We live in strange times with the advent of the Covid-19 Coronavirus. I have not yet managed to write poetry on this subject. I am still processing my sense of grief and loss, for my own personal situation, those around me, and the global community I am powerless to help.

I was working on a series of poems to highlight the situation of the homeless in my home city, the subject now seems bizarre. I hear that the government has forced councils to house these people now that a pandemic casts its shadow on us. Although this is laudable and necessary, why did we not have the funds to do this before? Why as a society did the problem of homelessness and especially rough sleeping become so intractable and ignorable?

There is such an irony in the last line of this poem, now the streets of my city are so quiet, but I still feel it important to post this. I am sure I will be writing poems about Coranvavirus very soon.

The Angel on The Corner.

She came from nothing,
mud that walked,
a miracle brewed in
the core of stars and wombs.

When did wonder end,
the childish dreams, the spark
of love and life that pushed
her to this point?

Haloed with her blanket,
unassuming and pathetic,
begging for crumbs
from the banquet of life.

When did privilege end
and divide along a lineage
of poverty, stark with hate,
casting her aside?

Who hurt this angel,
scorned and kicked and bruised?
I can’t answer, can’t ignore,
can’t refuse these alms.

And tears can’t refuse this miracle
that came to the rattle of a tin,
starved of life and love
as strangers pass and pass and pass.

I am unsure where it came from. At the age of 9 or 10 I saw a man in a wheelchair, dribbling saliva, and yet somehow managing to move along in his chair. I remember running to a wall and burying my face to cry. So many times this happened, and then I grew up and these feelings were, for a while, overwritten by my own pain. At some point I learned to name this yearning, aching feeling in my heart. Empathy, compassion, warmth, love.

Despite the temptation to grow a crust, to harden my heart (and yes at times it has been tempting!), I have tried not to lose that genuine, aching feeling that comes from somewhere deep within. You don’t have to go far to see suffering, perhaps especially in a city. So many people and so many connections – and so many disconnections. It breaks my heart to see the downtrodden and broken souls that parade the streets, whether those that shiver in the shadows, or those that wear their loss and suffering on their well coated sleeves.

This poem arose from such feelings, one Friday night, as I paused to speak with one of my “regulars”, a person I know by name who lives on the street, who is a human being, and yet often treated as if they are no more than garbage. This poem is for David.

Late Night, Piccadilly.

Squashed, crumpled trash.
Wet, smelly, filthy. Disgusting.
Human. Shivering in the gutter.
Loveless and hopeless and afraid.

Once there was a birthday cake,
a kind word, or perhaps just hate
hammered into a heart’s innocent beat.
Something about him pulls me in,

I hold his tattooed hand,
eyes intersecting across worlds
of love and lack, craving
and refusing to release tears, just yet.

And yet, his eyes, his hand,
the beauty in this broken man;
the tenderness and loss that
ripple through divided selves.

Then, feet stream to the beat of sirens;
the fortunate chow down on life,
their fancy clothes, expensive shoes,
obliterating and refusing love.

Billboards stream a neon dream –
lip gloss, luggage and laughter
filter through rain
in the flickering parade

of people revelling past the gutter –
human and inhuman shapes
mirrored in puddles and windows.
Loveless and hopeless and afraid.

Moon sniffs out the paw prints
that punctuate the path,
frozen-broken canine cuneiform,

somewhere south of the howls
that issue from the kennels
slinking into shadow.

Sun blinks and sways
through woody lung vessels,
translating ground and sky,

rustling up some new language,
enabling this crossing here
like a skyborn belisha.

Gloom obliterates it all
as moon slides into supremacy,
silvering the carbon clouds.

In the kennels, dogs howl,
caged and far from home –
Paw language pads at my thoughts.

I have not been writing a great deal, been very busy setting up a new project and lots of other things happening. However, out on a run the other day, I felt this clarity of being and thought which I have not felt for a while, and began to compose a poem in my head about the act of running and being, and how alive and in the moment I felt… I managed to capture it on my return from the run in the woods, and here is the result!

Mindful Spring Run

Twigs twist and crunch underfoot
in this push pull with gravity,
body borrowing oxygen, feet flying,
lungs gulping to the drum of heart
in this world of earth and trees
where sun drifts down to reflect
on a mind as still as winter water.

Legs, lungs, heart say stop, stop,
But mind nods to sun, earth, trees,
this motion, light – this urgent, precious life.

Not ready to cease this hardwon
effortlessness of being.

Not yet.

The months, to paraphrase Sylvia Plath, have glided by like ticker tape, and this poetry blog is not the only project of mine to have been neglected what with one thing and another.

I have been writing on and off, and have given the odd public reading, but nothing much – a lot of my time has been taken up with my terminally ill mother and my ailing business – it saw the economic crisis months before anyone else, and has been struggling, but I will find something to pay the mortgage, I’m sure!

This poem is about my father’s sudden death in hospital (in August 2007) – I wrote it this April, and choked up when I took it to a writing group and started reading it. However it is now over a year since it happened, and I feel it is an appropriate time to publish it on my blog.

The references to Last Post and sailing/travel images are references to my Dad’s 13 years in the British Royal Navy (where he became a Chief Petty Officer) and his love of travel. I did write another, simpler poem for his funeral, which I publish in the local paper on his birthday as a memorial – it ends “Sail on, you’re free, sail on.”

Am not sure of the literary merit of the poem, come to think of it, but feel I need to publish it to move on.

Last Post

We went into the room and saw memories cooling already.
Such slipped-awayness in his face, tube protruding
From a mouth newly language-less. How many breaths,
Kindnesses, harsh words, did those lips let go when
Blood still gave them colour?

A brother and sister stand with father
Like the ocean between them, standing on shores
That all his journeyings could not undistance. Like gulls they
Hover over his beached body, whalebone pale and colder with each
Tick of the callous clock.

Eye to eye for just this moment,
Last stir of embers in his flaming hair,
We stand as grief knits memory in our minds.
No last handshake but a kiss and then we leave his last post
And close the door on all he was.

A brother and sister drift away
And leave behind this man who gave
The gift of loving, suffering life.
Together and alone, tears and memories
Flow behind as we leave him in the wake
Of all the journeys she, and I, must take.

Haven’t posted for a while – have been busy with this thing called “life” – it is incredible how the months rush by. Anyway, I am not going to say much today. Am due to give a reading at Cafe Muse at the Manchester Museum this evening, was sorting through some poems for it, and found a recent(ish) one. It has Buddhist leanings, I guess, but is also a reflection of things that have been beginning and ending in my own life of late. The title I use for want of a better one – it may certainly change or evolve in future!

Beginnings and Endings

Beginnings can be kind: A first drop of rain,
Tip of the sun rising at morning,
First green shoot that signals spring.
Awakenings of all kinds, these beginnings,
Like a newborn’s joyful snatch at breath.

Endings can also be kind: A lull in the rain,
Sunset drawing day to a close,
The scatter-art of autumn leaves.
Sleepings of all kinds, these endings,
Like a man’s last troubled snatch at breath.

We make so much of our beginnings and endings,
Clinging to wakefulness, dreading our sleeping,
Blind to the beauty of cycles as
Rain gives way to sunshine, day to night,
Spring to autumn, our first breath to our last.

Our ending too can be kind, it is not so hard,
Without endings there can be no beginnings.

As timelines go, the last few months have been pretty shocking for me. In August my father died suddenly and unexpectedly, and a month later my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and has since been stuck in hospital, as well as having poor mobility to start with. No wonder then that I have neglected my poetry site, and indeed the only poem I have written was the one I read at my Dad’s funeral, which I may or may not post here in future, as it was largely a personal piece. There have been emotions aplenty, but little tranquility in which to allow those emotions to distill into thoughtful and considered language. It comes to us all, and we know it, but when sad events strike they still come nonetheless as a shock to the system.

In any case, I thought it was time to post a poem, and in some ways it is quite appropriate that I should “dig out” one I was toying with this spring, while out walking. I had originally envisaged it as part of a larger piece, and am not even sure if it is finished (like most of my poems!) – but I think it deserves a place here, being as it is a warning, I think, that now is all we can be sure of, and to savour the now, for living for the past or the future can be a dangerous habit when we never know where we might meet our end on the timeline…

Timeline

Shatter of stumps on the green, thwock of a golf ball,
A girl playful in her own solitary world, a coated horse,
Fields thick with insects, fading doppler of a plane, all
Stir my awareness of this moment in the timeline.

It is our moment, from breath to breath and smile to smile
And kiss to kiss, drinking deep of melting time
As seconds pass and those unaware
Are marked by knowing strangers.

Footsteps carry my senses through conundrums
Of thought as I observe each moment in the timeline
We share, each humming conversation and explosion
And the drone of flies, of cars, of fleeting sights

As swans dip and geese parade. What human
Thoughts are left in the dark as sleep comes to all
Except for the still watcher counting the precious
Moments, knowing that now, this moment

Is the only forever we can know.

Regular readers of the Poetry of Rob Radcliffe will be aware of my fondness for Wales – and recently I have been exploring again, this time managing to scale Snowdon (well, at least on the train as far as Clogwyn!), find Dolbadarn Castle in Llanberis, and also spend two days in Betws-y-Coed in North Wales. The second day was a damp squib where I ended up trying to find Swallow Falls with a bag full of expensive camera equipment, and instead ended up walking through a constant waterfall of rain! However the Thursday spent there was a lovely day, and I managed a great walk into the middle of nowhere with plenty of sheep! Upon my return to the village, it was an idyllic midsummer’s evening with birdsong, and that was where I discovered the Pont-y-Pair, or bridge of the cauldron, and the foaming, rushing water of the river Llugwy that passes beneath it. As I walked across the bridge – well, this poem gives a snapshot of the experience, which as well as being about “romantic” love, also encompasses the Buddhist ideas of mudita (sympathetic joy, rejoicing in the happiness of others) and metta (goodwill to others).

Couple in Betws-y-Coed

Where Llugwy churns under Pont-y-Pair
And the river’s cauldron bubbles through this
Prayer house in the woods, as I crossed the bridge
A kissing couple stopped me in my tracks
And asked if I would photograph the two of them.
So I framed their love in the viewfinder
And froze a moment of them cuddled on the stone,
Waterfall boiling like laughter and love behind them.
I walked on, and turned to see them staring
Eye to eye with hands held tight.
Where Llugwy churns under Pont-y-Pair
We waved – I shared their joy – I wish them well.

I have some poems up my sleeve, for now here is one about finding one lonely person amid a crowd of strangers – and how simply listening to them, acknowledging them, made them open up with their pain, their issues – and how a sense of connectedness arose despite wildy differing circumstances from my own.

The Strangers

The strangers passed her one by one
as she asked for directions
and I stopped to stare at my own tears
in her booze bleared eyes as she explained:
“just the one drink after work,
Just this one last drink”.

In a minute her lifestory unfolded –
married, with a son, a full time job
and the alcohol, the alcohol,
the hurt, the suffering it caused her
“But it hits the spot” she said,
blinking my strangerness away.

She left for her one last drink,
went to undo the demons for an hour
as i walked into sunshine and strangers,
eyes sparkling with suffering,
and no distance left between our breath
or our beating hearts, no distance at all.

Well, I’ve been busy lately bustling about, doing lots of new things, and the writing seems to have taken a backseat. Either that or the words won’t come in the right place at the right time, and even then rarely in the right order. Still, I’m experiencing lots of stuff so I suppose those words are gestating and will come when they’re good and ready.

I did write this last month, it’s based on my curiosity about life elsewhere in the universe (and there must be, seems like an awful waste of space otherwise 🙂 ) I’m also intrigued by the fact that we all came from this single point in space and time, so cannot really be all that separate – and even the other side of the universe was once right here. We often think of ourselves as separate from the rest of space time, but I feel we’re actually an integral part of it as the system seeks to achieve higher and higher levels of consciousness. There are particles which share properties, and even if they were a million light years apart, one particle will affect the other instantly, defying the laws of physics. Who knows, maybe one day that mechanism will be used to send a message in a bottle. I hope we hear back – and soon 🙂 Anyway, enough of scientific wafflings 🙂 I’m not even sure if this poem is finished – ah well, one day I can revise it…

Cosmic love poem

These words are formed of stardust,
Sift the atoms you will find the signature
Of a shattered star, some cobweb in the sky
We sprang from, faint yet still revolving.

Night’s planetarium opens its illusion show,
Planes and satellites glide through networks
Of stars, galaxies dwarfed by distance
Nestle on the ends of branches.

Why were we cast so far from anything
That a message in a bottle at the speed of light
Would never reach its cosmic shore
In the lifetime of the sender’s species?

The sky is silent while machines click and beep
To track the static and the footprints
Of our making that our eyes can’t see
As we trace the fragments of the cosmos.

So many stars, there must be others looking
Back, maybe there are others who know
Of love or who have come to this conclusion:
Love is the universe as it seeks to know itself.

Things have been, and continue to be busy lately and it’s been a fallow time for my writing, but I have written some, and spring is often a productive time for me. I will post this brief poem for now, it is quite self-explanatory and rather simple, kind of an epilogue of Zen Love Poem…

Metaphor

The fire burns and I paint snowflakes
Into the picture for her, white flames
In her twists of hair, smouldering in auburn.
Something wrong with the canvas or brush
Or my artistry leaves her eyes empty
And her skin stroked cold. I finish
With something Rubenesque, yet Dali-ish,
Staring at a palimpsest of all she never was,
And all the things we might have been.