Poems from an earlier incarnation
Do you have some work for which, irrespective of the passing of time, you retain a lasting fondness?

I suspect we all do; those nuggets we wrote when we were a different person, and which — though we’re now someone else entirely — we wouldn’t change. From four decades ago, here are three poems I still love…
Cormorants Diving
I stood on the sea-wall
and watched cormorants diving
into the cold grey sea,
you nearby
- watching me watching them -
knowing I had not seen you
nor spotted your sophisticated
remote control device.
You fooled me with your body
and its language -
and as you fooled me then,
so the cormorants rise
always where I did not expect to see them.
Cormorants diving, you say,
is a simple matter of being able
to hold your breath under water.
Skipton
The dales were flooded.
At the top, snow on the ground,
ice in the cracks of the dry stone wall;
below, in remorseless cold,
Skipton
grey and grim.
All that way
and still the big hills in the distance,
still in the sun.
Evensong time;
the uneven peel of church bells against the hills
spilling into the flooded fields.
St Ives (for W.H.Auden) Were you here, struggling for context, you might concede how things change - or not changing, how they are fixed: sons like fathers; daughters, mothers; a patchwork of forlorn tans, plastic balls, dark glasses, and bathers splashing at the edge of an inevitable sea. You might argue how even this - from bathing rags to cream teas, beach towels to broken bottles - might manufacture a cry (or at best, some feeble rattle!) against what is to come. Men, too soon grown old, play football in mimicry of younger days; and sons (yet to know of their tragedy!) endure the legends of the Tellers. Young men - wearing puberty like some gaudy medallion - stride the beach, striving for an image only time and disappointment can bring. A pulse of caravans brings them South (along arterial roads, you might have said) clogging motorways, blocking the mouths of narrow lanes they cannot navigate. They arrive over-burdened, and what they leave behind is opaque; memory lacking a peg to hang it on. History is a fading parking ticket; the remnants of suntan lotion; tatty books upon the chalet’s shelves; your craggy face in the mirror. And then we drive away ourselves, and all the while imagining the indefinable talent Old Masters had with suffering.
These poems are included in Selected Poems 1976-2022.