the café,

on the table Aronzon’s Death of a Butterfly

but the poem refuses to fly.

Dull ache in my head,

then by rhymes I’m led.

II

By chance I found in my wallet

two extra banknotes.

This café is quality,

for this guest a real table d’hote.

And I read the wedding speech I wrote,

liberally sprinkled with quotes

from my life with Juliet

who in the Times’ birth announcement was spelt ‘Juniet’.

16 June 2004

A swift espresso and on the express

to Bromley South, pressing

on to get home to write.

The day’s impressions

are buried in my memory,

perhaps in ten years time they’ll surface,

but now there’s only this pen presenting

into the future, left to right:

the past is left, the future right

and the blank pages ahead:

my future unwritten poems,

but when the notebook is closed

the early poems are at the beginning:

this is the reverse archaeology of writing:

on the top of the trench

is the most recent find,

the deeper you go the deeper

into the past layers. Perhaps it’s like the sleeper

going deep into dreams.

16 June 2004

When you feel you’ve been through the mangler

and yet you still retain your anger,

when the Spitfire beer is still in the hanger

of the Fridge and you return from the angles

of conversation that verge on the dangerous,

though you may say: what danger? Us?

The other side is clear and you’re not nonplussed,

you have to work out the pros and cons, the minuses and pluses.

But to balance the equation is not possible –

you are not an oracle, nor the Pythian Sybil,

do not have the nurturing power of Cybele:

but this summer – no lying on meadow or lea,

no bargaining with beads or pleas,

on a holiday hotel no ‘Do not disturb please’

signs on the door: it’s open field,

hunting the hunters till one of them yields.

June 2004

RED ALERT

Half a dozen times, alert, I’ve woken

to my bedroom flooded with green light,

but yesterday this syndrome was broken:

I woke to a concentrated intense red light,

the size of a bright cherry.

The green had been merry.

All day I put myself on red alert

and at its end, exhausted, I fear

in the restaurant a friend I badly hurt.

22 June 2004

COBBERSHIP, FOR PENNY, BILL AND GRACE

‘And if this day should be your last?’

you’ll have to do some thinking fast,

for it doesn’t flash past before your eyes, the past,

too many characters in the cast

and anyway no one’s returned ‘is that real?’ to ask.

Write poems, interpret support, perform your daily tasks,

keep the powder dry in the cask

for the dynamite question you’ll have to ask.

O PEN, o pen, open up, open up,

there’s coffee not poison in this cup,

heh passers-by crossing my path, heh stranger,

let me ride on a train from this station of the cross

to a place where I am beyond danger.

II

But Lord I used to pray daily ‘thy will be done’,

by rote and heart and from my high place in the sun,

I heard my daughter say: ‘You’re breaking the Lord’,

when she felt this father lay down an unjust law.

One day we’ll all lay down for the ultimate sleep –

all the other times have been a preparation –

and those who survive may mourn and weep

for this too is the nature of life and creation:

it’s not surprising death rhymes with breath,

the flowers for a wedding are the same for the funeral wreath,

but four to one as the famous film bequeathed.

Oh Lord, Thy will be done, I’ll keep my ego out of it,

if that’s what You wish, but spare me the pity of it:

Your crucifixion You shared with two robbers,

they may have been good mates, real cobbers.

I search and find that cobbership is not dead,

but I am on the edge – it’s not just in my head.

These days, though, I come back from the ledge

into the room and I’m proud that my daughter can talk people down,

though not Mayor I give her the freedom of London Town.

22 June 2004

The intense red light was the size of the tiny cherries

littering the road from work to the Turkish café.

At one stage I thought it might be a cranberry:

my dawn visions have a habit of being interpreted in the day.

But what does it mean now, at this moment in poetry,

rather than psychology or psychiatry,

or rather what feeling can I attach to it?

It’s not edible but if I try to catch onto it,

I see it lying on the saucer of my coffee

cup as we three make an unorthodox triangle

on metal chairs avoiding any acute angles:

Gillian, Felix and I taking time out

for an important talk in an Algerian café:

yes, this is what friendship’s about,

though our building being opened

and closed doesn’t happen every day.

25 June 2004

FOR PRECIOSA

I was hiding it successfully, then you said:

‘Your eyes have changed colour

and you are very sad.’

I’m glad  I deserved this observation’s honour

and the opportunity to telephone you at the weekend,

and since I also do this sort of thing

as well as our interpreting

I recognised in you again an unusual friend.

25 June 2004

X IT

Long before the apple eating they’d had sex:

the fig leaf was just a fig leaf.

Left alone exploring

the garden of Eve

Adam couldn’t believe

she would one day be his ex

and Eden they would leave

and it would be xed out,

a permanent exit.

25 June 2004

I

Sleeplessness before the Big Day.

I just can’t seem to hit the hay.

I’m caught in a silent role in a play,

while on Radio 3 music plays.

Perhaps my PEN friends are not sleeping too,

and our writers in prison, I think of you,

grey cells in your cells, hoping that all will be well.

It’s only realistic wishes that are granted by the Wishing Well.

II

I think too of the refugee hell, Meral, you are going through

and that Gillian reminded me I must phone you.

Past two, the morning is swiftly approaching,

the denouement must be achieved without reproaching.

No moon tonight – ideal for poaching

some salmon ideas and poaching them

on the stove of this poem.

Oh, it’s my delight on this dark night

to rob myself of sleeping tight

and get the target in my sights,

but feel confident that I won’t pull my triggers

but will cope with the explosive nature of my work

and remember the differences between Arab, Kurd and Turk.

III

Less sleep than I would want

as is my wont,

but it’s not hours’ quantity

but their quality I quote.

Less the lottery than the tote,

today is the counting of the postal vote:

if you add up what those PEN pens wrote,

it’s not a lump you’d get in your throat

but a positive tumour from stress and rumour.

28 June 2004

I touch base at the café,

smoke pipe, drink coffee,

I am alone, pen and notebook

at the end of the day.

Next train forsook,

needing time to write,

and round I look –

in my life all is not black and white,

though no florid rainbows,

few belles with few beaux –

though my touch has bowed out

other sense compensate,

conventions of non-conversation I flout

and on black cherry air and coffee I am sated.

28-29 June 2004

LUCKY STRIKE

I made it through the strike-ridden city

with comparative ease, but what a pity

none of my clients have turned up

for me to interpret for, that’s a turn up

for the books, the 5 or 6 I’m simultaneously writing.

The vice of age its grip is tightening,

but it’s advice not vice I give and get,

fox that I am, I still have to hedge not hog my bets,

better to have withdrawn from the window ledge,

but there we are – I was more than on edge.

Of abstinence have I signed the pledge,

though as a monk I never registered?

Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest,

for writing and life may still be the best.

II

Running out of energy and it’s not yet midday,

five hours sleep was enough for the Iron Lady

and I bet less had to suffice in war zones for Kate Adey,

for both of them to miss a trick would give the game away.

Now I’ve eaten an English breakfast in the Turkish Café

served by my Khyrgyz waitress friend Jemile,

fluent in my three languages: we pop

between Russian and Turkish, rarely hop

into her weaker English and I attempt to bring

round the table or into the mind’s wrestling ring

those grapplers of ideas and feelings

and bounce back their voices from walls and ceiling,

or dash them down into this notebook

with many a sidelong look,

conscious of past poems, my reflections on the past.

III

Why in high summer am I thinking of icicles

when the grass in the garden is high enough to sickle.

It’s like Pasternak’s snow cycle

written in summer. I have that inkling

and Shirin does too, weather is the heart feeling –

both ways – moods react to atmospheric pressure,

continuously, even with strangers, we reassure

ourselves by ‘talking about the weather’,

whether fair or foul, though apart, we are together.

30 June 2004

MAKER

And I make words which are my love

and I lay them down above my love,

so in a real sense I am making love

and now hold no love above this,

and they can touch and they can kiss

the eye of reader, the ear of listener

and they can shine and they can glisten

and I insist they are for her

and him – for all who feel and all who part

whose Achilles’ heel is in their heart.

1-2 July 2004

PS On hearing: David Kessel, my poet friend, said something like: ‘For some of us love is a most destructive thing…’
TORCH SONG

If I find myself held in detention

for singing words of freedom

I’ll cut through the tension:

let me be me.

And in my time of torture

there is still a light that shines on me,

shine through my blindfold:

let me be me.

And if they attack my brain

with their age-old waiting game,

I‘ll sing through the bars:

let me be free.

And in the interrogation,

when they fire those questions at me,

I’ll hold this torch song up,

for you’ll be thinking of me,

thinking of me, thinking of me,

thinking of me, thinking of me,

whisper words of freedom:

for I’ll be thinking – of you.

April-June 2004

SWANSEA MORNING AFTER BLIND FLIGHT

I

As the Tibetan wind chimes tinkle in the wind

and last night’s black-clouded moon has disappeared,

still Blind Flight dins in my ears

as I burn burn burn my lungs and harden

my arteries with tobacco smoke in the garden,

I turn turn turn to Dylan Thomas’s vocabulary of poetry

and in his native Swain see

I write this so not swan song,

Celt as I am not Norman or Anglo Saxon

and I ponder on brotherhood and friendship

and hospitality, guest on this bench,

breathing this damp, early Welsh morning air

far from London and remember

conversing with the poet S. Adel Guemar

and his wife Latifa and watching their children

turning handstands and somersaults

in the night grass fending off the grave assaults

that occurred against their parents,

that occurred against the hostages

in that film Blind Flight as their term lasted ages

and I thought of other imprisoned writers

and people detained unjustly

and this poem is in clear English,

clearer than the discussion

that didn’t happen after the film in the bar,

when we were all a bit shell-shocked

yet uplifted, then we flew in the night

to dinner at my hosts’ home and stayed up for ages

talking not just about the hostages

but of the Algerian general Tufek (‘gun’ in Turkish as I said to Adel)

who led the torture in Algeria,

of my interpreter friend the Berber Kahina,

and I remember the barbarous barber scenes in the film,

far from Marlborough College, the smoking ceremony of Marlboro Reds,

the touching respect for insects,

yet the keen mosquito-killing contests,

then the beatings with rifle butts

and a boy out of control giving Brian falaka.

Thanks to the film makers

who let me see behind the words I interpret,

the human dignity of these two heroes:

I’ll remember on the screen of my mind,

now I’ve seen – before I was blind,

and could only fly in flights of fantasy.

This film shed light on a universal reality

far too close for comfort

but none the less a comfort

in the days – if only it can further discomfit

torturers and their order givers

and give hope to the life-givers.

II

Walking the cliffs on the cropped grass,

walking the dog and walking fast.

Near Swansea, sea beneath, this was Dylan’s childhood see,

or childhood sight, bequeathed him, now bequeathed me.

Is it possible that this air is free?

It has capacity for all souls

since they take up no space,

more weightless than white holes,

so when dead, the human race

only preoccupies the grave’s space,

the symmetry of a well-laid out cemetery,

so ‘death shall have no dominion’ –

it shall not be a vulture gyring on pinions

in the hot desert air above a corpse

of a tank or soldier. No, here by the golf course

with the tiny yellow rock roses and stickleback gorse,

I return to the crowning achievement

of my youth: ‘The Crown of Gorse’

and though since then I have suffered bereavements

I still cajole words not force

them into my life’s river course,

flow my poems to the sea from the source!

3 July 2004

Kittle, near Swansea

FOR ANNE BEACHAM

Train Swansea-Bristol-London

What is said is said and done

and there is no turning back.

The train cannot reverse on the track

any more than this poems can be undone.

Yet memory is the great recoverer of time,

though it too requires imagination:

how we basked in our brief conversation

now these words make past present time.

Tall land agent, your black hair pinned up,

forgive me for asking when your boyfriend would pop the question,

I only wanted to give us a pick-me-up –

picking each other up was out of the question.

You told me of Idris Davies, poet of the Rhonda

and on my Aronzon book I let your eyes wander

and you spotted his love and melancholia

and as the train forged on neither of us was holier

than the other. We talked about Russia

and how in National Service your father learnt Russian,

and I left you reading the Death of a Butterfly introduction

as I made my way through the carriages for an age

to get an uncharacteristic Diet Coke

and then McKane and Beacham

each needed no powders or coke

and I required no pipe to smoke

just the air that divided us as we spoke

breathed in and out over the vocal chords

with tongue and lips speaking the English language,

sharing our thoughts and feelings, engaging

with ringing words, gauging

a so brief acquaintance which ended with a resonance

as you got out at Bristol.

So, here is the poem, my epistle

to you, though I have not your address,

nor on its contents can I give you redress.

It would have been nice to receive your reactions in a letter

but I felt I got to know you better

than other women in a one coffee stand.

‘Loving the stranger in they midst’

soon leads to friendships

and I see the ripples of our words expand

and though apart, we’ll walk hand in hand,

working, reading books, travelling on trains this land,

this land we call our own, but do not own.

3 July 2004

 PIPES

With two goldies I summon up the Pan Pipes

and stand by smoking my pipe.

Alpha is from ‘that tiny country’ Ecuador

and tells me how the Indians lived peacefully before the Conquistadors.

In his country it is enough to dissent

to get a bullet head-sent.

Then he talks to me of his divorce

and how from him his son was forced

and I realise how lucky I was

to have my daughter from twelve to 23.

Blow pipes at the world’s cruelty,

compañeros still have fealty.

4 July 2004

CHUTE POEM

If it’s possible to write winter poems in summer,

then why not the winter of the soul in happiness

and as they always say ‘vice versa’,

a bit like treating a tumour with humour.

These days people approach the seasons with sameness.

I’m back on the poem prowl, though I should be being my own editor:

it’ll have to be a different arrow in my quiver –

many poems will forlornly be ejected

but the ones that remain will form a parachute,

floating down to the field of the reader,

a sort of voluntary fundraiser without loot,

and when my booted body will finally be rejected,

cremated or prone in my grave,

the silk fabric of my parachute poems

may buoy up readers this side of the grave.

9 July 2004

Leave age out of it,

when it comes to not admiring

a cleavage or a beautiful face

you will be displaced or retiring to the other place:

it will have come to a pretty pass.

This is for the man who takes

the w out of anchor

and lives his life without rancour,

steaming on like a tanker

loaded not with fossil fuel

but something less cruel

to the environment.

He is not of the establishment –

no money spooned into the Nat West Bank,

but he has blood, sweat and tears

mingling with hopes and fears,

still believing in the magi’s quest

rather than GIs even at their best.

This is for the international brigade of builders of the Tower of Babel

who knew that they were perfectly able

to understand the language of spirit level, mudbricks and mortar

and how the Tower collapsed not from a linguistic agenda –

there were plenty of interpreters –

but because the threatening Tower was sabotaged, undermined

and that would be plain from what archaeologists would find.

But we are preoccupied with archaeology of the mind,

digging in our memories’ layers, sometimes throwing in the trowel,

at the end of a working day of struggle,

mud, blood, sweat and tears can be washed and wiped away with a towel.

12 July 2004

I’ve got a queasy stomach, don’t feel right.

It’s not easy when you can’t put your finger on the fright

or apprehension. It may not even be internal tension

but high waves coming in of which I’m unsure.

I’ve talked about the cliché of ocean of emotion,

but perhaps one should reflect on the shore,

the terra firma: ‘feet on the ground’

was a family refrain, but I never refrained

from jumping in at the deep end

and when I learned that words had wings,

were supple, could beat and bend

I took flight regularly in poems –

by then I’d already left home –

and these days I’ve freed my voice to sing

airs into the mobilised air on the street –

air, water, earth and fire in my belly: the full house is complete.

12 July 2004
BACK TO THE CAFÉ

Sitting behind your long hair with the highlights –

why is it that this is my long day’s highlight,

when we’ve only just said one resonant ‘hello’?

Today I lifted my spirits which were low

with poems and translations of Kuzmin –

a little dove coos within

though not necessarily with love,

certainly with poetry and reflection

for the mirror almost catches your profile

and long ago I opened the file:

‘Love the Stranger in Thy Midst’,

and as you eat chips and salad (no onion), your face averted,

I wonder whether to keep this poem introverted

or to boldly declare its presence,

thus, face to face, learning a bit about your essence.

II

It was not to be – I left before you,

not offering or mentioning the poem for you,

concerned to run an important errand for my Algerian friend

and chase up some interpreter’s slips.

In the staff room I ended up

in a serious conversation where I usually quip

about how our hearts can be rent

by feeling well confused (not clear RM) as well as by serious content.

Still in my belly a sense of unease,

pulse seems to be racing at time,

surely not my thyroid again, oh please?

Perhaps it’s just a surfeit of unripe rhymes.

I must breathe through this mild panic attack,

must not paint white too black,

even in harsh times there is still the craic

and I refuse to crack.

12 July 2004

I’m writing for this evening,

I’m writing for tonight,

it’s the only way for evening

thoughts, hopes and fright.

And hope is in the future,

worries from the past,

that is their tense feature,

I wonder does time last?

Have I got it to borrow,

can we make it tomorrow,

if second follows second

by whom am I beckoned?

I don’t break the sound barrier,

the silence with a bang,

it doesn’t matter if it’s Phantom or Harrier,

the carrier pigeon is more my style,

flying over this Sceptred Isle,

cherishing the songs we sing and sang.

13 July 2004

She says: ‘You make poetry out of a turn

of a stranger’s head’, and I in return:

‘How did you know that?’ They turn

my head then with a phrase’s turn

I catch them in my butterfly net.

I try to be positive not be Dr Net,

my words are my Bonds, my intelligence.

I have three or four agents

rolled up within me, the poetry spy,

so when I spy with my little eye

the A to Z of the people of London town,

I have this compulsion to record it down –

a smile as I catch a glance browbeats a frown,

the writer is silent as a clown,

but these words drown out other sounds.

On the tube they read with an alliance of silence.

14 July 2004

FOR JOHN SCHLAPOBERSKY

My eyes did not wander round your text –

direct lines to my own thinking parallel,

knowing you, anticipation made me guess what might come next,

and I honour your comparisons of personal Hell

with state violence. Eliot in England could say: ‘All manner

                                                               of things will be well’

but his God too now needs a lot of help.

Sometimes we are blind seers with a Cassandra yelp

when it comes to Palestine and Israel

and all of us are brushed by the wings of Azrael,

when the bombers swoop, the bombers suicide

and escalation leads to the top of the pyramid

where death is not its summit but amid

the bones on which it is built. Take no sides

the therapist might say, interpret interpreter,

let neither language wander or err

and the one who does the supervision I don’t yet have must

                                                                  have super vision.

It could be you John. Though our paths have crossed rarely,

after 9/11 we shared a brisk walk round Kentish Town

and I wrote you a poem about Homer’s dawns and sunsets that barely

scratched the surface tension of the deep lake down

into which we look daily. I like the rigour

of intellectual dialogue – it invigorates

me. If we are and have to be deep divers

(as a writer I long ago gave up the myth of Dick Diver)

we have to fine tune our equipment,

remember to get our oxygen shipments

in on time – and if sometimes we have to go into the decompression                                           

                                                                                               chamber

all on our own, I opt for a book of poetry,

but you John, as into isolation you clamber,

what book will you take – though it is not a prison isolation cell.

This poem for a pittance I will not sell –

it’s for you and me to value,

still mine but to you:

a few words, the opposite of a wreath

of barbed wire, bequeathed

to each other, knighted by the sound sur-vivor,

forgive the pun, it will be the highest award

we’ll get: we know what’s in a word,

and when you read this silently

and when you speak to you and yours gently,

you who honour poets in your text

might be able to anticipate what comes next

in this poem – some clues come at the ends of lines:

for we both watch time’s signs

from the watchtower, the lighthouse of our brains.

It’s about time we sat down together again;

last time properly was 14 years ago

and I had a go with: ‘What went right?’,

a positive variant on my ‘What is not to be Done’ –

you remember the cursed question

of 19^th Century Russian: ‘What is to be Done?’

Oh, how I like to work with myths – tight-

ening them up, unravelling them,

then comes the deconstruction in a poem,

turning them on their head and sometimes

I have an image of an inverted pyramid

bearing down on my skull amid

these non-vegetarian times.

That evening I told you of a section

of a stream that kept flowing

in my visual brain. Within the following

months I had been admitted, not on a section,

to hospital, my last, I hope, my final admission.

Long ago, in the 60s in the Warneford, the consultant with his posse

asked me: ‘Do you have a mission?’

It was a standard trick question,

and if I answer now I can indeed give a mission

statement and add: ‘The quest goes on’.

The real swings are not between the lows and highs

but between gradations of generosity,

humility and grandiosity,

but perhaps we are talking of humiliation

which leads to blowing oneself up,

inflating I mean as well. Sometimes I feel deflated,

exhausted to the point that I have no air

to pass over my vocal chords and my left hand can’t write.

What it meant to read your article at first sight there,

was to see another sort of struggle and fight

and this poem is to try and explain my luminous plight,

to duck and drake a stone over the lake

I’ve mentioned – though it skips across the surface

as I saw in 66 boys doing it by the Dead Sea –

it doesn’t bloody the face

of a soldier in or out of any uniform.

This is a long letter in poem form.

As the words become more powerful,

we have to become more responsible,

pick and choose them till the specific gravitas

is no longer just heavy but full of light.

Once I had a panic attack at the Turkish Restaurant Tas

with a Californian, resident in Moscow,

Martial Arts teacher and raconteur,

who had drafted a PEN Resolution on Chechnya, Holy Cow,

I thought, as he told me of reindeer herders in Siberia

who had discovered a miracle drug,

and of another that turned lemons sweet.

Somehow from under my feet he pulled the rug –

I went down to the loo to pee

and throw up, convinced that I was poisoned.

I staggered out, got him to get the tab,

left him at the crossroads, no need to get a cab,

distanced myself, walking away, from the incident –

‘Mankind cannot bear much reality’,

but I successfully avoided that fate’s accident,

though the conversation had been spiced with levity.

Every day we two deal with the ballistics

of the modern world without going ballistic.

We don’t wear troops’ or journalists’ flak jackets,

we don’t defuse suspect packets,

but we use the metaphors of peacemaking and warfare,

and somewhere there’s the concept of love:

we can’t entrust these just to the Almighty.

‘He hath cast down the mighty from their seats

and the rich he hath sent empty away

and he hath exalted the humble and meek’.

Eek, I don’t see this having happened or happening –

the powerful, the arms sellers, drug and oil barons still hold sway,

if there’s a Third Way why not a Hundredth Way?

‘There are always benches on the way’,

my brother Christopher wrote in a note.

This poem is not written by rote,

interspersed as it is with half-quotes

learned by heart. Its art is more populist

than elitist, still they would accuse us of elitism.

It is in telling that true intellectualism lies –

and we know what a hash was made of intelligence from Iraq:

ours is another intelligence that does not wreck,

that does not conveyor other people onto torture’s rack

after the tyrant has been sacked,

that does not use force majeure to extract

chicken-shit value confessions from victims who’ve been cracked.

You too probably played at Blindman’s Buff

when school and games were almost enough

and a home life displaced was tough:

I’d like this poem to shine through the blindfolds

but I know it’s too late and not enough

and I am getting old,

my skin like a wise snake I cannot slough.

There are so many people more capable of creating miracles,

always more active than oracles.

I feel this poem is like a chronicle-coracle

on our lake: or a little ship

carrying forward our friendship.

16 July 2004

I want you to know that you’re going to be fine

but I want you to know that I’m crossing the line,

it’s Medecins sans Frontieres, now has a frontier

and I want you to know – I have a Third Ear.

I want you to get out the woods and be in the clear,

to come up from the cellar and hear the all clear

and if you’re blind to be a seer,

in autumn to tramp through the leaves that are sear…

17 July 2004

ANYONE FOR POETRY?

The stranger becomes a friend

and both are bound yet free to the end

and the friendship is supple and bending

like a subtle rhyme word ending

that has a deep deep meaning.

You may swap couplets,

play mixed doubles though not be a couple

and the reader may think you are,

but in poetry’s game there are many partners

and you have to break through the opposing racket.

The poet serves then returns, though there are no longer poetry rallies,

near the tramlines, down the alleys,

the grass well-trodden not lush like meadows and leas.

Bring back the love poems please,

the days of cream and strawberries,

though my score is well over forty – love.

18 July 2004

My Uncle Denis

played a lot of tennis

before the War that killed him….
A stench of onions, though none around,

for taking Tegritol have I found grounds

and might I soon be fitting,

into that EP diagnosis fitting?

Can one have the symptoms without fits,

would the medication get on my tits?

I’ve always preferred to hit on rather than hit

or hit out. Can I retain my clout,

box my weight, my illness flout.

Too easily a lad becomes a lout.

18 July 2004

I’m writing for the reading,

I’m writing for tonight,

the words they are speeding

and I’m driving on the right.

I’m in a field that’s foreign,

in no-woman’s land.

I’m jumping over quarries

and fighting hand to hand.

Don’t take me to the trenches,

make me visit World War One:

I am a man of conscience

and I carry pen not gun.

Neither am I a correspondent

in peace or in war –

but I know the despondence

of filing a report.

The front of my lines is the spoken

word, does not go over the top.

Hearts and heads are broken,

the killing’s got to stop.

No deadlines dictate me dead lines,

there’s life in them yet,

I’ll not make the headlines:

this is a safe bet.

The frontline heads the struggle,,

gives the mood of war and peace –

usually there’s a helluva muddle,

millions cry for war to cease.

There’s not much beauty now in the desert,

build sandcastles in your dreams,

but for the young people we must make an effort,

already there’s gathering a head of steam.

And in this world so sorely corrupted,

where terrorism holds minds in sway.

Mounts Vesuvius, Etna have erupted,

metaphorically not in a natural way.

In the choking ash and lava,

raining, pressing down from above,

is it possible to keep loving?

It was after the flood Noah released the dove.

But now there are no twigs of olive,

let alone branches and fruit:

squaddies sink in mud that’s squalid,

in a war you have to shoot.

Partisans, terrorists and freedom fighters,

juggle for their real nomenclature.

All over the globe imprisoned writers

are choosing words that will endure.

We who live in comparative freedom

must write for those who cannot write,

bring heaven down into this kingdom:

for justice on earth we must fight.

27-28 May 2004

BEYOND BACK TO NOWHERE

So are we ‘back to nowhere’,

farther back than before,

are they tearing at their hair,

pinned naked on the floor?

The blindfolded eyes ‘see no evil’,

but the body sees the pain.

‘Torture is the work of the devil’

is too simple a refrain.

Bodies and souls pay the price

for not yielding information.

In preparation for interrogation:

they are heavily loaded, the dice.

Nor would I distress you readers,

unless distress is justified,

no broken bones or bleeding

does not mean that a part does not die.

Torture is a form of multiple death,

of dignity erased.

Now I hold my breath

that the torturers should be phased.

For it is them who should be shamed,

should feel shame and admit it,

for each victim lamed,

for each unlawful hit – it

is against the Geneva Convention

that it now seems is the Unconvention,

but who reads that now, who needs it now,

when they can extract information.

Torture is power and control,

not gathering intelligence.

It angers the victim’s soul

and that is unintelligent.

You may ask why it continues:

the Turks say ‘the fish smells from the head’.

Are the perpetrators part of a retinue,

the question is are they leading or led?

Hard boiled eggs under armpits

defy the chicken and egg thesis.

Who came first, the torturer or the victim

powerless to hit her or him.

Even I, still not inured by torture testimony,

was shocked by those naked photos,

a macabre ritualistic ceremony,

live Eastern bodies almost in autopsy.

We heard no words in those pictures:

the other half to be understood would need an interpreter.

It is possible, desirable that new strictures

will be put on the perpetrators:

that is our hope. Or are we back to nowhere?

The gains of exposure of torture

of the last twenty years, will they go under?

Or can we take the products of digital cameras

and get more than apologies’ chimeras

and launch World Peace Three against the perpetrators

and their leaders.

10 May 2004

EAGLE EYE

Eagle eye could see through people,

could see into their souls.

Eagle eye was sharp as a needle

that injects then sews and sews.

The so and sos would be seen right through

and they’d have to mend their ways.

The impervious ones were really quite few,

resisted only a few nights and days.

Eagle eye is not you, eagle eye is in Turkey,

on torture duty in Evin, Vatan and Butyrki,

perfecting the terror of interrogation,

making the terra firmer,

making the captive all at sea.

The jump from victim to survivor

is a quantum leap indeed.

13 June 2004

TORCH SONG

If I find myself held in detention

for singing words of freedom

I’ll cut through the tension:

let me be me.

And in my time of torture

there is still a light that shines on me,

shine through my blindfold:

let me be me.

And if they attack my brain

with their age-old waiting game,

I‘ll sing through the bars:

let me be free.

And in the interrogation,

when they fire those questions at me,

I’ll hold this torch song up,

for you’ll be thinking of me,

thinking of me, thinking of me,

thinking of me, thinking of me,

whisper words of freedom:

for I’ll be thinking – of you.

April-June 2004

              

                        

RICHARD McKANE

                                 

POEMS JULY-2004

BIPOLAR DANCER

FOR ANNE STEWART

I was a bipolar Russian bear

with my thoughts in the air,

when I didn’t put them on ice.

I went with the floe

where the current goes

but my mood changed in a trice.

My coat and skin are white –

is this getting trite?

and I am not agin feist.

I went against the flow

always at the poles

and they were frozen out, those lice.

Once citizen of the Arctic

and of the Antarctic

cold and loneliness was the price

I paid – bipolarised.

But now stabilised with psychotropics

I live in the tropics

neither North nor South,

lithium by mouth

no vodka on ice –

my decision not to dance at both poles.

19 July 2004

PEN FRIEND

Reading Larissa Miller would go down well here,

Velimir Khlebnikov even better,

my drink lager not bitter

no crying tears this evening into my beer.

For we spoke on the phone with an imprisoned writer

in Uzbekistan and left a message for Belarus –

and we talked to Sharipov in Russia:

every day I put my languages and voice to use.

I wish I could wave a magic wand

and put the world to rights:

it’s very muddy in our small pond,

the big and little fish fight.

What would I do without notebook and pen,

without doors inside four walls,

without windows that open,

my boots with laces withal,

and making telephone calls

and email at my beck and call?

This side of prison bars we take

everything for granted

even relief of pains and aches:

flower bulbs are planted,

trees are transplanted,

why then cannot injustice be supplanted?

My poverty is only relative:

for I have the support of relatives,

work at the Foundation,

perhaps help from a Fund,

but I am stunned to the foundation

at the pressure you are under,

will fight for your work not to go asunder,

will not let them steal your thunder,

will protect WiPC from rape and plunder:

maybe you’ll think this verse is too pat:

that it soars too high in the clouds,

but it supplements what I said to you out loud

and in poems I do my best thinking.

19 July 2004

Lebanese Restaurant Finsbury Park

Today I will look at mouths and lips

rather than figures and hips.

I read them from West and East, this North and South

and watch them speak out and see them pout

thin-lipped and full –

I’m receptive to the oral pull,

silent as kisses and muscles not in use,

behind them a rough and gentle tongue,

capable of kindness yet all kinds of verbal abuse,

lips of the old and lips of the young.

By my reading I recognise languages,

soft-lipped tenderness of French,

words spoken – not for pages –

curt commands of personnel in the trench.

But eyes, you speak volumes too,

and tomorrow on my journey I’ll concentrate on you.

20 July 2004

FOR GILLIAN AND MERAL

The evening sunlight is bright on the white page.

Today I was calm and connected, no rage

for her needed at the Case Conference,

satisfied that the meeting’s inference

was that her child should be protected.

Month by month I am injected

with a depot for a ‘serious mental illness’

yet somehow the miracle is

that we are able to hold down others’ demons

and the humbling of my illness demeans

not my treatment of them: it means

empathy and sympathy, tender understanding of psychosis

and presents an unusual series of choices,

though the interpreter’s words are always led.

But with you Gillian, Meral, we take turns to lead

and though in the past much blood was shed,

it’s staunched now and staunch are our hearts and heads

to each other and the pages of our fates we read

swiftly together on a weekly basis,

or twice a week in times of crisis.

20 July 2004

Lebanese Restaurant

Treasure her as a friend

and let the experience deepen.

Scare yourselves not with words of love,

though it has surely happened.

Be happy in the knowledge

that you both think well of each other.

Walk round the abyss’s edge,

embrace more like old friends,

and you will find, and you will find –

or have you found already? –

that she is many friends in one,

but neither of you may ever be ready

to stun with the words

‘I love you.’

Week of 21 July 2004

Camille takes my bag firmly,

leads me down to a table

and gives me a cup of coffee

that comes all the way from Brazil,

as I was quite certain

that I hadn’t got the money,

and she gives me a ‘Da Nada’

for my one word ‘Obligado’,

and we smile at each other

more like a sister and old brother,

and I have to travel homeward

on a train to the South

and I have to travel Southward

on a train to my house,

and I’m deaf to all sounds

as I take the gifted coffee in my mouth

and she’s touched her perfect

soul to these lines.

Late July 2004

PHARM ASSISTANT

Where the oxen ford the Isis,

where you intervene in life’s crises

with not only flimsy green prescriptions

but kind words never scripted.

Where platoons of addicts

beat their way to your Chemist’s door

and you work too as a locum

and do a lot to fight their boredom;

knowing you and of them how can I say I am poor?

I still activate my card in the hole in the wall

and only go a little overdrawn

and I’ve spent time when I could have read

your gift, Orhan Pamuk’s  ‘My Name is Red’,

the CD player for Cohen is in the loft:

I’m writing this gentle poem on the bucking Tube

remembering our meeting which was exuberant.

27 July 2004

Does the heart change when it is in love?

Yes, it beats faster – the blood courses thinner.

Are those two words on their own enough

if love’s target is saint and sinner?

And if you are ‘pulling the black love’

which being interpreted is ‘unrequited’

is the physiological shove

even more benighted?

God protect me from the ego’s swoop,

mine or anyone else’s.

Let me not let out a caveman’s whoop,

freeze or burn in Fahrenheit or Celsius.

But let me not be mean in searching for the mean,

and let me not be Mister Average,

and let me act in the drama’s scene

and let my poems have coverage.

28 July 2004

A little bit of anger fires me this morning:

everything was slightly behind schedule,

this poem is underscoring

that I can write in any mood as a rule.

Now I have to be my own poetry school,

a university of the universe,

somewhere between a blessing and a curse,

I play the play of the wise fool.

I’ll go overdrawn to pay the postage

on the Oktay Rifat manuscript to Turkey.

To no future is he our hostage,

prospects of making any money are murky.

Shall we go on like Braille leading the blind,

discovering language finds, laying them on the lines?

30 July 2004

We are both pinned down by the plurals:

working on five books is like preparing for multiple births,

quintuplets no less, but after they’re out there’ll be an uplet –

that’s the difference between books and parentship.

I’d like to book a berth on the good ship friendship,

bunk off to the Mediterranean,

somewhere where the language is not alien,

allow myself a holiday outside the holly and ivy days of Christmas,

I still resist mass movements and mass communism.

30 July 2004

How little space I take up in life –

a table for this notebook, coffee and tobacco,

an empty place in bed where could be a wife,

but I don’t turn the clock back, oh

back. It’s when I’m writing against the clock

that I realise time is not locked:

the present becomes unlocked

and though these lines are now in the past,

they are fixed, firm and fast:

already a book, though unpublished,

and when the notebook closes they are not banished.

31 July 2004

See don’t touch.

Sea, don’t touch her,

dive in only with your eyes:

sea, she is a woman I’ve kissed and missed.

I can see her face tranquil and furrowed,

radiant with sunflecks,

bobbing swimmers’ necks.

31 July 2004

ON A PEBBLE BEACH NEAR BRIGHTON

The table is bright white plastic,

the sun’s power is fantastic.

The beach that stretches beneath us

is purely pebble detritus.

I treat myself to a cappuccino away from the group,

really an excuse to run some lines through the hoop

and hoop-la as the sun goes in

I have closure, the poem closes in.

My friends, for friends they are

are never closer, though never far,

talking in little language groups in threes or fours,

bright in their bathing costumes.

They brought the food they’ve prepared according to their customs

and on a simple blanket on the pebble beach

onto the found cardboard plates we reached

for chicken, fish, rice, homemade humus –

one for all and all for us,

and the football bounced off feet and heads –

the sea air guaranteed us extra sleep in our beds

tonight. You don’t know what I’m doing,

or perhaps you’ve guessed.

The best poems are written in secret,

then there are no ‘lests’.

I think of the rich energy of the groups

and how we are the opposite of those torturing troops

and I’d talked with Frederic about the Sudan

and gleaned a little knowledge

and Ibrahim said: ‘Tu dois chanter’

and I wish you all you first choice college.

And as I admired Halil’s elephant pantaloons,

Ibrahim again, offered to tailor me some.

I could fly over this scene in a hot air balloon,

all around only the air’s hum –

but that would be at a greater distance.

I must gather more material on the ground – no missed chance,

then return to this café – writing has to be done on its own.

Sheila said: ‘Are you going with someone?’

and I said: ‘Only if someone wants to come.’

And I realize: they’ve come with me,

the ones who couldn’t make it:

a father here, a mother there,

a lost friend, brother or sister,

and they insist and I insist

that they like to be here with me, with us.

31 July 2004 Near Brighton Beach

KNUCKLE RAP

Rushed in the morning: house to clean.

Wonder if I’ve copied the correct file,

and no time to send an important email.

These days time itself is short and mean

to me – I can only get back into my old routine

of writing poems outside the house

away from the computer mouse-trap.

But I must knuckle under and cut the crap.

It’s a hot and humid August day,

just write for a coffee in the café with James Thackara,

with this good friend to rap

and wrap up the world’s goods and evils

with our conversation skills

at a level round little table.

2 August 2004

THE WHEEL FOR GORDON WILLS

Bright sun charges up my solar batteries:

God knows, a sunny day in England is like winning the lottery.

Today I could throw a pot of poetry –

paper doesn’t last as long as pottery shards.

Car wheels move round and forwards

unlike the fixed rotating potter’s wheel

and I will cajole the clay with the heel

of my hand and make a vase for verse.

2 August 2004

Poetry blocked out by life’s stuff:

how simple it is to eat and drink enough,

you don’t need much brass for that,

but I’ll need nine lifetimes like the cat

to complete my labours of love and duty,

not to mention my love of the mind and body’s beauty.

Poetry is the thin edge of the wedge,

it can insert into the field of your life sans hedge,

it is a granary, a treasurehouse, a pledge,

logs split to be enjoyed by the fire edge.

Poetry is the stuff of life,

it cuts up its food with pen or knife,

fills throughout one’s days one’s soul’s stomach

like the small farm did, owned by my father Mac.

4 August 2004

AT MY POST, MAN

The only baccy shag I could buy at Victoria Station

was pipe tobacco, St Bruno.

There’s not a lot of it about these days, or

am I smoking up a storm above my station?

I’ve become an expert at the one coffee stand,

usually on my own though weaving strands

of poetry – I need to talk to my selves,

to assure myself that my books are on the shelves

of my audiences’ minds with the friends I made

and make. I shared coffees here with Maide,

one of the few people I can call with a Mayday.

Children, men, women, maidens, all those in distress

if my interpreting words has abated your stress

then I can rest in peace in bed or grave –

I never really was one for a rave

even in the permissive sixties.

Now in a few years I’ll be knocking on sixty.

Neruda had the knack well after that,

furnishing il postinho with love poems not pat,

but powerful enough to move

the couple at one remove

to that rare emotion: love.

4 August 2004

Just ten minutes at this Café table,

yet primed with a Latte, I feel able

to string like a Frenchman his garlic and onions:

these words – for I know them well.

Nothing new in the words – just their order,

but I am under holy orders.

You might glimpse my dog collar,

hear me pray and sermonise from a whisper to a holler –

but I may yet become a whistleblower,

crowd pleaser, rabble rouser,

and though I don’t get on the carousel of carousing,

when it comes to arousing

feelings – I know my onions.

5 August 2004

On this rock of bureaucracy

we shall found this State

so many people can founder

and get their homes too late.

‘I will find a loophole’,

the smart alec pimp retorts,

will smuggle in my tarts

and exhort my torts.

And what of the torture victims?

Shall they sleep in the park?

Shall the state inflict them

with more than fear of the dark?

I cannot bear their grief tonight,

let that cup pass me by.

My coffee cup is empty –

but here’s a poem in their eye.

5 August 2004

Because you care and mind,

because you give kindness in kind,

because many happy returns,

you’ve learned, don’t happen just on birthdays.

Because on earth your days

are inevitably numbered.

Because I read Aronzon to my Ma as she half slumbered,

so I feel unencumbered,

a sense of regeneration,

a feeling that the languages go on and on

from generation to generation.

Ma, I read you poems for the first time

outside a reading

and we talked of death and the future,

without our hearts attacked or bleeding

and needing no sutures,

calmly, without any fuss,

confident of what awaits us.

9 August 2004

Let your eyes only do the stalking,

though they may be on stalks.

Add, if you like, a bit of random talking,

sitting in a café after waste land walks.

This poet and interpreter is unable to avert poverty,

to business unable to convert.

Blame it on a philistine government

which with poetry and the arts is curt.

So I sit too early to have activated my freedom pass

on the stopping train bound for Victoria –

we never really saw the human face of socialism; my arse,

this country is getting torier and torier.

And I wonder when I can replace my razorblades

or buy my Vitamin C,

20p in the slot will get me a pee,

the paper I use even for poems has created a glade.

10 August 2004

I relish that looking is free.

They can’t impose an eye tax.

I work on an updated PC,

never bothered with I-Macs,

but I remain poor as a church or mosque mouse,

or rodent in a synagogue.

My unthyroid eyes still goggle

as when I used to don the mask,

flippers and snorkel in the blue Mediterranean.

I’m afraid I no longer have a leg to stand on,

let alone terra firma beneath.

These poems I hand on

as second hand clothes I bequeath

them to you – I’ve lived in them –

everyday I change them, take them off at night,

oh reader, this poem is about looks and sight

emerging on to vision.

It may need a lot of revision

before I get it right.

11 August 2004

FOR GILLIAN BALANCE

I realized well after I had seen the portrait vision

of you in a blue long dress painting

with an enigmatic smile on your lipsticked lips

that you were doing it in the corner of the conservatory

of my elder brother’s house. How you got there

from holiday in Scotland I don’t really know

and there was no way you could possibly know

that in January twenty years ago

I had jumped into my new life so far from that window

above that I didn’t crash into the glass.

Now I have the visual counter-balance at last

I’ve been seeking, old friend, though younger in time than that past

destructive event, drawn to me by interpreting,

creating your art, painting your and my dreams,

intervening into my life, this poem’s schemes.

For me this is better, more vivid than a photograph,

finally it lifts the low point of my life’s graph.

I’ve interpreted this on my own, without you,

but that’s a power you gave me and I thank you,

and it’s something in the future I may often have to do.

14 August 2004

In my bag Alev, Bejan and Negar,

as I walk to Bromley South train gare

and I wonder what sort of people we are

who earn less money by the pen

than a cleaning lady or jenny wren,

but still we stroke the plumes of the swan

and hope our last poems won’t be swan songs.

Alev is all tongues, rough tongue of a lioness,

Bejan is stone, red stones on a mountainside,

Negar is in the clouds in her highness:

I’m not sitting on the fence but taking no sides,

capable in poetry of honouring these three friends

and when with each of these books I reach the end,

unlike with linear music I reread them selectively again

and again until, they’re more familiar to me,

I swear, than my very own poetry.

18 August 2004

I stared at you with one long look,

gently painting you into a poem in my notebook.

There you were concentrating on your book,

it was not even necessary for you to return my look,

though there is a mutuality when eyes touch.

18 August 2004

STRESS THE WORDS

The theft of my bag makes me distressed,

plus at this café there are none of my favourite waitresses.

It’s too simple to say that I am stressed

by work. I have to establish other origins of these stresses.

I try to avoid the usual excesses

and not let my poverty obsess me.

I don’t fall for coincidences’ processions.

When one’s near the bottom there is less

effect on one from a global recession.

I’m beyond my own Maydays and SOSs,

on the contrary I’ve become a fisher of souls,

and in a recent dream I was hauled

up on a hawser by an invisible helicopter

to a safe place as I fell off a grassy cliff,

reminding me that I live the if

and work in a dangerous conditional tense.

19 August 2004

A sort of feeling of a muzzy head,

of getting over a hangover,

not alcohol or drug induced.

Rhymes don’t lead

any more than the words take me over,

in each poem my total vocabulary is reduced

to approximately a hundred words a poem,

selected, skeletal, honed down, combed.

The end of the line is a sound repetition,

but if it’s cracked before, it steps on the craic,

becomes trivial in its tribulation

to entertain or move, it loses the track

and can’t cause trouble or elation.

20 August 2004

You are somewhere to me between ‘tu’ and ‘vous’,

between ‘ty’ and ‘vy’, ‘sen’ and ‘siz’.

In the flare and fizz

of our conversations, I slip to call you

‘thou’ although you are not the deity.

Divine perhaps, in my eyes, yes

and English is familiar enough to you

to sense the affection and respect I feel for you.

20 August 2004

INTERPRETER’S RANT

The frustration of coming in –

and no interpreting.

Sitting in a Moroccan Café with myself and me

is a poor substitute for £sd,

I mean good old pounds shillings and pence.

So I sit here angry and tense,

my coffee poured, the poem intense,

but where are the red cents

and where are the roubles for my troubles?

My life makes no financial sense.

Soon it’ll be autumn – I’ll put my collar up

but the American dollars won’t be rolling up.

I’m caught in a cleft stick,

but I won’t be left sick

or allow myself to be put on the shelf

unless it’s next to my Collected Poems

and I will not elect to ‘work from home’

whither all my roads and railroads lead.

They make me wither and bleed

like a dry branch in autumn without sap.

I feel they make me feel old and all that crap.

You have to have a voice to rejoice.

You have to have words to be heard.

20 August 2004

‘Put us not to the test’

is not the same as

‘lead us not into temptation’.

The same text

but two different translations.

Every day I seem to be tested

but rarely led into temptation,

the latter I preempt with caution,

the former I overcome, then rested

with naps or overnight sleep,

I continue, press on, keep

going onwards ‘as’ to war,

with the ‘as’ the important word

for I am a peaceful man at heart

and I make sacrifices for my art.

20 August 2004

OFF THE TRAIN

I

The weather in my head is overcast.

I sit silently reading Aronzon

opposite a beautiful Kurdish woman,

or so I thought to myself, with dark red lipstick,

not very many summers younger than I.

It was only eyes, though I can imagine

her smile of recognition

if I’d approached her in her languages or words.

‘You can recognise us by our eyes’,

I was told once by a young Kurd,

and, strange woman on the train,

I recognise you are cognisant

that you are bewitching.

II

I somehow feel laid back

though I have to purchase a Bank Holiday ticket.

It was late when I made tracks,

my seat – I was able pick it.

Then she sits down in the place almost opposite,

but I tried to reread the Aronzon introduction.

I spy a middle eastern queen, that’s it,

I teeter on whether to offer an introduction.

But by not speaking to her, not revealing myself,

I’ve left myself hanging on the shelf

and a tectonic one at that,

but volcanoes mostly suppress their lava,

it is given to poets to express for lovers.

26 August 2004
FOR JOHN JOYCE WHO WORKED

AS A DOCTOR IN AFGHANISTAN

I just have to tell you that it may not turn out fine

and I also have to tell you that I’m crossing the line.

Médecins Sans Frontiéres now has a frontier

and all NGOs have to have a Third Ear.

You tried to heal the traumata in Afghanistan,

treated landmine wounds, gave more than a hand

but it was themselves they had to ban,

now there’s no Médecins Sans Frontiéres in Afghanistan.

The North West Frontier too is no doctors’ land

for some of their workers were murdered out of hand.

Forbidden countries were never planned

but Médecins Sans Frontiéres now has a frontier.

I ask what world it is where Sans Frontiéres can’t operate,

can’t operate on the casualties of a tribal state?

And the warlords are not just in Afghanistan,

the litany goes on from Iraq to Sudan.

Médecins Sans Frontiéres was the healthiest intervention,

never tarred with adventurism’s brush,

they weren’t troops observing the Geneva Convention,

they slapped ointment on traumata but they had to leave in a rush.

July-August 2004

A WARNING POEM

In the vocabulary of the constabulary

I rush to the scene with blues and twos:

a Dark Blue undergraduate has a dose of the darkest blues

and it is my duty to save him from suicidal hues,

to warn him that the Warneford* may not be the best ford,

but that Oxford could hang over him like a dressing-down cord

with its gowns and no town and its cruel words:

I urge him to retain his sense of the absurd,

to eat College porridge, not over-fancy birds,

read his favourite poets to himself and out loud,

be proud in his privilege and be not cowed;

in my day when I was up at Univ we allowed

too much cruelty to each other

and as a result lost many sisters and brothers,

though not all of them drowned in the river Isis,

a better sense of intervention might have solved their crises.

*The aptly named Warneford is Oxford’s main psychiatric hospital, ‘up the hill’.

29 August 2004

BOURNEMOUTH DAWN

This Bournemouth dawn is predominantly grey-

I came out before six to smoke my lungs away,

down the steps from my tower of sleep,

of reading Boris Pasternak I’ve had a clean sweep

and have made up my mind to do a book of translations,

forty years reading him is surely enough practice

and the decision gives me a sense of elation,

I’ve marked up the poems, now it’s soon into action.

But I have to clear the decks,

find a home, a cabin, a study to work in,

to launch a book, a ship.

I still need friendships rather than sex,

this is the way it’s been in Russian and Turkish

and it’s far less lonely than you can imagine.

The wind blows at my pyjama’d legs.

The light is chasing the grey away.

The night has been drunk to the dregs.

Silhouettes of plants sway over the fence:

this Bank Holiday weekend is far from tense,

the books I took with me Pasternak and Ella Joffe.

A book decision and fifteen translations I offer

into the dawning day as the others sleep tight –

my new bag was rifled in my dream last night.

30 August 2004

I got a contact tiredness

from my old friend the waitress

in the café by the computer shop.

I’m going away with a printer that stops –

the paper’s not feeding properly.

Here I am again in poverty

and I need the tools for my trade,

it’s beyond pen and paper, words written or said.

I’ll wait again until I am paid,

at least I have a roof over my head.

And you, Justina, are worked long hours to the bone,

I see exhaustion in the structure of your face.

Perhaps I should have walked past, left you alone

and humped this useless printer to my work place.

1 September 2004

‘IT’S NOT FAIR’

As I write the siege in Osetia continues.

It is difficult to get a true figure of the hostages

but perhaps it’s as many as a thousand.

School Number One is number one news item.

The man about my age with the wolf face leaves the café,

these days I see him on the train from Bromley

and lurking here suspiciously –

but then he might find me suspicious.

Despite all my knowledge

of Russia and Chechnya

I cannot bring back the hostage situation from the edge

and poetry and thinking become more like a prayer

for the children, the parents, the hostages there,

and I pray for restraint on behalf of captors and encircling troops

and, of course, as the youngest child could say ‘It’s not fair,’

and Putin, Bush and Blair are between rocks and hard places

and no intelligence can save them

from the mentality of the terrorist or the freedom fighter

and the distinction between the two

is the key issue. Osip Mandelstam

has something to say about this and Mandela too.

And we, not just the persons in the street,

who pick up  pens slender but powerful,

have no more power than a hostage child

in School Number One who might otherwise at this very moment

have been doing a drawing or writing a poem

encouraged by a parent or teacher,

but now they’re desperately hungry, scared witless –

I’d like to  take them all of the hit-list.

2 September 2004

This storm was another storm,

a leaden cloud of lead,

explosions, bloodshed,

severed limbs and heads.

This is what happens

when talks break down

and terror reigns,

terror rains

on both sides.

I didn’t watch it on TV

and Oleg jibed at me

that I wanted to remain

the romantic poet.

The radio was enough reality

and my imagination was ripped

enough to create these harrowing lines

and I am on a London train

feeling safe but far from fine.

4 September 2004

I waited a long time to get the pace of the place:

the horseshoe of plane trees by the brick rotunda.

My life was menaced by the distant thunder

of imminent homelessness – this need to find myself a place.

So here I am at the zoological garden

writing and trying to get my logic to harden,

though sitting, step by step to go through my choices,

to give my ambitions and wishes their voices,

for it is when I put them into words

that they cut back the randomness, the absurd

and I can approach reality in its plurality.

4 September 2004

My writing seems to be rushed

and I’m feeling pretty bushed

in both sense of the word.

My weekend in Oxford with the Kurds

is under threat: I lift my hand

to my head and it’s wet with sweat,

a train before I’m home yet.

Empty stands the coffee cup,

but I’m reluctant to get up,

though I may not be writing a major poem,

but fee fi fo fum

I sense the blood of the woman

sitting alone at the next door table

and though it’s summer I’d dress her in sable

of a poem – it’s only a metaphor –

a fun fur – I don’t have it in for

the beast, besides she’s busy dialling

on her mobile phone – no doubt

someone will appear for her

from a nearby zone.

She fidgets like Tory Amos

on the piano stool,

twines the leather straps of her bag.

I look up – I’ve missed two trains

and the next is in half an hour:

this is fascination’s power,

fitting words to a face

but keeping one’s space.

4 September 2004

The beggarwoman came through the train

as I was rereading Pasternak again.

I gave her my bottle of water and said: ‘Take care!’

not that I’d give her money anyway – none to spare.

The route Bromley South to Victoria I will soon not use –

which will rule out the Café Ritazza and Olga –

she brings me Lattes but our friendship I do not abuse

and though she may teach the other waitresses the most vulgar

words of Russian, I gave her a copy of my Aronzon,

the deepest tribute to that language I could present.

I travel to the first from the sixth zone

and with presentiments but without oversentiments

begin to plan my life on another route to another place

where I will have a different time, a different space.

5 September 2004

A transition state is not the best playing field

in which to write poetry, but at least I am better healed –

it’s gone that down-at-heel feeling,

red into black in the bank can start healing:

but I count myself lucky that the experience was revealing

and I will never hit the ceiling,

but like the grey mullet I will continue feeding

near the seabed always heeding

the stranger in my midst,

the stranger in myself.

He saw far, my friend Moris Farhi:

His new commandment gives society health.

September 2004

With unerring line I circled the café tables

before hitting on a free chair by a table,

where sat the cartoonist as I was to find out

after half an hour poetry conversation.

He offered me his discarded Times,

then it was onto Elegy by Dylan Thomas,

that he read once at a poetry evening:

‘I do like a bit of Burns’

one person said though he thought his Welsh priest impression

had drowned out his Scottish burr.

He taught creative writing in a mental hospital

then became a user himself,

was beaten black and blue, which I called torture

and ‘a psychiatrist would have called a manic episode’.

So as the talk rose about poetry and MacNeice’s odes,

about his beloved Prufrock and Eliot’s awful voice:

it was always grounded as by the Glasgow squaddies’ boots,

tramping off to Cultural Evenings: ‘Tonight Keats’

and one saying: ‘I bet none of them even know what a keat is’.

I give as good as I get.

There was much more wit that I forget,

though I write this immediately after our talk.

Before he left he unfurled the Money Section

of the Times and showed me his cartoon

about BT’s dearer option:

‘Laying it on … on the line’.

I said: ‘That’s poetry!’

It was signed: GED.

11 September 2004

Between pools of tiredness

it’s difficult to keep the fire flowing.

A Fund showed great kindness:

that’ll keep the boat floating,

but I no longer know where I’m rowing to.

All these years of poems sown,

printed out, then consigned to files,

never broadcast, never printed

others critical eyes have never squinted

at them in their manifold styles,

yet I can’t fold my hand – the stakes are too high.

12 September 2004

And when my Grant came through

I bought myself the Collected Poems

of T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden

and re-read Eliot

and read and re-read Auden.

The familiar and the strange,

leapt at me from the pages –

it had been ages

since I had indulged in the full range.

Eliot, of course, the magi and ‘It’s not that at all’,

the realisation that the evening sunset

of the patient etherised on the table

was a bloody one probably.

If Eliot was a surgeon,

Auden was indeed the ‘stretcher bearer

of a cruel age’. Now it’s a London sunset

again and do ‘the neon streetlamps burn in orange rage’

for me – no, now I feel they’re peacefully glowing

as the train passes Battersea

Power Station, which I see

as a grey ghost age old symbol.

A poem is a gamble

that will not pay off in money,

but if a stranger reader thinks it’s clever or funny

or is moved by the sheer emotion of it,

or likes the rhythms and music in it,

then that is reward enough for this poet.

15 September 2004

The young Polish waitress says: ‘You’re always busy writing’,

and I say : ‘Poesia’, and she inevitably asks ‘What’s it about?’

and I say ‘Life’. She says ‘Is it very philosophoistic?’

and I say: ‘sometimes’. Loving poetry, she trips off her favourite poets:

Wieslawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz, Boleslaw Lesmian

and finds time to write them down for me at my meditation table.

‘Milosz died two weeks ago’, she says –

almost unread, his Collected lies like his tombstone

on my bookshelf. I must get more outside myself, outside my languages.

Must I ‘go out more’ as my daughter says,

‘get more of a life’ than this lyrical philosophy?

I hedge myself and my bets with words –

time to read beyond the Russians, Turks, Kurds, Persians and Arabs,

the latter three of these are all Greek to me –

I could polish my Russian into Polish,

but perhaps I should brush up my English,

perhaps the monoglot English poet has an advantage,

but from a handful of languages’ vantage,

and beyond Dante’s halfway down life’s road,

I can now more easily decipher and encipher poetry’s codes

and let the tightrope of lines bear for me tensile words’ loads.

16 September 2004

I have no idea how this poem will develop –

my mind is blank as this page –

yesterday at this café conversation enveloped

us and overwhelming and whelming was all the rage.

Your one condition for our next meeting

was we wouldn’t speak a word of English.

My attractively hyperactive one – I send you this greeting

but I suggest you translate from English into Turkish.

I didn’t want to see your energy crushed

but I didn’t want in any way to hush

my powerful disillusionment in translating prose.

Tractor editors can’t tell the wild weeds from the rose

which you’ll have to grow on your own

after grafting from a language that is not quite your own.

19 September 2004

Olga, I’m back in the fish and chip shop we ate in,

on Feinstein and Akhmatova duty again.

It is as good a place as any to create in.

The friers are joking in Turkish. I’m trying to remain

with my thoughts of you, my beautiful-voiced one,

though my CD player has been in the loft and

so since your CDs don’t spin my mind doesn’t revolve so often

to you, Anna and Peter. But I will not let our project peter out.

For Pete’s sake, for Perry’s sake, I’ll give it a bit more clout.

19 September 2004

FOR ALEV

Between ‘What have I done?’

and ‘What have I not done?’

it about covers everything,

songs I haven’t sung

and songs I have yet to sing.

Between omission and commission –

I don’t want to call them sins,

rather commitments

or lack of commitments.

I try to state my mission,

put heart and head on the line.

The living of life is a big period of remission,

if, as a Turk said to me a long time ago,

‘everyone is a little ill’. Beyond words, we come and go,

as I went from beside you at the Birthday Dinner

to another place setting, and it was only much later

when I looked for you that I saw you’d left.

These little partings leave us slightly bereft,

maybe my comparative lack of serious grief brings brief relief,

till the next green incident or death bursts and springs into leaf.

20 September 2004

A KISS OF LIFE DOWN THE TELEPHONE LINE

Sitting on the station concourse with a half of London Pride.

These long lines will soon get me into my stride.

I think of the Turkish girl who attempted suicide,

then rang her interpreter to get him on side.

How the pills would collide with her gastric juices

and how many therapeutic interpretations there are of the uses

of a ‘cry or call for help’. He’d rung 999, trusting in chance,

while he waited offline, it came the ambulance.

He could put away his freelance lance

but was aghast that it should come to this:

a kiss of life down the telephone line.

20 September 2004

FOR ANTHONY FRY

Perhaps it’s good they came back, your demons,

you couldn’t always remain a doctor, he-man,

and it’s better to wrestle them while you’re fit and able.

The woman at the café table I clothed in Russian sable

is far away in her own life

and I am no longer searching out a relationship or wife.

The time before you said: ‘If you’re not in love, can you love God then?’

Yes, I think, if He’s the spirit of creation:

his molecules are miniscule,

he creates feminine and masculine,

but did he create Lsd and mescaline

to divert our mental stability?

It was your unerring diagnostic ability

that saw my swings and roundabouts,

that spotted the manic and depressive bouts.

If I am recovered it’s not just from the lithium

you put me on – now you say I should sing a Te Deum!

21 September 2004

To Kings Langley I’m moving over,

to a bungalow like a cabin in Komarovo.

All my books from Akhmatova to Sedakova

in one pace will pacify this rover.

I see my own hand, not the hand of fate –

so many homes I’ve left: this time I’ll get it right.

To get everything in, the fit will be tight,

what could have been never is never too late.

I won’t be served communal dinner on a plate:

I will still have to pay Council rates.

Perhaps I can develop other character traits.

Gardening and cooking raise their heads,

for ten pound a night a guest can have a bed:

and under it there will be no reds.

22 September 2004

Reading poems before Rory Bremner is a challenge –

I’ve decided to concentrate on a collage,

not all light and not all heavy.

While you are having the bevy

of your choice, I’ll add my poet’s voice.

Read, learn and inwardly digest

is not a bad maxim.

We know that jests are best for the digestion,

though the cause is serious to the maximum,

it’s we at MF who take up for you that strain.

Doggerel is a faithful way of hounding a train

of thought, then there’s catterel – distinctly more catty,

it’s tempting to let our hair down, go slightly batty,

play with jazz rhythms and comedy:

you entered here to be entertained

and my poems were not on the menu,

some old ones, some new, some borrowed from the blues,

let’s walk down the aisle for MF for Isledon Road,

a marriage of poetry, comedy and jazz –

the last line, our top fundraiser is called Jaz.)

22-23 September 2004
LANGEBRIDE REVISITED FOR JULIET GREENER

‘The swing is not a pendulum’

but it almost became your endulum.

Suspense led to suspension –

thirty years before your pension.

Frayed hopes too harshly, too easily led to the rope.

In solidarity I attempted to explain my shortened legs.

This was late at night when we discussed injured knights

and sinking further into the soul’s black night

before swimming out and up to the light.

You told me of the three vertebrae in the middle back

that control a woman’s emotions

and later Juniper, your mother, tracked

in healing her hand down my spine where Juliet had stroked

in a swift gesture of solidarity.

So much friendship and friendly food stoked

me and though they hadn’t swept the chimney

our hearts were the hearth

and our words cherished the whole earth

and there was a dearth of negativity

and a wealth of mirth and creativity.

Your gentle lentil salad,

I am still inwardly digesting

into this powerful ballad

built on honesty and jesting.

These days I am not just the court jester

in a tragic affair.

But they’ve stolen my lute

and I have not much loot

and I can be neither knight nor troubadour.

At the evening this poet recited,

then on top he found friendships requited,

hugs and kisses and words

and though he misheard

‘legs’ for eggs and ‘let’s have the nipples’ for nibbles,                                                                 

he remained the interpreter with the multi-track mind

and back in London remembers

the healing track of hands down the spine,

the backbone, and words that became shared on our own

that once were yours, that once were mine.                      26/9/04

While your mother drove us down the Motorways,

you, the children, were away in Essex, lined up crabbing

and when they’d taken the bacon

the six crabs were put in a bucket

then released – no need for them to kick it.

No hooks either were needed.

We didn’t catch any crabs at the reading,

but these lines walk sideways,

a sort of lateral thinking.

Our claws were retracted.

No one acted up, just acted out

the familiar poems far from home –

we were farther than you and your father.

At your age, Madeleine and Olivia, I would rather

be catching crabs in Essex

than driving down the Motorway,

than taking poem risks –

and we also did not kill our catch.

27 September 2004

The extra tea comes

tying me further to the table.

This Turkish café is humdrum

but it is a cable away from work.

I’m going for an update on my thyroid,

since the treatment I’ve been less paranoid.

I’m not retired, still employed,

advancing to The Retreat,

my brain still unalloyed,

looking forward to more poetry treats.

I slurp my tea, then slurp this poem.

A little cold in the head,

not enough to take to my bed.

We gave a push to our swings

gently but forcefully.

Each other we tried to ring –

answerphone to answerphone,

finished up emailing

the poem, gentle but forceful.

In the country I’d banished

the city’s toxins,

ironic that it may be the doctor’s wish

to give me thyroxin.

I’d rather be talking in the Big House balanced

by you and your mother’s pendulum and hands

all summed and summing up in words and glances

as the sand of time dances

through the hourglass

and you bake a special cake,

heck, a month before my birthday

and this fluish ache

should fly away

as the rooks on the hill above the kitchen in their rookery

croak and accompany you the ace cook with your cookery.

28 September 2004

*

The photo came by email with a portion of breakfast

deposited on my tie. The printer colours were fast,

then why were my shirt and tie pink not blue?

Helen, Billie, Fiona and I and you

fingering the digital camera to your eye.

Round me the poets cluster –

a veritable constellation.

It’s enough to get one into a fluster,

which of us has a star as destination?

If it’s not Bejan, it’s Ziba or Negar, Ruth or Stephen,

then are the translators poets of a different magnitude?

It is through our words theirs reach the multitude,

we get across the contents, the intrinsic form even.

I am content to pay you not just lip service

but to savour our words as I read on my tongue and lips,

to render their essential virtues and vices,

to shoot down critics from the hip.

This last couplet will complete the sonnet:

without these originals I couldn’t have done it.

1 October 2004

Reading puts the biggest brake on writing,

but when I’m done and released from it

I feel its friendly grip tightening

on me like a handshake or embrace,

through the black lines, across the ages,

as though my investment in the pages

which can be topped up again in life’s stages,

arranges not deranges a harmony in me,

to borrow words from Elizabeth Bishop

to Robert Lowell. I’ve been reading the former’s crop

these last days: through her eyes her world I see.

I am not Erica Jong,

perhaps my fear of flying to America is wrong,

let alone to Brazil and South America,

but let Bishop’s non-ecclesiastical

poems crown my head like Lowell’s laurel mitre

and let me emerge from this deep reading – a better writer.

2 October 2004

This love will last for ever,

from cradle to the grave,

for the broken-hearted people,

for the broken and the brave.

I wrote these lines on waking

as I emerged from bed.

The long night was forsaken,

the day would be sun-led.

Why is it my thoughts wander

to the tortured and the lame,

to those under pressure,

to those who’re not to blame.

What started as a high love poem

is dropping into the gutter,

for that indeed is the costliest home

where words are scarcely a mutter;

where people zero in on heroin

and their sceptre is the needle,

where there are no heroes to believe in

and life is constant dealing and wheedling..

4 October 2004

POET FOR POET

For Inge Laird

Thinking of Inge

at Waterloo Station,

drinking coffee,

bursting for the loo,

to lower the tone.

The thinking becomes an inkling,

black ink on white page,

for an obvious reason DT’s rage, rage

comes to light,

though neither it nor we are dying.

And I remember a two hour talk with you here –

was it 2 or 3 years ago?

In all sincerity

above all I admire your serenity

and though serendipity

smacks of zippity-do-da –

with this poem, our meetings – it fits.

4 October 2004

PROTECT MY READERS

Where do they go the words

that don’t develop onto paper?

Is there an inbox in the brain

where I can express their outlook

or am I composing and deleting all the time?

Do they go where birds fly to die,

where old biros and odd socks congregate?

Do they slip through the grate

as I walk the streets and go on the underground

where their luckier sister poems are displayed.

Lost as soon as they are created

on CDs they’ll never be played –

but in losing them something else is found:

forgetfulness may abound,

but my memory is still sound

and with my pen I have both feet on the ground.

I take aim and shoot a line,

fire all the tyrants and leaders

and keep my powder dry to protect my readers.

6 October 2004

POEMS NOVEMBER 2004-

Turn the tap of poetry

that leads to the pipe,

that leads to the tank.

Don’t force it American style

for you have to see:

say it in French devoir à voire,

a reservoir.

1 November 2004

Never always dating but never out of date.

I hadn’t heard from you lately,

why do people under pressure swing between love and hate?

You put your cakes on friends’ plates

and put them in for raffles –

but I wish you’d be more unruffled by fate.

1 November 2004

Upper class voices talk English to the Polish barmaid.

My Switch Card has gone out of date,

but I have tomorrow morning’s fare –

coins in my pocket, a shell and a turquoise,

a gift from Shirin who didn’t realise it’s power,

remnants of some German rolling tobacco

and my pipe thingy. I could survive an age

with this support system. My half is half drunk,

my glasses upside down lying nonchalantly.

In fact I like that word and perhaps I’m nonchalant

myself, taking this drink before the Pushkin Club,

in this Pub opposite the Police Station.

I talked in English and French to my mother

about ‘la grande aventure’ as my father

had put it in English, literally on his death bed.

2 November 2004

Just five minutes to go –

see what the words will do,

though I’m feeling low,

I have to see this day through.

The music annoys me,

yet hope buoys me:

that over life’s noise

we’ve become men from boys.

MOVING

Irritable, body restless,

not just because the train’s late.

Moving, I’ll take less

books – my clothes, files, a few plates.

Is it a risk to leave on display

a wealth of Turkish and Russian poetry?

I imagine no literary thieves

would relieve the shelves of this weight!

So in limbo-land between homes I wait

enervated by simple domestic tasks:

not much of me is asked by my daughter,

final bills of gas, electricity and water,

contact the Council about its tax,

don’t bother about the non-existent Fax,

get a phone connected at the next place,

work out if the emails need a new phone number to trace,

get the heating switched on,

hitch on to a new GP,

always put the seat down after I pee,

smoke in one room and sweep up the tobacco debris,

or better still smoke outside.

I’ve deleted the Temporary Internet Files,

though I had nothing to hide,

now I should make inroads into my Inbox,

a sort of overload detox.

I’d like to leave my Sent Box

as a sort of Selected Emails

but to select them down into a Selected

is a task I should not fail.

The train pulls into the Station,

a humdrum poem has found its station.

8 November 2004

14 LINES ABOUT IT

Just for the writing of it,

when words don’t seem to fit,

when it’s a struggle to keep my pipe lit,

when I know I’m not writing a greatest hit.

The nicotine is beginning to hit,

another reason to quit or not to quit,

so in this Algerian café I sit,

smoking tobacco not shit.

A few lines I’ve writ,

an hour before I have to split:

this is just a little skit

based on the rhyme ‘it’.

Suddenly it’s become a sonnet:

fourteen lines – I’ve done it!

10 November 2004

There may be no sense in writing when the vessel

is empty, but even the strings of Veysel’s

saz were often idle. On this poem I could sidle up,

even though it’s empty, my caffeine cup,

the effects swim in the bloodstream

and these words are not a whisper, not a scream,

though all around the pop music plays

and the waitresses carry their little trays

and the speakers drown out the speakers.

I take on board that I am aching inside,

that life has given me a bumpy ride,

but my secrets I’ll hide in my poet’s divan

rather than confess them on the analyst’s couch.

10 November 2004

These are my last days of taking the Bromley train.

I congratulate myself on remaining sane

despite the crush of rush hour

and I have seen poems and conversations flower,

the latter especially after the pubs close,

and though take aways may assault my nose,

I have mastered the art of the snatched poem

written on my knee going away and home,

so that the train becomes the poems’ crucible –

I dipped my ladle in as much as I was able.

These days phones need no wire or cable

but my refrains are infinitely more subtle

and mobile than the perennial: ‘I’m on the train’!

10 November 2004

No worries that I don’t attempt the grand form

and these days my poems are far from elegiac.

Somehow you have to keep the ashes warm

to be able to light a major fire.

Words dim when the mind tires.

10 November 2004

LAST POEM IN VICTORIA STATION

I never thought I’d come to the end of the lines:

I am going to where new perspectives rule.

This trip is going to be the end of the line:

in going I know I’m not playing the fool.

As I sip my last coffee all is cool,

a few friendships I’ve made here:

now I look to the future without fear.

12 November 2004

MOVED TO THE RETREAT KINGS LANGLEY

14 NOVEMBER 2004

PHARM ASSIST

Where the oxen ford the Isis,

where you intervene in life’s crises

with not only flimsy green prescriptions

but kind words never scripted.

Where platoons of addicts

beat their way to your Chemist’s door

and you work too as a locum

and do a lot to fight their boredom;

knowing you and of them how can I say I am poor?

I still activate my card in the hole in the wall

and only go a little overdrawn

and I’ve spent time when I could have read

your gift, Orhan Pamuk’s  ‘My Name is Red’,

the CD player for Cohen is in the loft:

I’m writing this gentle poem on the bucking Tube

remembering our meeting which was exuberant.

27 July 2004

THESIS TOPICS OF MELIKE

Like an enthusiastic ballerina on tiptoes

you pirouette between thesis topics

and I am not the one who knows

which of these you should pick.

I only know that our talk does not drown

the poetry that emerges from it.

I would pick you, when I am up or down,

to give incipient mania or depression a hit.

So from the young women suicides in the town of Batman –

and I am not Robin, Hood or Superman –

to women’s rights in Kurdish journals in Turkey,

then you feel gender-typing in psychoanalysis is the key.

Dear Melike, you may lick them with your thesis.

I am not saying there is ease in your choice.

I hear so many feelings in your voice –

to the Kurdish amputee you are more than a prosthesis,

but you give me words, eyes, legs, hands and though we don’t touch

except in greeting and parting, you are my friend, my arkadash

                                                                   and that means much.

I can touch and feel your soul

without even touching your body:

touching and feeling souls is one of the poet’s roles,

touching and feeling bodies can be anybody’s.

When we give each other the two cheeked kiss

in greeting and in parting

it’s not a bad start or ending

to our conversation face to face.

We both love to listen to each other and wax lyrical,

talking of poetry, prose, a bit of the political,

not forgetting Can Yucel and the satirical.

Forgive me, but this is not doggerel or catterel

and you are thinking of a thesis on gender and the psychoanalytical.

15/16 November 2004

In my new home I love the fizzing of my brain

when I lie on my bed listening for trains.

If truth lies in single grains,

we can’t aim for a full harvest,

there is no sparagmos after the Parish Breakfast.

But on the cross the tortured Christ

though he tried hard to take on all suffering and sin must

have known (he’d pushed his fate so fast),

that he was neither the first nor the last

to be tortured for religio-political reasons.

Certainly a son of man for all seasons,

but he planed against the grain, that’s plain.

17 November 2004

FOR CORINNE

You are far enough away from me
not to transmit your awful cold
and the emails you send me are virus free.
I’m sitting in a cafe in Fulham with a double espresso
trying to do your bidding
and write another poem to you.
The prospect is far from forbidding.
I’ll find words to express my warmth for you,
to send warm to your cold
though it’s all in the head not your soul.

I’m on my way to Julia’s lunch,
pausing before I meet the PEN friends’ bunch.
You’d love to be here, I know,
I’d love you to be here and so
perhaps I’ll write another poem
after the event.
No doubt a little spleen will be vented
at the perpetrators of recent events,
but I hope we won’t forget the real tyrants
and their regimes - against them we must keep up our rants.

Sunday 21 November 2004

BRIEFLY AFTER THE PARTY LINES

So many people crowded in one room,
there was scarcely room
to talk let alone walk.
I managed to converse
in prose not in verse
with a woman from Oxford
who ‘was a spy for a while’, then worked for Maxwell
in Pergamon (Purgatory) Press,
but I was more impressed
by Maricia who runs a charity
for disabled children in Petersburg...

Sunday 21 November 2004

(Monday morning: went down with cold…)

No Libbie to

slake my increased libido –

I’ll have to write it out by myself,

that’s a better consummation than abuse of the self.

As usual it’s lonely even on the bookshelf,

but I control my moods with writing

and though real sex would still be exciting

I get a contact high from close friendship

and one day she’ll come in to my desert island, that ship.

24 November 2004

LATEST FOR CORINNE

I told no one, actually I forgot,

that in my stolen bag were also W.H. Smith vouchers,

hard gotten leaving present from the PEN WiPC lot,

the two thieves who got away with it can vouch for that.

I hope they like Class A heroic Turkish poetry

and perhaps they’ll give Katia Kapovich’s book a try, aptly

called ‘smoke break’ because that is what I was about to do

before going through the tunnel to Finsbury Park Tube.

I turned to give directions to

a man asking to go to Hounslow –

unfortunately I was too slow

and turning on my booted heel,

my black bag was gone –

that sinking feeling,

I found myself screaming ‘My bag!!!’

and answer came there none.

24 November 2004
FOR NATHALIE

I can’t think this computer is like my lost exercise book –

I write poems right onto it so rarely, but hey, look:

it contains most of my work, emails and the potentials of the Internet

and inside it is lodged and logged your own website,

though your poems for some reason didn’t come up this time,

                                                                        there were you, the poet,

and alongside your biography your red lips, beautiful hair, face and eyes

                                                                               that give mine sight,

that see in exchange these words, black on white in an email,

all four want to see our new books, and we want to see each other

                                                                                          in reality

and we live in that hope. Tonight, after midnight, I long for that to be.

The rhyme is not, but we are unique, poets male and female.

28 November 2004

Starting a new notebook

is like crooking a lost sheep –

shepherd and nymph rejoice,

better than catching a fish on a hook

and keeping it in the keepnet,

the sport we enjoyed as young boys,

better than catching a butterfly

with Nabokov’s little net

for pinned it will surely die,

better than laying down to sleep.

29 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

Out on the station bench

in the black drizzly night

when I’d missed my train

you offered me one small black woolly glove.

In French I swear you called me ‘tu’,

but in Turkish it was back to ‘siz’

and I am so happy to know you

in all languages, tenses and cases,

will even learn from you a smattering of Kurdish,

one day will cook you a simple dish

so we could dissolve any stereotypes

and be dosts to each other

and avoid traditional hype

and without bending our genders

to be not needy yet in friendship need each other,

to give a voice and hearing to each other,

to listen, then apart recall, remember.

30 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

‘Sweets for my sweet, honey for my honey’ –

blasts out and it really is not funny

and disinclines me to write immortal poetry,

but against this forebackground I’ll still give it a try.

I’m in the Euston Pub I feel is ours,

though our balcony is closed.

I got them wrong again, the train hours

and in the Pushkin lecture I dozed.

I haven’t retained a face so vividly

in my faithful memory

for a long while –

it’s not just your hair, it’s your smile

and above all the words you say –

and we’ll never lead each other astray.

30 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

Your smile is not like her smile:

I don’t superimpose my women’s features.

Who knows? Perhaps we may not share our futures

but I will muse on you for much longer than a while.

I am not frightened that we share our souls –

I feel our trilingual conversations make a whole,

unsplittable in themselves.

I am not high and dry on the bookshelves,

but grounded in reality and surreality.

Why settle for quantity when there’s quality?

These days I ignore the plurality

and address you alone in actuality.

This sonnet round closing time first took me ten minutes

and I poured a full measure of my soul in it.

30 November 2004

Sitting at Highbury and Islington

waiting for a train to Finchley.

My tongue doesn’t come down like a ton

of bricks – I must build this poem delicately.

My life is coming out of a lull,

no bye byes for us, baby.

I cast a coin in a wishing well

and it splashed back a ‘definite maybe’.

1 December 2004

FOR ANDREW

Death turned out to be the ultimate authority

in your short life, from it you drew

your final handout, your final benefit.

It’s ten years since you died, Andrew,

and still I’ve never written you a poem that’s fit,

though through floes of my life you butted like an ice breaker.

Ten black candles burn on your virtual anniversary cake,

our memories of you are getting more opaque

and in her old age you’re in oblivion for our mother.

We, the survivors, talk to one another

about the possibility of your predeath recovery.

If death can be a discovery

to those left, you tested it first, Andrew, brother.

I’m sad you’re not sitting opposite me at this café table,

then no one else is either, so I am able

to concentrate on you as if you were living like my absent friends.

Andrew John, I’ve made a sour feast of your beggarhood,

but remember when we played Little John and Robin Hood

as children and you batted straight and bowled swingers.

Sometimes I see down and outs on the streets and they are dead ringers

for you and though I don’t give money, I bring you to life for them

                                                                                    until it’s scary

and every coffee or sandwich I get them I’m giving to you too.

Today at work I told a lot of people

of your anniversary, but it was good old John Rundle

my fellow poet who reacted: he’d lost his brother aged 23,

a fighter pilot, shot down. ‘He could have been talking to me,

helping me in this state and I miss him,

I will never forget him,’ but over the years though I’ve missed you

at the same time, I realize I’ve too often dismissed you

and I, unlike our mother, am able to remember.

Now I sit in another café in your patch in Islington

and it is winter, the second of December.

2 December 2004

I purchased two lighters and two bic biros

and a pack of handy andies,

resisted the Mars Bars and candies

and for almost two decades I’ve been off giros.

Here they’ll make bacon, sausage and eggs.

Above the poverty line I don’t beg,

not on my uppers, not down on my knees,

my poems are still able to please:

some merciful God heard my pleas –

now I’ll not yet drink my cup to the lees,

rather drain this black coffee to the dregs

and rush to the train on sturdy legs.

3 December 2004

TESTIMONY

After reading Sylvia Plath on the train

Committed to living until I die,

never again will I contemplate suicide.

I erect a simple structure

to ensure my own poems’ resurrection.

No property do I own, only books, goods and chattels

and I will them to my daughter and favourite people.

May my body be buried or cremated but my books and papers not burned,

and let them say of me: ‘He sought poetry in life, in friendships

                                                                                        and fools spurned,

and he was after life in life not the afterlife.

3 December 2004

NOUGHTS AND CROSSES

Why do they call it the Cross

when it’s really the plus?

Is it because Your News multiplied

swifter than adding implies?

It was a strange arithmetic

in the garden of Arimathea:

three crosses in a row

had led to three noughts,

then You rose, You rose

and rolled over the zero of the boulder,

only three days older.

You rose again, so the Bible says –

was death crossed out

and brought to naught?

4 December 2004

On my first visit to Campsfield

I felt the authoritarian system

but I gave the lads a book of Mandelstam,

which didn’t prevent their fate being sealed –

they were railroaded, deported back to Israel.

They wrote me letters and emails from Jerusalem’

sent me photos of their favourite parrot.

They told me it had been their only book, that Mandelstam:

all UK gave then was the stick not the carrot,

and a beating, they claimed, in a police station in Dover,

when three of them lay on their leader

to protect him. I imagine in Israel their trials are not over.

4 December 2004

Though I went to bed after three

it wasn’t till after eleven that I woke:

this man sleeps soundly after the words we all spoke,

so our conversation stimulated and calmed me.

Now late morning, a rare Vogue cigarette smoked,

I don’t want to go an inch from this notebook.

Yesterday at the Turf Tavern the coke

in the braziers outside made my croaky,

reminded me of the smoky Aga fumes in our childhood kitchen.

See, at a domestic level I can pitch in this poem,

an honoured guest this weekend in your home.

5 December 2004

Though I am not Kurdish,

I am wordish

and it took a Kurd

to get me back to Oxford.

You object to my simple rhyme dish

because with sharpened vowel it’s ‘tooth’ in Turkish.

Is this poem sounding a bit kitsch?

And didn’t we discuss all this

on a walk in Blenheim grounds:

and all this is grounds

for a close friendship,

wandering like ships in the evening in a slender mist,

in three languages subtle mists,

entering through a wicket gate

into a sloping field with trees,

walking not the two of us, but three,

walking though we would be late,

comparing the privilege of the castle owner in this village with my fate,

after the exercise, sound slept, I fish wishes in the exercise book,

realizing that it is never too late –

and I write this as you sleep in late.

5 December 2004

‘Beklemek’ means to wait in Turkish,

but for me it is to be at poems’ beck and call,

whether at the bus station or at this table:

it gives me the edge to fill

the minutes that may turn into hours –

at this juncture your acupuncturist’s powers

create exhaustion and pain in your back and shoulders.

In the bedroom I was in I saw your philosophy folders

and I inscribed for you a gift of Sylvia Plath.

After this weekend to leave I am loath:

it’s as though the dust of ages has been wiped away with a cloth.

I very much feel for you both.

Akhmatova once said in Tashkent she had found

asylum in the homeland,

and Fatma rightly calls herself a ‘refuge’.

Just before I came here I was writing death fugues

for my brother and myself: there’s a huge

difference now: this for me is like two weeks by the sea,

but more: we brought the us out of us, the me out of me.

5 December 2004

I was not at my most creative when up at Oxford:

I was still the apprentice poet not the Master.

And when thoughts got faster and faster and faster

I finished up the hill in the Warneford.

It took me years to get down from the high horse of psychosis,

to realise that the rose is, the rose is

the rose for its petals, thorns and fragrance:

the breakdown was so flagrant.

I’m in a friend’s home at the bottom of the same hill:

thirty five years have passed.

Now when my thinking goes too fast,

I talk and write but don’t forget my protective pills.

It’s the sort of balance I wanted then:

writing and translating and being a man.

5 December 2004

FOR CRISTINA VITI

I am apprehensive that I am in the wrong café –

perhaps we changed the rendezvous:

was it Starbucks by the British Library

or Ritazza here in Euston Station?

Your campaign on Campana – how is it going?

Are the bells tolling for us as well as you?

And are the dawn-worked words flowing

and are your translator’s obstacles many or few?

Today I will not alarm friends, myself or you:

the moments we’ll share will be few –

indeed they may not ever happen

if by mishap I’ve got the wrong place –

then your appearance will be sudden –

my fear put firmly into place.

7 December 2004

Oh pretty, pretty, pretty one, prithee print

your lips so pink onto the imprint

of this book, without a backward look

you’d lift my work that so long took

that was forsaken and forsook.

For your sake now, it’s you I recall:

‘You’re in love with life’, your words broke my fall.

Sitting writing on this train I’m standing tall,

neck not bowed, spirit not cowed,

yoking the oxen of words to our cause

and I look back from the avant garde

to guard your tender back with peaceful arms.

8 December 2004

Today I was not able to spend enough time

thinking of you, let alone with you.

It’s a sign of the times

that we work too hard us two.

I’ll be back too late to phone you,

but I see you, or rather your face in my mind,

between interpretings in those few

minutes – then it’s a glow of happiness I find.

How was your day at your chemist’s?

Do you remember walking in the falling mist?

We have to live not just exist –

the hand of friendship must not close into a fist

but remain open from the wrist

and lips are for words, not just to be kissed.

8 December 2004

FOR INGE

When I think of it, it grieves me much

that these last months we’ve fallen slightly out of touch.

Here I am on the London-bound train

but this time from Kings Langley -

we can’t meet at Waterloo or Victoria again:

a pub or café in the North would be more handy.

When we talk I’d like to tell you

of fantastic new friends and remarkable poems I’ve met

and channel my enthusiasm for them into you

and listen to your news out of your time of bereavement.

Like hearty men we wouldn’t slap each other on the back,

so much as slap ointment on wounds,

ours and this earth’s and since happiness has come back

to me and mirth never left me, it sounds

to me that we will have an epic conversation

beyond the daily round’s turgidversations:

it will be as usual ‘sensationelle’ to see you,

and, Inge, our poems will linger as we shoulder our daily work’s strain.

10 December 2004

NEW YEAR POEM

First I was taking my notebook on trains from Bromley South

then I ended the year on trains to Euston from Kings Langley.

At Victoria the Ritazza Café was always friendly and handy

for poem writing, meetings, talk and caffe latte by mouth.

The poems I wrote last year numbered in the hundreds.

Some of the things I played a part in and was proud of

included an article on anti-torture interpreting and metaphor

and helping with PEN to get to the West the Uzbek journalist Ruslan

                                                                                            Sharipov.

Daughter Juliet got married to Michael in May in the Church

                                                                              in Upminster,

where I’d shared jokes and fellowship with the Ministers.

A lean year for translations apart from Oktay Rifat with Ruth,

but a good year for me for reading English poets, Lowell, Hughes,

                                                            Hardy, Clare, Auden and Plath.

Books of Larissa Miller, early Mandelstam and Vitaly Korotko hung in

                                                                           the publishers’ balance

and diminished interpreting and no advances affected the bank balance.

But it was a fantastic year for a new friendship: you know who you are!

In December I even travelled back to Oxford which for me was going far.

Readings full strength not light at the old school Marlborough

and in Dorset with Julie and again with Helen, and at last I’ve found

                                                                               this bungalow burrow

in the grounds of a Big House in Kings Langley. I have time to borrow

rather than living on borrowed time. I’ll lend you some for 2005

                                                                                      if you’ll allow.

10 December 2004

FOR DUNCAN FORREST

Duncan, you were the gentlest of men,

on your lips often hovered a smile,

but when it came to tortured women and men

your nerves were of steel.

You treated them with courtesy,

whether from Somalia, Kurdistan or Turkey:

the two hemispheres of the globe

for seventeen years involved your temporal lobes.

As a surgeon you must have been a knight –

then your crusade became against torture.

Your onerous honourous duty was to write

the handbook of anti-torture.

Few here knew you were over eighty –

you carried so well your weight of years.

The only thing about you that was flighty

was that flight to death that awaits all of us here.

But you died in your home without a long illness,

a sudden heart attack and gone:

we’ll miss your gentlemanliness,

your smile of greeting, now you’re gone.

But your face shines on in my mind’s eye

and ‘you didn’t die’ is only partly a lie,

for you live on in the bodies and souls

of those you treated at MF,

in the way you strove to heal and make whole

those who suffered and suffer

from that cruellest inhumanity.

You struck many blows for humanity

and your words remain,

though your voice is lost,

we will interpret them again –

you laboured and did not count the cost.

11 December 2004 Richard McKane MF Interpreter

Does Oxford rhyme with Kurd

and distant with Kurdistan?

Can they be inferred with each other

like two close sisters?

For you are a pair, Melike and Fatma,

closer to Gandhi Mahatma

than the tenets of a fatwa.

And I honour your twin presences in the United Kingdom

and realise you bring into my life a fresh wind of freedom and gleedom.

Before one speaks a language one is bunged up and dumb:

you feed me words until they come.

We have three tongues and none of them forked:

to let the wine of conversation flow you have to pull the cork.

11 December 2004

Your voice on the telephone –

I almost can feel your call –

we talk in friendship’s tone.

My moods rise and fall

like the moonswept sea.

I’ll tide these days over

before new year when we

12 December 2004

MISSING THE TRAIN BUT NOT MISSING THE BOAT

I missed the train from introducing myself to stationmaster Bob,

talking, bobbing at me through the glass like a driver in his cab.

‘So, you’re Richard’ he says. ‘Am I that famous?’

perhaps it was the poem I wrote in the nearby café, for you for us.

So I pause: writing poems is my dynamic rest,

like our walk alone on Shotover Hill,

when the dogs appeared you took my arm

and I felt the tremor of your fear thrill.

May God, this Aronzon, protect you, oh protect you from all harm

and I’d settle for our friendship and its poetry above all the rest.

13 December 2004
I will be your protector

in the field of life,

will be your mine detector

in the minefield of life.

Is there anything wrong with this?

I will filter the poison gas

through my own lungs

and breathe out pure air into yours

and give you the kiss of life.

I will speak to you words you understand

and forget about our languages,

forget about our ages,

come in eternally like the sea on sand –

we will so be part of each other’s life.

I will not invade your life

but like waves aching to break

the ship of friendship has to moor

and I will surely reach your shore.

If you back aches I will make a firm corset of my arms,

if your blood pressure is low I will heighten it with my charms,

I will feature as your friend the palm reader reads your palm,

when you need me I will be a sea that’s calm.

Is there any harm in this?

And when we shed a few tears together

we add to that huge salty sea

that is shared by sensitive humanity.

In my cupboard I still have the black leather

jacket you lent me that night by the Thames of wind and rain –

though our bulks are so different, we are our bulwarks.

Is there anything wrong with this?

I may work like a bull in London and you in Oxford:

we don’t question what for –

This friendship of an Englishman and a Kurd in AD 2004.

You protect me, we protect each other

in this minefield of life.

                                                                13/14 December 2004

The other day I was asked to interpret into Turkish:

‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’.

‘Um’, I said in English, ‘Shey’, I translated, but I’m pretty good

                                                                                at metaphor.

These days my nights go on till three in the morning:

is my mind giving me a warning –

is my asylum in sleep refused?

But bright dawn dreams, not nightmares, diffuse

the rays of hard work for practitioners, Kurds, Russians and Turks

and most remarkable of all:

I’m reading the novel you gave me and writing poems AT HOME withal!

14 December 2004

What do they care about my white hair and orthopaedic boot –

they don’t stand out; but I’m more outstanding than them,

and I’ll stand out this half hour on the train, to boot.

In that whole time I did not hear a word aloud,

but pulp fiction, books, mags and ‘news’papers are allowed.

Sit glued in your igloos, my fellow commuters.

Hey, mister, on your laptop computer,

warming your testicles, calculate for me

the cost of silence for a whole non-community.

I stood it out and in my head wrote poetry

that even they could understand.

15 December 2004

FOR CORINNE: DYLAN THOMAS IS A LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER

I like it that you call me a beacon -

can I really show shelter to the seeking?

I’m not at sea but on the train to Swansea

and I’m not singing a swan song.

Dylan Thomas is a lighthouse keeper,

climbing his poems like fishermen’s prayers up the stairs,

lighting our lamps by our bedsides, and besides

I carry a pen-torch for him: he’s only sleeping,

no longer wrecked after drinking but reaping

the harvest of his poetising, counting, teasing

words from the fleece of his flock of lively Welsh sheep,

rob-robbing his own words, holding them up to his red breast,

and always the colour green, that fruitful word green

that refuses, does not traffic with going out:

go, go, go,

as he comes into us thriving, rolling on the emerald wave’s crest

to flood our lives with his great, best, green lamplight.

15 December 2004

Loneliness means something’s missing –

no, someone’s missing, missing someone.

Even kissing lips must part.

Science says there is never an emptiness in the heart,

but loneliness is like a hollow hole in it,

it’s important not to say ‘bin it’ –

there are reasons for all feelings:

but even when your parent hits the ceiling,

if your parent lashes out with hand or tongue

violence in the family is always wrong

and can lead even to torture if not bullying.

Loneliness means feeling’s missing,

so someone’s missing, missing someone.

15/16 December 2004

SONG

He was the life and soul of the Club party.

His jokes were crude but he thought hearty,

in fact they were downright crass and rude,

then he’d taunt me that I was a prude.

But better him than the acid type,

who never hesitates to have a swipe,

the demolition literary critic,

too powerful just to be pathetic.

But what of they who’d burn my books,

who hide behind their smiles and looks,

those small minded petty bureaucrats

who’ve become power-crazed autocrats.

I think I’d burn them all in Hell,

freeze off their genitals as well.

16 December 2004

Blue skies and sun: a wonderful day.

The London train is coming to take me away

to luncheon or rather lunch in Fulham Broadway –

you can be sure Julia will fill ‘em anyway.

I leave behind my computer with a translation in it

of an Uzbek journalist’s article – an achievement innit

for a Sunday morning. It’s difficult to pin it

down but I like the journalist in me

more than the novelist’s potentiality,

but God knows will I have to start my apprenticeship

again if I jump poetry’s ship.

A line is a line is a line if it’s a poem on a rose

or hip prose.

19 December 2004

TRANSLATOR’S KNACK

I’m losing my spontaneous translator’s knack –

for hours I stare at lines of Pasternak.

I’m concentrating on his Themes and Variations

but I can’t achieve the variation of concentration

that leads to putting English words on paper.

Yet I can still cut a mean caper

with these bursts of my own poems –

even achieving writing them at home.

Pasternak was my baptism, my confirmation

and the poems of Dr Zhivago are still my Bible.

It is only a matter of time before I am able

to add my translator’s ration

to feed the English readership –

though I never knew him, we have a close friendship.

20 December 2004

I take out my notebook at the end of a long day,

now sitting in the Euston Café.

I read you my recent poems’ oxygen at O2 Centre

and told you of my lurid human rights’ adventures.

We were just like good old friends,

inquisitive about our lives and poetries’ trends.

People don’t know that after one has been driven round the bend

the road may straighten out – it doesn’t end,

plenty of opportunity before the next hairpin rolls

up to grab the wheel from the driver and get in control.

21 December 2004

FOR MELIKE AND FATMA

New Year together in Oxford: what a treat!

You and your sister the writer from Roza @ English Newroz.

It’s sweeter than a bunch of new roses.

It’s designed to quell midwinter neuroses.

We’ve worked hard all round the year –

I’ve put myself in situations of fear:

but come on, we three are risk-takers,

not just sit-at-home Xmas cake bakers.

Yet I would bake a cake of patter-poetry,

rather than decorate a Christmas tree

and I’ll work out and buy you each a suitable gift,

something that would give receiver and giver a lift.

21 December 2004

The tough pin-striped lawyer was suave and svelte

but butter didn’t melt

in her mouth when the poet on the train

read her above the sleepers’ refrain

a few poems to relieve their twin stresses and strains.

So this is what poetry’s for:

an individual accolade!

You got out at Watford,

stranger turned listener –

we put the compartment in the shade.

I bear not grudges but brood,

like a mother turkey with her brood,

upon the capacity of man to be rude

and then accuse one of being a prude.

Good men should be just and true,

a handful of them is too few.

The business of life has to be seen through.

You have to be able to see through things.

They don’t clash, two rings

on a finger are banns apart.

Your heart can never be ringed,

unlike a bird even in flight.

22 December 2004

And I say unto you that language is not words but feeling,

is not, in other words, diagnosis but healing.

When your father hits the ceiling

it’s his impact you are feeling.

‘All this may be very revealing

but you’ve missed the point completely:

the question can be put more neatly.’

22 December 2004

FOR KATIE MELUA

How can you know that in my new home

in the process of moving I was left with only one CD

and it was yours? I put The Closest Thing to Crazy on repeat

as I went to sleep and now as I write this poem

on the commuter train both lyric and melody wash my brain

happily like the black wave of your hair

with its foam of ringlets.

A strong yet slender, tender voice

and a lyric on the edge:

what more could I want in midwinter,

in the time of the winter solstice.

22 December 2004

I bear not grudges but brood,

like a mother turkey with her brood,

upon the capacity of man to be rude

and then accuse me of being a prude.

Good men should be just and true,

a handful of them is too few.

The business of life has to be seen through.

You have to be able to see through things.

They don’t clash, two rings

on a finger are banns apart,

but the heart can never be ringed

unlike a bird even in flight.

22 December 2004

And I say unto you that language is not words but feeling,

is not, in other words, diagnosis but healing.

When your father hits the ceiling

it’s his impact you are feeling.

‘All this may be very revealing,

but you’ve missed the point completely:

the question can be put more neatly…’

22 December 2004

‘I’ll remind you always’,

the Kurd in black said

and it works both ways.

Black-haired and moustachioed:

I’d shared a few words occasionally with him

during this aftermath of the Iraqi War,

not cracked pistachio nuts together

in his native village in the past now dim.

He only knew I was a poet, for

he could see me buried in my notebook. Whether

we’ll meet again is in the lap of God or Allah

but we shared a last handclasp

and the human touch.

23 December 2004

End of work. Christmas and New Year coming.

Tiredness is overcoming me

yet I squeeze out the last drops

of poetry though I’m dropping on my feet.

No snow yet, nor even sleet –

it didn’t rain properly for weeks.

I’ve found new strengths, I am not weak,

and in this healthy exhaustion

I find the needed internal combustion

to heat your hearts and minds by my poems’ fire.

23 December 2004

I sit at our table on the Pub balcony,

without a drink more from tiredness than economy.

Here we’d sat and I missed two trains

and we listened to the strains

of each other’s voices

while you enumerated your thesis choices.

The young Turkish barman comes up

and I explain that I’m writing up

a storm. I say ‘Actually

I’m exhausted’, and he: ‘You never really

know when inspiration will strike.’

We say it in Turkish which seems more apposite –

I’m approaching the New Year on a positive

note and the missing won’t be long.

These days my poems are on song.

23 December 2004

When I write I get a new lease of life

and you’d said: ‘You are in love with life’

and ever since you said it

I want to prove it

as though it’s truth excited both of us.

Certainly it gave me license to make life,

then in your Christmas and New Year card

you wished me a year full of poems. What’s hard

then about my life? I have a reader:

I am a little less needier.

23 December 2004

DEVOTION: FOR JULIET AT CHRISTMAS

This Christmas, I realise, for the first time ever

I won’t have been to Church,

but I hope I don’t leave the Christ child in the lurch

and I love you too, daughter, more than ever.

For reasons of old age

my mother may not be going either

and I am writing this straight on the computer

in my new home rather than with pen on page.

Outside the Christmas dawn is breaking

and my father’s soul is aching

with the traditional mixture of emotions

of meeting and parting with the only child,

anticipation, and a parent’s devotion.

I’ll save and close this file

but I’ll give it to you: a small crystal display,

to keep as your present this holy Christmas day.

25 December 2004

Starting a new notebook

is like crooking a lost sheep –

shepherd and nymph rejoice,

better than catching a fish on a hook

and keeping it in the keepnet,

the sport we enjoyed as young boys,

better than catching a butterfly

with Nabokov’s little net

for pinned it will surely die,

better than laying down to sleep.

29 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

Out on the station bench

in the black drizzly night

when I’d missed my train

you offered me one small black woolly glove.

In French I swear you called me ‘tu’,

but in Turkish it was back to ‘siz’

and I am so happy to know you

in all languages, tenses and cases,

will even learn from you a smattering of Kurdish,

one day will cook you a simple dish

so we could dissolve any stereotypes

and be dosts to each other

and avoid traditional hype

and without bending our genders

to be not needy yet in friendship need each other,

to give a voice and hearing to each other,

to listen, then apart recall, remember.

30 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

‘Sweets for my sweet, honey for my honey’ –

blasts out and it really is not funny

and disinclines me to write immortal poetry,

but against this forebackground I’ll still give it a try.

I’m in the Euston Pub I feel is ours,

though our balcony is closed.

I got them wrong again, the train hours

and in the Pushkin lecture I dozed.

I haven’t retained a face so vividly

in my faithful memory

for a long while –

it’s not just your hair, it’s your smile

and above all the words you say –

and we’ll never lead each other astray.

30 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

Your smile is not like her smile:

I don’t superimpose my women’s features

and though we may not share our futures

I will muse on you for longer than a while.

I am not frightened that we share our souls –

I feel our trilingual conversations make a whole,

unsplittable in themselves.

I am not high and dry on the bookshelves,

but grounded in reality and surreality.

Why settle for quantity when there’s quality?

These days I ignore the plurality

and address you alone in actuality.

This sonnet round closing time first took me ten minutes

and I poured a full measure of my soul in it.

30 November 2004

Sitting at Highbury and Islington

waiting for a train to Finchley.

My tongue doesn’t come down like a ton

of bricks – I must build this poem delicately.

My life is coming out of a lull,

no bye byes for us, baby.

I cast a coin in a wishing well

and it splashed back a ‘definite maybe’.

1 December 2004

Though I went to bed after three

it wasn’t till after eleven that I woke:

this man sleeps soundly after the words we all spoke,

so our conversation stimulated and calmed me.

Now late morning, a rare Vogue cigarette smoked,

I don’t want to go an inch from this notebook.

Yesterday at the Turf Tavern the coke

in the braziers outside made my croaky,

reminded me of the smoky Aga fumes in our childhood kitchen.

See, at a domestic level I can pitch in this poem,

an honoured guest this weekend in your home.

5 December 2004

Though I am not Kurdish,

I am wordish

and it took a Kurd

to get me back to Oxford.

You object to my simple rhyme dish

because with sharpened vowel it’s ‘tooth’ in Turkish.

Is this poem sounding a bit kitsch?

And didn’t we discuss all this

on a walk in Blenheim grounds:

and all this is grounds

for a close friendship,

wandering like ships in the evening in a slender mist,

in three languages subtle mists,

entering through a wicket gate

into a sloping field with trees,

walking not the two of us, but three,

walking though we would be late,

comparing the privilege of the castle owner in this village with my fate,

after the exercise, sound slept, I fish wishes in the exercise book,

realizing that it is never too late –

and I write this as you sleep in late.

5 December 2004

‘Beklemek’ means to wait in Turkish,

but for me it is to be at poems’ beck and call,

whether at the bus station or at this table:

it gives me the edge to fill

the minutes that may turn into hours –

at this juncture your acupuncturist’s powers

create exhaustion and pain in your back and shoulders.

In the bedroom I was in I saw your philosophy folders

and I inscribed for you a gift of Sylvia Plath.

After this weekend to leave I am loathe:

it’s as though the dust of ages has been wiped away with a cloth.

I very much feel for you both.

Akhmatova once said in Tashkent she had found

asylum in the homeland,

and Fatma rightly calls herself a ‘refuge’.

Just before I came here I was writing death fugues

for my brother and myself: there’s a huge

difference now: this for me is like two weeks by the sea,

but more: we brought the us out of us, the me out of me.

5 December 2004

I was not at my most creative when up at Oxford:

I was still the apprentice poet not the Master.

And when thoughts got faster and faster and faster

I finished up the hill in the Warneford.

It took me years to get down from the high horse of psychosis,

to realise that the rose is, the rose is

the rose for its petals, thorns and fragrance:

the breakdown was so flagrant.

I’m in a friend’s home at the bottom of the same hill:

thirty five years have passed.

Now when my thinking goes too fast,

I talk and write but don’t forget my protective pills.

It’s the sort of balance I wanted then:

writing and translating and being a man.

5 December 2004

Oh pretty, pretty, pretty one, prithee print

your lips so pink onto the imprint

of this book, without a backward look

you’d lift my work that so long took

that was forsaken and forsook.

For your sake now, it’s you I recall:

‘You’re in love with life’, your words broke my fall.

Sitting writing on this train I’m standing tall,

neck not bowed, spirit not cowed,

yoking the oxen of words to our cause

and I look back from the avant garde

to guard your tender back with peaceful arms.

8 December 2004

Today I was not able to spend enough time

thinking of you, let alone with you.

It’s a sign of the times

that we work too hard us two.

I’ll be back too late to phone you,

but I see you, or rather your face in my mind,

between interpretings in those few

minutes – then it’s a glow of happiness I find.

How was your day at your chemist’s?

Do you remember walking in the falling mist?

We have to live not just exist –

the hand of friendship must not close into a fist

but remain open from the wrist

and lips are for words, not just to be kissed.

8 December 2004

Does Oxford rhyme with Kurd

and distant with Kurdistan?

Can they be inferred with each other

like two close sisters?

For you are a pair, Melike and Fatma,

closer to Gandhi Mahatma

than the tenets of a fatwa.

And I honour your twin presences in the United Kingdom

and realise you bring into my life a fresh wind of freedom and gleedom.

Before one speaks a language one is bunged up and dumb:

you feed me words until they come.

We have three tongues and none of them forked:

to let the wine of conversation flow you have to pull the cork.

11 December 2004

Your voice on the telephone –

I almost can feel your call –

we talk in friendship’s tone.

My moods rise and fall

like the moonswept sea.

I’ll tide these days over

before new year when we

12 December 2004

MISSING THE TRAIN BUT NOT MISSING THE BOAT

I missed the train from introducing myself to stationmaster Bob,

talking, bobbing at me through the glass like a driver in his cab.

‘So, you’re Richard’ he says. ‘Am I that famous?’

perhaps it was the poem I wrote in the nearby café, for you for us.

So I pause: writing poems is my dynamic rest,

like our walk alone on Shotover Hill,

when the dogs appeared you took my arm

and I felt the tremor of your fear thrill.

May God, this Aronzon, protect you, oh protect you from all harm

and I’d settle for our friendship and its poetry above all the rest.

13 December 2004
I will be your protector

in the field of life,

will be your mine detector

in the minefield of life.

Is there anything wrong with this?

I will filter the poison gas

through my own lungs

and breathe out pure air into yours

and give you the kiss of life.

I will speak to you words you understand

and forget about our languages,

forget about our ages,

come in eternally like the sea on sand –

we will so be part of each other’s life.

I will not invade your life

but like waves aching to break

the ship of friendship has to moor

and I will surely reach your shore.

If you back aches I will make a firm corset of my arms,

if your blood pressure is low I will heighten it with my charms,

I will feature as your friend the palm reader reads your palm,

when you need me I will be a sea that’s calm.

Is there any harm in this?

And when we shed a few tears together

we add to that huge salty sea

that is shared by sensitive humanity.

In my cupboard I still have the black leather

jacket you lent me that night by the Thames of wind and rain –

though our bulks are so different, we are our bulwarks.

Is there anything wrong with this?

I may work like a bulls I in London and you in Oxford:

we don’t question what for –

This friendship of an Englishman and a Kurd in AD 2004.

You protect me, we protect each other

in this minefield of life.

                                                                13/14 December 2004

The other day I was asked to interpret into Turkish:

‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’.

‘Um’, I said in English, ‘Shey’, I translated, but I’m pretty good

                                                                                at metaphor.

These days my nights go on till three in the morning:

is my mind giving me a warning –

is my asylum in sleep refused?

But bright dawn dreams, not nightmares, diffuse

the rays of hard work for practitioners, Kurds, Russians and Turks

and most remarkable f all:

I’m reading the novel you gave me and writing poems AT HOME withal!

14 December 2004

What do they care about my white hair and orthopaedic boot –

they don’t stand out; but I’m more outstanding than them,

and I’ll stand out this half hour on the train, to boot.

In that whole time I did not hear a word aloud,

but pulp fiction, books, mags and ‘news’papers are allowed.

Sit glued in your igloos, my fellow commuters.

Hey, mister, on your laptop computer,

warming your testicles, calculate for me

the cost of silence for a whole non-community.

I stood it out and in my head wrote poetry

that even they could understand.

15 December 2004

FOR MELIKE AND FATMA

New Year together in Oxford: what a treat!

You and your sister the writer from Roza @ English Newroz.

It’s sweeter than a bunch of new roses.

It’s designed to quell midwinter neuroses.

We’ve worked hard all round the year –

I’ve put myself in situations of fear:

but come on, we three are risk-takers,

not just sit-at-home Xmas cake bakers.

Yet I would bake a cake of patter-poetry,

rather than decorate a Christmas tree

and I’ll work out and buy you each a suitable gift,

something that would give receiver and giver a lift.

21 December 2004

I sit at our table on the Pub balcony,

without a drink more from tiredness than economy.

Here we’d sat and I missed two trains

and we listened to the strains

of each other’s voices

while you enumerated your thesis choices.

The young Turkish barman comes up

and I explain that I’m writing up

a storm. I say ‘Actually

I’m exhausted’, and he: ‘You never really

know when inspiration will strike.’

We say it in Turkish which seems more apposite –

I’m approaching the New Year on a positive

note and the missing won’t be long.

These days my poems are on song.

23 December 2004

When I write I get a new lease of life

and you’d said: ‘You are in love with life’

and ever since you said it

I want to prove it

as though it’s truth excited both of us.

Certainly it gave me license to make life,

then in your Christmas and New Year card

you wished me a year full of poems. What’s hard

then about my life? I have a reader:

I am a little less needier.

23 December 2004

NEW YEAR’S DINNER POEM

I love your thinking as you talk

on phone, in person, easily unravelling our narratives.

I too feel better sometimes in my non-native

tongues. Though in Russian I don’t know knife and fork

language, in Turkish I am familiar with this sofra table,

having lived on the South Coast and in Istanbul.

You already give good therapeutic counsel

and in another life I’d have made a good British Consul

like the poets Neruda and Seferis were Ambassadors.

To a certain extent we are commanders

of our fates which have crossed –

if our roads get lost

now we will be fast guides for each other in life

and together in your home we’ll eat New Year Dinner –

with spoon, fork and knife.

29 December 2004

PARTING OVER: LULLABY FOR MELIKE

One thirty. Are you sleeping, perhaps dreaming?

I got out of bed knowing this poem was missing

and could fill the hollow of the night

like a hand in a woolly back glove

and I hold on very tight

to our sohbet of the other night

and know our friendship embraces love.

I lit a big red candle from a friend:

it has a long way to burn before it ends.

We have a lifetime of time to spend,

more intense than that long parting

that came before we met

when I’d become set in my ways.

Now I’ll throw bad habits away,

live for our lives, not just day by day.

Like a very good poet

you inspire inspiration.

Let that be so, this night and for evermore.

30 December 2004

It seems daring to write you another poem tonight.

A beer, a pipe and the soft World Service

are lulling me into a kind of kind state of sleep.

Soon I’ll blow out the candle with an air kiss.

As the poet said: ‘I have promises to keep’,

and I’m really looking forward to the dawn’s light:

a whole day nearer to our meeting

and my heart is full and beating, beating

the ban I’d imposed on writing at home.

So, work your miracles, my love,

I know you know it’s you.

Settle into my life, my late night thoughts

like white healing snow from above.

Tonight a battle for peace was fought:

I couldn’t have won it without you.

30 December 2004

FOR NINA AND MORIS FARHI

I’m a night worker, I’m a sleepworker –

my brain works in my sleep

and itself only requires two hours,

the rest is to renew the body’s powers.

Can pain be shared, can fingers sense it?

A muscle can go into spasm when you tense it

but the outside hand may not feel the pain,

yet you feel intensely each other’s pain,

bouncing back like reflections pupil to pupil,

and as you both look death in the eye

you still care vigorously for people.

And as fate whittles down the ‘I’

you still stand upright to the letter

and dot it not with English dottiness –

your serious humour goes one better,

smattered with Turkishness and Jewishness.

After our three hours, the three of us,

I emerged not from the curtained confessional

but confirmed in my poet and interpreter’s profession:

we had duly laid taboo matters without undue fuss.

I read you my recent poems to Melike

and we talked serotoninally of the power of melotonin

and mellowed by raki and wine we found the tone in

the midwinter evening and we felt Melike rhymes with Richard.

You build my character, Nina and Musa:

I address the woman and man, therapist and novelist

and we are all three Health Service users:

one of us has to go first:

but the universal fact

is on earth we go and come back,

even visit heaven and hell.

Unlike Eliot I cannot guarantee

that ‘all manner of things will be well’.

As in life with death we struggle

I can see nothing better than that we

continue, continue, continue thus till our last breaths –

and there will be time again for taking of High Tea:

and we’ll gently draw the sting from ours and others’ deaths.

31 December 2004