Copenhagen May 2026 I tell you what is poetry!This is poetry.It is a warm late spring,a bar in Copenhagen.Eyes arrested by shining herring,nose sharpened by Akavit’s vapours,a knife spreads white lard and caperssavoured with crispy shards of apple-sweetened onion spread on black, black bread.All life’s skewerskitchen cured.
Category: Poems (Page 1 of 3)
May 2026 Some lives would never land in Christiania –yours might be one.But a thin sliver of a pathfrom rebellious youth and contrary convictions,walked in some other footwear,might have led me here.However, my leather shoes and Paul Smith shirtswalked in a different way.Increments of work and social pleasurescreated their own compelling movement,and the joys of […]
We are Mary Oliver’s snow geese when you see us, see us – it may be enough for any life We are Seamus Heaney’s father’s spade digging gravelly ground down and down to healing wells We are Dylan Thomas’s young and easy days under simple stars and the moon always rising And, of course, we […]
For Helen and Harry He stared into the tank as fish swam towards him in an alchemy of welcome. Bubbles rose past a plastic diver, and a mermaid’s chair – until silently bursting into air. His daughter – mother of his grandchildren – played half-remembered fragments, fingers finding familiar paths along the keyboard of an […]
I bought you tulips in Cambridge market and, for no good reason, thought to mark it with a smile to all who passed me by as I walked from Market Hill to home. I had welcoming eyes down Trinity Street and smiles for all on Magdelene Bridge, each one with a happy echo, and so, […]
True Stories, NCI Club, January 2026 Once upon a time On hard plastic chairs with all the comfort of the rack I crossed my legs to ease my painful back and waited…. We watched a slender, older woman watching us. She let our attention settle, and began her tale. She had crawled through potholes, dragging […]
For almost a millennium, when all their deeds that would be done were done, the island brought its people here to bury them. Now, fifty years since mourners sang their final sorrows, the chapel’s wooden roof has fallen in on generations of loss. In the graveyard, bones bed shallowly on carboniferous rocks and, above, flat […]
They appeared by our kitchen window, some sombrely on foot, others in more cars, we thought, than were on the island. At the front, a green van had been repurposed as an adequate hearse. At the rear, hurried two mopeds and a bike. Give or take, the whole island was there. With my hands in […]
How do you speak to me?
With what occult science and hidden roses
do you address the crystals in my heart?
On Brighton’s pebble beach, patrolled by seagulls,
two women sat in white linen.