Crow in Westminster Abbey: a Ted Hughes memorial

Down the river

On Tower Green,

Sleek ravens strut:

Their wings are clipped.



Crow is free to soar

His space, broad and high.

Through plumes of incense,

Sooty candle smoke.

Far below, tourists

Trample Chaucer's grave.



Crow feels the loss:

The north wind's absence

The missing green-brown

Palette of the moors,

But takes heart that

Something survives.

Gardening

Gardening (detail)  Martin Locock acrylic on board C 2010

She stoops to place fresh

Flowers on the gravel square

And removes browned blooms

Her work done, she stands

Her eyes cloud as she reads the

Simple inscription

Soon she'll rejoin him

She weaves away through thickets

Of marble headstones

7/4/2010

The Skeleton Coast

Skeleton Coast by Martin Locock acrylic on board (C) 2010

Breakers pound the beach
Editing the sea's graffiti
Rewriting lines in the sand

Bald dunes, too arid to retain
A hairline of grass
Inch towards  the interior

The wind howls around
Bleached whale bones


I review my options
East and west - impassable
North and south -prospects unpromising
Offering no hint of change

Yet staying would be worse -
I'd face the same choice tomorrow
But would be tireder, weaker

I stand up, start to to walk,
My hollow footprints smoothed
By the shore's impatient hand


7/5/10

Indentured

Long years at this bench
Have I worked, under
The quick and critical eye
Of my master

Saint's days brought
No rest to me
While other 'prentice-lads
Whooped and frolicked
In the streets
I kept to my task

Each new skill was practised,
Honed, on off-cuts, waste,
Until I was deemed worthy
Of the prime material

My back is bent,
Shoulders drooped, eyes sore
From so much hunched labour

The grizzled master grows old;
His guild and trade will soon be mine;
I will be master in his place.


23/2/2010

The Mind, Body, Spirit section

From brain chemistry
On through fitness and fatness
All the way to God


30/3/10

Punk proverb

John Cooper Clarke said
That a friend in need
Was a friend in debt


30 March 2010

The loner

He'd rather drink than
Talk so spends his nights at the
Anti-social club

Spilt milk

We are where we are:
However we arrived here,
We are where we are

Landscape and language in the Arctic

They say Eskimos
Have two hundred words for snow*
And one word for love

Imagine a world
With one word for snow and two
Hundred words for love


*It isn't true that they have 200 words for snow.

Maturity

The old chef says that
It is the stalest bread that
Makes the best breadcrumbs

Marathon men

The slap of trainers on tarmac
Echoes down the still-dark street

Youths are happily a-bed,
Snugly dreaming - it's the
Middle-aged who feel the need
To run, their faces red,
Mouth open, gasping, as they try
To beat their personal best,
To improve, transcend

They never can outpace
The thing from which they run:
It's perched on their shoulder
A shade, whispering doom.

Birthday poem (for Gwenllian)

In the blank darkness
Of the icy winter world
Gleams a new pale bud

Airport

Welcome to Heathrow
The world's biggest bus station
Queue here for tickets

Arrivals emerge
Tired, battered, blinking: they can't
Match their meeters' joy

Knots of travellers
Confer about the delays,
faces lined in doubt

One by one the planes
Drop down from the holding loop
Buzzing the M4

The remote chance of
Terrible violence seems to
Worry people more

Than the certainty
Of boredom, chaos, expense:
The glamour of flight

The importance of clear thinking

What happens in vagueness
Stays in vagueness

Intoxicated

Translation of Meddwi by Meurig Walters

I supped from the cup of your lips
I drank in the wine of your cheek
No moment was as sweet
As this lip-to-lip

My soul soared to the horizon
Sated by the charm of our love
At golden dusk
I was drunk from a girl's lips

Give to no other that cup
Offer no taste of that wine
I'll return in the night
With a burning kiss