The sword of Damocles
hangs above your head
supported by a fragile thread.
Scissor-tailed birds around you fly
and Fate’s sharp knife is standing by
to sever your thread and watch you die.
If you’re up to your shoulders in tragedies
whatever you do, don’t drop to your knees,
for if you do you’ll surely drown
and that sword will bring you down.
If the sword falls you mustn’t grieve:
for we’re all bound by the webs we weave.
Our lives are shaped by what we believe,
and also by what we build and leave.
Spotify: Remember to scroll down to the appropriate audio episode.
A Farewell to Charms
Early tomorrow, my love, you’ll fly away. Today, you’ll walk around the Beaver Pond where red and yellow leaves abound. A thin grey
webbing garlands one dead tree. I’m not too fond of tent worms. I hate them when they swing from low branches. Give me a fresh green frond
caught by the morning sun in early spring or else bright autumn leaves so soon to fall. I love American Goldfinches when they sing
that last departing song. I love most of all those occasional visitors: do you recall that bright blue Indigo Bunting with his “I’m-a-lost-bird” call?
The hunting hawks give everyone a fright. They perch on top of a garden tree then step off into space to claw-first alight
on some poor songbird trilling away, quite free from fear, his unfinished symphony of song. It’s getting late, my love. You walk towards me out of the woods. I’ll end this poem with a plea: don’t forget me … and don’t stay away too long.
Spotify: Remember to scroll down to the appropriate audio episode.
Fear of the Fence
Our conversation this morning: a sun-dried Roman aqueduct no longer capable of carrying water.
I envision brown sacking winter-lagged around leaking pipes, and me a little Dutch boy stemming the damage, a finger in life’s dyke.
Each sentence is a wasted movement of lips, tongue, teeth. Our words are motionless kites, earthbound, too heavy to rise.
Dead soldiers, gone over the top, my thoughts hang like washing pegged out on the Siegfried Line on a windless day in WWI.
I have grown afraid of this barbed-wire fence growing daily between us.
Comment: The penultimate verse is from a WWI song that my grandfather taught me in the kitchen, back home in Wales, when I was a child. “I’m going to hang out my washing on the Siegfried Line. Have you any dirty washing, mother dear.” The words of such songs have stayed with me and recur in my poems from time to time.
Spotify: Remember to scroll down to the appropriate audio episode.
The Beaver Pond Last October
Leaves walked tip-toe footprints, delicate, on dark water. Wrinkled brown tongues lapped towards dry land. Everywhere low light fell bright on stripped white branches.
Open were the pond’s shiny spaces, dry and withered were its reeds. Clouds floated in the tarn’s spotted mirror. Islets of seeded grass marked spots where underwater logs rotted back to life.
We gazed on emptiness, empty nests, and a burnt, tanned earth that waited for what strange second coming? The wind’s chill arm wrapped us in the silent thought of oncoming winter.
He walks past the Jesuit Church where the shoe-shine boys store polish, brushes, and chairs overnight. He walks past the wrought-iron bench where the gay guys sit, caressing, asking the unsuspecting to join them.
Nobody asks Charles for a match, for a drink, for charity, for a walk down the alley to a cheap hotel.
The witch doctor is the one who stops the hands on all the clocks at midnight. He’s the one who leaves this place, and returns to this place, all places being one. The witch doctor sees little things that other men don’t see. He reaches out and flicks a fly from Charles’s nose. “I too have lost my way,” it sighs.
Charles thinks he knows who he is, but sometimes he wonders when he shaves, rasping the razor across his chin’s dry husks. The witch doctor, his lookalike, his twin, stares back at him from the bathroom mirror. Three witches dance on the waning soap dish. One spins the yarn, one measures the cloth, one wields the knife, that will one day sever the thread of all poor creatures born to die.
Spotify: Remember to scroll down to the appropriate audio episode.
Northern Lights
Old man looks out of his window. Falling leaves twist like they did in his childhood. They spread bronzed carpets across the lawn. His granddaughter stands by the flowerbed, squeezing fall’s last blossoms, turning them into perfume.
Dandelions clutter Old Man’s lawn. Last summer he lost the strength and will to stoop down and root them out. In dreams, Old Man’s spirit tries to escape and wander through celestial pastures. For a moment, stars shine brighter as a new spark adorns the sky.
Walking through the Aurora Borealis, he understands the way to weave rainbows from ribbons of color and floating light. Old Man knows he must share this knowledge. One day he will share his secret with this child.
Spotify: Remember to scroll down to the appropriate audio episode.
Man from Merthyr
Memory loss punched holes in your head and let in the dark, instead of the light. Constellations faded from your sight, erased by the arch-angel’s coal-dust wing.
“I’m shrinking,” you said, the last time I saw you, you, who had been taller, were now smaller than me.
Tonight, when the harvest moon shines bright and drowns the stars in its sea of light, I will sit by my window and watch for your soul as it rockets its way to eternity.
My eyes will be dry. I do not want pink runnels running down this coal-miner’s unwashed face. I’ll sing you this lullaby, to help you sleep.
“When the coal comes from the Rhondda down the Merthyr-Taff Vale line, when the coal comes from the Rhondda I’ll be there,” with you, shoulder to shoulder. Farewell, my friend, sleep safe, sleep deep.
Spotify: Remember to scroll down to the appropriate audio episode.
Time A Theory of the Absurd
I wonder what I’m doing here, so far from home, sitting at the bar, with my beer before me, my face distorted in half a dozen fairground mirrors, surrounded by people half my age, or less, all smoking, cursing, using foreign forms of meta-language, gestures I no longer recall: the single finger on the nose, two fingers on the forehead, the back of the hand rammed against the chin with a sort of snort of disapproval. It’s way beyond my bedtime, yet I am held here, captured, body and soul, by foreign rhythms, unreal expectations of a daily ritual that runs on unbroken cycles of time: morning brandy, pre-lunch wine and tapas, home for the mid-day meal, a brief siesta, back to the café for a post-prandial raising of spirits, more blanco, then back to work at four and struggle on until seven or eight when the bar routine begins again with pre-supper tapas and tinto. Time, comprehended in this new life-cycle, lacks meaning. Time, in a cycle I have long abandoned, is absurd as well.
