Friday 28 August 2009



-->Harvest time was a golden time in my memory, hayfields and harvest – look at the English countryside and it is littered with the harvest home, bales and stacks. Unfortunately, as I was an asthmatic child, I was unable to assist much with the cutting and stacking of the hay , prior to the arrival of the baler. However , I came to assist with the tea and billy-can and the ubiqitious ‘soda farls’ to feed the workers (my two Uncles, brothers and sister). I came to assist with the packing and stacking of the bales into the barn.

And We Were Kings

We laid our back against the stack
And wiped the sweat and hayseeds from our brow
Caps cocked to shield the sun
thirst slain in the billy-can
We squinted at swallows in their drunken dives
With no rhyme nor reason nor route to roost
Our limbs tired and toiled those fields
till sunset, where stacks , some small
gave birth to bigger ones
The day the baler came with reverence we accepted
Its offspring into our blistered hands
And nursed that harvest home
With many a shout ‘Watch out’
as one bale tumbled from the trailer
into the pressure cooker barn
And we built castles that Summer eve'
Tight to the tin-high heaven roof
Castles for cattle whose winter weary days
Were bunged up in dunged-up, silent byres
And they would chew the cud
And chew the cud and sip the Summer dew
when Winter froze the ground
and we were boys in the Spring of our lives

Thursday 27 August 2009

Feedback

Thank you Patricia for your feedback

" interesting poems. I cannot get away with any certainty from rhyme schemes partricularly the terza rima. Your poetry has the same immediacy as impressionist painting and reminds me of my childhood on a farm in Essex"

Friday 7 August 2009

When you are old

William Butler Yeats - I read my father "Lake Isle of Innisfree " just before he died. At the Flackwell Heath Writing Club, this week, I was asked to read this.


When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.