This is a selection of my shorter poems. As I’ve been writing them for a bit over forty years I have selected forty poems. They go very roughly in chronological order from now, 2025, back to when I was 18. I haven’t selected any from my book SONNETS OF VARIOUS SIZES (Shearsman 2016,) or SONNETS FOR ROUGHLY NOW, (Mysterium 2022.) Nor any from my unpublished collection THE APPROPRIATION OF BIRDSONG, which I’ll put separately on this website.  My longer poems include WEYLAND (Oberon Books,) HELEN (Isinglass,) EGIL (performed but not published,) THREE FOLKTALES (Letterpress.)

SPRING-WINTER

She walks inspecting the high oaks

For readiness. They touch her face

That is still cold, so she knows

She is not yet, by their hard buds.

She runs her fingers like a seamstress

Along the verges, feeling for

The celandines that have not woken.

And they mistake her urgency

For the right moment, but what burns

Is just the frost of her impatience.

She was just hoping for herself

Jubilant in their yellow faces.

She runs and peers into the river,

That only steams and stains its mirror.

RHYME

Said the brown deer,

Flight is not fear.

And the red fox,

My least look unlocks.

As the grey owl

Let float her vowel

Where the moon’s hare

Spilled everywhere

And the swift cat

Slipped through her slat

Into the carnival,

Hunter of shriek and shrew.

And I pursue them too,

Rhyme is an animal.

RAIN

The sky is trying to create a rose,

That needs a certain weight of rain,

But no one in the clouds knows

How much, and so it rains and rains

And still no flower grows,

And the world is washing away,

The hoofprints brim, the puddles join,

The river cannot spend its fortune

Of molten brass, old women slide,

The leaves have fallen but the falling

Has not stopped there, the boughs are bowing,

And we in awe at windows stare

And try to fly a soggy paper prayer,

Or stare into the fire,

Which is the rose the sky imagines

It can create by means of raining.

SO LOVE GROWS

As sip by sip the money goes

And the slight oak slow grows,

As someone goes abroad for years

And comes back able to tame bears,

As your abandoned window flowers

Have stored your absent days and hours,

So love grows its miraculous powers,

And builds a city out of breezes,

Not to be smashed by fighter planes,

That take their aim at love, slow target,

But murder only what goes quickly.

TREE HUNT.

I will creep up on the apple tree

And lie in wait for the cherry,

Set traps for the great oak

And stalk the holly.

They are not always where they are,

Sometimes timber only,

Even in bud, in leaf, in flower,

Wooden gestures merely.

Where they go I don’t know,

Along the cloud roads maybe,

Shivering in a dream shower

Or by the moon’s lakes lonely.

But when they fall into themselves,

Come back to earth and Thursday,

Nearby their bark lairs

I will be ready.

GOOD MORNING.

Now the sun rises on my problem,

For which the moon was no solution.

The birds are talking across the gardens,

Wren to blackbird shrieks its perplexity,

The gull shrugs

And now the stars are blearily

Blinking out, and soon the streetlights

Will all give up at once. I thank you all

For your attention to my question,

Thank you, heron, for your concentration,

Fixed by the starry river; light

Now blasts its face, this scattering morning,

That in a beating of great wings

Breaks up the night with no decision.

IN THE AULDCHLAPPIE

In the Auldchlappie the landlord said,

I would accept them if they would just integrate –

And a red-haired man, having taken exception,

Kicked my friend down in the car-park,

Striking a ball that won’t roll, and there’s no goal,

Only the blind head-lights and the dead engines.

And I’m fast asleep halfway home bedded down

By the shine and the to-fro silence of the road,

A line struck through thick words, and I wake up

And set off home in the wrong direction.

Tramp and tramp through the ache and the lack of the land,

Back to the bright and empty car-park.

Oh brothers and sisters from over the sea,

Come to my arms and dance with me!

SHAVING

The stars are shaved to rough stubble by the street-lights,

The thick bush beard of fire cut right back,

That keeps on pushing from its roots in the deep black.

Always these pin-points push out on the chin of the night,

That dreams of sporting a thick beard of bristling lights.

And the moon, too, thin blade then round harrow-share, sweeps

All but the brightest points back into the deep black.

Brightness pushes the bright points back,

Black pushes them back out onto the chin of the night.

All the deep urge of the dark, the black origin,

Is to push this blazing fire-beard out onto the chin,

All the sharp wish of the street-lights, the moon and the dawn,

Is to keep the face clean - maybe cloud-woolly, but plain.

Oh black keep pushing out your fire-beard again and again.

FIFTY-FOUR.

The shock and brutal quickness of love’s transitions

Falls like a hail of hatred, fire-blood-steel,

And those who are looking for God may find it

Crushed under tons of love’s concrete. (As may those who are not.)

Because just to keep on the same blithe smiling

Is loveless, indifferent, fake, wax, faithless,

And so there have got to be wars and crammed hospital corridors,

Self-belief has got to plough into the protesters,

Love’s latest fighter jet lift straight up

And at the height faint and flop right into the watchers,

The lead-car flip out and spin through the barriers.

Yes but this slow down-glide through unclutchable days,

Wheezing in the weakening air, cloud then clear, cloud then clear,

Falling towards what? – is this love or hate or what is it?

DOLPHINS IN THE MINCH

The shifting Minch strains its mind between mountains,

Shapes of the thoughts it struggles to form, to firm,

Being such a bendy mirror, maze and mess of blurred reflections -

Black floating rocks and maybe drifting white winged houses -

Which it delays from dissolving for as long as possible.

The great green brain is groping, grip-less, for something.

Too much black night below, much too bright day above,

Such a Cold-War-confrontation of a contradiction,

Resolved at so endlessly a never-to-be-reached horizon.

A shadow-blue squall, a quick scattering of inklings,

Vanishes its needle-points into the green repetition.

Oh the aching brain of the hung-over water – a rainbow

Fades like a dream of a dream of a dream. And then -

Suddenly a flash of clear thought! Look! Another one!

AUGUST

Exhausted August. Next door, a sunflower

Has fused together so many thousand sunbeams

Into a tower-imitation of the sun,

It has succeeded in making light heavy

And now, tied to a bamboo stake, hangs its clown crown.

As if the sun, denied night, just wore itself out,

Grew from lightning roots a green blade of light

To the zenith then died and hung there blackening,

Stars crawling over its face, an everlasting ending.

Instead of, as it does, just leaping to the height,

Without rope or wire or safety net

Or balancing-pole, or drum-beat, but not without audience,

Leaping lower with the year, but still leaping,

Without the need of a seed or bees or bonfires.

THIS MORNING

An early bird distracted me.

I had no deaf ear to turn. She led me

Out of my head first east then west then,

Tracing an illumination

Or flower arrangement of comet trails fading,

Down into Heaven and Hades and Brixton,

Slow through cotton swamps, climbing a pine

Into the International Space Station,

Where they too had all downed tools to listen.

And on. Distraction was my destination,

As through a blue eye scatter-gun photons

Bend into pictures of scattering. Then she was gone

And I turned to my work, to find she had taken

All of my notes and the stars and the whole summer

HYMN (from the Danish)

Now the sun rises on the eastern side,

Opens the child-king’s golden tomb world-wide –

Now be a steeple bell, my soul, high-swinging!
Lift up your house of dust,

Scatter bright thanks and trust,

Through the sky ringing!

Mercy is measureless – count the grains of sand

And the sea’s fingers piano-ing the land,

But mercy never. At each day’s rose-budding

It overflows the bowl

Of my star-crowded soul

With its down-flooding!

Last night the angels in a fire of frost

Devoured my house. Now nothing can be lost,

And in the morning I have woken, scrambled,

Half-way along the path

That leads away from death

And my soul’s shambles.

Let the good land lift up her fruit and wheat,

Let Truth stride on till she and Justice meet –

Give me my share, as much as any other.

Till at the end, death-sick,

I drop my walking stick

And join the weather.

FULL MOON, MONDAY OF HOLY WEEK.

Very dim and small,

The moon too big and too bright,

An owl experiments its call,

As in an empty lecture hall

A child might.

And if it was a stone dropped in a lake

The screech would make

Increasing circles, but this moon

Swallows it soon.

And all the little cries of time and space

Sink without trace

Into its hush, and out-pour

This bright inaudible roar.

Daisies may close

But this moon grows

Star-high invisible plants.

Stillness conducts their dance.

Up on the roof,

Soundless, its silver hoof

Pounds on the slates.

Unfolding their fates

With thick dream-fingers, folk

Open their mouths to joke,

But this moon swallows it all,

Silver and gold beach ball

Bursting but still unbroken

By the half-spoken

That it keeps on blissfully drinking,

Bright babe unblinking,

And that keeps on shining out

In this odd corpse-mouth shout

That makes you stir and stir

Searching for him or her,

Face to the blank and then

Face to the blank again,

Shuffling your pack

Of selves – King, Queen, Jack,

Till at last a fat old priest

Turns in his sleep to the east

Which breaks

And the world wakes.

HERE COMES THE PREACHER

Here comes the preacher

In his black hat.

He says there’s no death –

How we hate him for that!

We know it’s not true

Cos we’re all going blind –

But he says that’s the death

Of death, we’ll find.

He takes the small baby

And wets its head –

But the dead he buries,

They do look dead.

Here comes the preacher

In his black hat.

He says there’s no death –

How we hate him for that!

FOR SYLVIE (Chrisening Poem.)

Why did you not decide to be

A blackbird in an apple tree,

Blowing the whistle of your head

As the green summer turns to red?

Or a fish flashing in a stream

Like a piece fallen from the moon

To dazzle in a different dream,

Bright riser in the afternoon?

Or a cat sleeping in the light,

Between the shadows where they fall,

Sweet dreaming till the break of night

Wakes you to walk along a wall?

Or a half-collie in a field,

Flustering through a maze of traces,

Till the hare leaping unconcealed

Suddenly takes you to the races?

Or any of a million creatures

With all their fascinating features?

Because as you, imagining

All of them, you are everything?

DAFFODILS.

Daffodils, here you are again.
What have you brought us from the ground?
Make a loud noise, a bright brass sound,
That we can clearly understand.

Among the open mouths I stand,

A deaf man staring at a band

Of trumpets heralding a king,

Making all eardrums ring but mine.

These are the only sounds they bring

Out of the numbness of the ground:
The absent music of the moon
And the bright silence of the sun.

A WOMAN DREAMS SHE IS A WHALE.

You shatter through the rooftop into moonlight,

Shoulder through water rafters into midnight -

Out of the darkness where the hours don't pass,

Into the light-years trapped in shattering glass,

The undeparting moments of the ocean.
You are a destination set in motion.

And though you're heavier than a thousand cows,

In this vast wood that never rests its boughs,

You are a bird. And in the streaming ages

Drained from the land as if from rain-blurred pages,
You are a moment. So you sing and fly,
Weightless in the reflection of the sky.

THORN

Although our sign has sometimes been

One thorn tree with two shadows, woven

Into a fierce embrace of scratches –

A witch interpreting the wind

And the wide north in creaks and groans –

And though these days get packed together

Like flakes of mackerel or the strata

Of Hartland cliffs, vast aeons seen

As streaks of green and brown and green,

Love is the opposite of time,

A river falling from the land

Into the wind, and turning round,

Blowing through rainbows back upstream.

OUT OF POLITENESS

Out of politeness

the rooves sit still on the houses,

and the chimneys stick up two fingers

because that is expected.

Because they were brought up like that

the gulls float right over,

dropping at most one wingbeat.

Compliant to disaster,

the rain will drive us all indoors,

where we will sit shivering

and dying out of politeness.

IDLE

Idle you are an aviary

whose wire has been removed – an undefined

small area of trees. The rare birds fly

into the night, the common birds invade,

chattering local endless intimacies.

THE OLD FOOL

An old fool stands in a field

In the shape of a young horse.

Where is the wit in that?

Hooves, mobile ears, big teeth!

This rolling around on the ground

Isn’t amusing anyone.

Sheep chew over the joke,

But already the jackdaws

Are turning back to their work.

An old fool stands on the table

In the shape of a mug of tea.

Where is the wit in that?

Steaming – standing there –

At the hip holding out a handle,

Deepening an O to the ceiling

As the tea sinks sip by sip and then

Gulp by gulp and then

The empty-mug punch-line!

You old fool, what are you doing

Hanging around in the shapes of things?

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday was a plain girl,

None of the dead did rise.

(Ladies and gentlemen, please keep your seats,

She is no Queen, or glittering singer,

just look at the plain way she dawns.

That is no trump that rattles the twigs,

Just the poor scholars in the trees

In their Sunday worst

Fiddling their best,

So keep your seats please.)

So they stayed in their graves,

In their graves they stayed,

Mother and father and dearly beloved

And missed and matched and relict and remembered

In the arms of angels

And sleeping with Jesus

And given and taken away –

Wednesday was a plain girl,

None of the dead did rise.

Some people even died,
Quite a few people actually died,

Another enormous reverse resurrection,
And worldwide flashing of spades.
Wednesday was a plain girl,

None of the dead did rise.
Perhaps next Wednesday?

HAPPINESS

When polar bears in worlds of snow

See the horizon start to glow,
Ending the night so long and slow,
They always let their feelings show.

When tall and weighty icebergs rise

Like frozen clouds in walrus skies,

The whales, despite their own great size,
Always express complete surprise.

For when the crowded ark was rocked,

And rose from where it had been docked,

When heaven's floodgates were unlocked,

Even Noah, who knew, was deeply shocked.

And when the seas began to sink,

And when the keel stopped with a clink

Upon a steaming mountain brink,

He celebrated with a drink.

OUT IN THE GARDEN

Out in the garden

Stands the Moon Maiden

Elegant and very tall,

All of her invisible

Except for her face

Far away

And her shoes kicked off

In the vegetables

LYNCH.

I am so glad that lad was strung,

The fence that pens my yard not strong,

Silk-soft my pigeons and my bantams,

Easily mangled into phantoms.

Too close, his neck-bone and his spine,

Better to have them stretched, I reckoned,

By hoisting from the grand old pine –

I saw him stand on his last second.

Now I am safer in my roof,

Though not from ghosts, it’s not ghost-proof,

Also in through the cracks runs lust,

Quick as the rust grows on the dust –

And I can see the little stars,

Breasty Venus and ripped Mars,

Through all the crumbles in my pointing,

Which is a little disappointing –

I hear a knock on my front door,

It is a parcel from the whore

Of Babylon. My fence needs mending,

Which will require increase of spending.

I will electrify the trees,

Where he swings ghostly in the breeze,

And zap him with the National Grid,

For all the dead things that he did.

JUST ONE MORE WAR.

Just one more war said the General,

Alright just one said the Priest –

One thing we know for certain,

One thing we can say at least:

It’s not that we are violent

Or after a Golden Fleece,

It ought to be self-evident,

This is a war for peace.

Just one more push said the clown,

Just one more kiss said the youth,

And truth’s steel rain came down,

Obliterating truth.

CANAL

Through the flat sheet of air

a square kingfisher.

Cuboid lilies rise

from octagonal pads and

by the parallel banks a nymph sitting

with both her arms cut off,

but still smiling.

DEAD RAT IN THE LANE

Nimbly

the emperor of alleyways

swift king of vanishing

and impossible gaps

is escaping again

now with his frenzied attendants undressing him

away he gets again

in two days totally gone

DREAM.

I saw a picture of a King

Enter the echoes of a building,
And stovepipes fluted by the wind

Sang praises, high and low, to him!

We struck the hollows of our hands,

And made great zeros with our mouths,
And our brains floated out like clouds,

Dripping a pattering refrain.

And the prayers wandered through our minds,

Like the last bison on the plains,

Seeking a place to lie down, not

Already taken up by bones.

Long boxes wrapped in flags, more empty
Than if they had been filled with nothing,

Floated towards the altar then,
And my head burst like a balloon.

OH NIGHT

Oh night who took away your face

And filled you like a pint glass

With the black blood of disgrace?

Each time I wake I see you crawling,

Drunk, in the wrong direction, howling.

Oh night, where do you think you’re going?
To your missed meeting with the morning?

LACRIMAE TRISTES

Need, mine grows, more every year,

Punctured, my heart gasps, bleeds black light,

Like a harsh hand had stabbed me with a spear,

Inside me, out of sight.

Hit so hard life has to change,

You might find shadow-thoughts run free,

And in your head a new whisper, ghost-strange,

Says, You are nobody.

You are just a burden, a weight

On loved-ones and friends,

And hope and will and wish all turn to dust and blow away

And the pit is your fate.

Had a Mental Health Care appointment

Right out at Mount Gould.

I feared the bus was late but it did come, it was on time,

But my heart, my hopes were fooled.

Oh! I counted out my pennies well,

But I was one short.
Driver, driver, save me from hell!
I was denied transport.

DEUCALION AND PYRRHA

There were two survivors of the flood. And this is how they regenerated the human race.

The last two people in the world sat down,

After the flood, a woman and a man,

And they were old. Strange of the gods to drown

The future too. They stared. Brown rivers ran

In all directions, and the world appeared

Little by little. Now she saw a stone

Smile in a runnel as the water cleared.

She ran, and pressed it to her sharp chest-bone,

And when she looked, there was another one.

Her husband helped her pick them up, the blue,

The white, the streaky, blinking in the sun.

Oh you dear stones! She knew just what to do - 

Fling them behind her on the hardening ground.

They would be people when she turned around. 

BAYLEAF BOAT

Love, to creatures bright and small,

Like us, offers no trials at all.
We flitted to it like two fleas

On a match and wire trapeze.
A castle in a goldfish bowl
Tested the mettle of my soul,
And your hair could pull me up the tower

When trimmed to just below the ear.
But sighs in empty concert halls,
And passion whispered in cathedrals,
Where echoes seem to grow forever

Through chambers of unchanging weather,
Made me vainer than the thrush,
Who knows that when his lovesongs hush,
The sun he raised will sink again.

Morning came and you were gone,

Fleeing in a bayleaf boat,
As dawn broke mighty from my throat.

THE MAN WHO RUSHED WITH NOTHING IN HIS HEAD.

The man who rushed with nothing in his head,

Out of his house, into the woods and in,

Over and over the mountains, up and up,

Left every valley like a golden cup,

And every wood a crowd of seraphim,
And every mountain top a marriage bed.

The emptiness of the future made him run,

He floods its channel as the present thaws,

And over his horizon farmlands rise.
The people see him with the same surprise

With which they see the autumn when it pours,

And with the awe in which they hold the sun.

He and this land, being each others' womb,

Love one another truly from afar,
Trees of one size across an equal stream,

Whose leaves are eyes but closed and in a dream,

In which they stroll and talk on a cold star,
Whilst the world smoulders in an orange gloom.

Following gravity through the tilted plough,

Stained by the faces of the self-seeing souls

Only as long as they can meet his stare,

He hurries on and leaves them standing there,

As water leaves a bucket full of holes,
As rapidly as time is passing now

Faster than darkness when the eyelids close,

Pressed by the thought of that which drives him on -

Nothing - until he runs against the mound

That makes the circle that he must run round,
In blinded rage, defending something gone,

Perhaps in penance but till when who knows.

IN NIGHTS AS LONELY AS THE SUN'S

In nights as lonely as the sun's,
I live my second innocence,
Dreaming about the moon’s white thighs

In dark asphyxiated skies.

The pricelessness of dawn demands

The heart and soul and resonance

Of little birds with worlds to sell,

But I possess the still hour's owl.

When butterflies, like pairs of hands,

Flit by me in a strobelit dance,
Gesturing in their extasy

That heaven is a shrubbery,

And breezes stagger drunkenly

Into the slowdance of the sea,
I cannot feel the kiss of the wind,
Because the moon is in my mind.

TO AN ACTRESS

Your eyes began this dialogue

By reminding me of it.

It ends by proving me a rogue,

You dodge the consequences with your feet.

You speak as though you dreamed these sad affairs,
And yet your steps slow to a stop
And you succumb to change with tears,
Fall silent and, in darkness, drop.

Each night I feel the waters rise

Over my face, wondering how
I drown and live in such quick seas,
Which is surprising when so often now

I’ve looked at you defending your designs

And your desires for two hours under lights,
Then gone to laugh with you behind the screens,
And out to watch the people on the streets.

THE CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS

In the wake of the parade

I lingered among heaps of dung;

Listening to the chaos fade,

I hummed the song the animals had sung.

As the steam that left the piles

Drained them of their body-heat
So the song, with growing miles,
Grew fainter, soon, to my ears, incomplete.

But I, among its residue,
Whistled my memory’s half-moon

Of the lament they shrieked and blew,
A mesmerising, supernatural tune.

Where they had eased themselves and bled,
Cut by the monotonous blade,

Animals singing as they fled,
So that their panic seemed like a parade.

WAKING

The wind that shakes the ilex tree shakes me,

The glare that blanks the stars wills me awake;

Across a paving stone across the sea,

The leaf that shuffles crablike for my sake

Opens my eyes and wipes mist from the lake.

But still it shakes as if stung to be free,

And now the later light caught by my eye

That strives to read the number of a psalm

Over a dead man’s shoulder, makes it calm

In obedience to the solemnity of the sky.

This is a jewel I take out sometimes

When all but one have made their sad retreat.

Its facets reflect just as chimes echo chimes,

And in the way a street opens on a street.