Graham Burchell
Graham John Burchell: 1950 - 2021
We lost our good friend Graham on Fri 21st May. He had fought a debilitating illness with bravery and humour. His parting was peaceful, for which we thank all the people who cared for him at Derriford Hospital.
What an interesting character Graham was – he had lived in many countries and had fascinating stories to tell from all of them. For years, his Facebook profile picture was of a fit young man having fun in the Zambia days.
None of us knew him then, so this appreciation can only start at the point when he settled back in Devon in the early 2000s. It was not until after the death of his mother that he was able to resume travelling. Over four consecutive winters he visited Egypt, Australia, St Lucia and India – from all of which he brought back fine observational poems. Most Octobers he went to Italy for the Poetry on the Lake celebrations, becoming almost a fixture.
In late April he sent his funeral plan to friends and family. It was headed: Detailed Notes for Funeral of Graham John Burchell, Poet and Procrastinator. Which is so typically Graham – wryly amusing, self-deprecatory…
There are so many more adjectives needed here: reliable – always on time for events, always where he said he would be. And modest, good-humoured, mild-mannered, easy-going, never pushy…
All these qualities came to the fore in editing sessions of the Litmus group, where seven or eight poets close-studied a piece of writing from each of the others in turn. After 14 years we had become close-knit – could sometimes be brutally honest about a new poem which wasn’t quite working. Graham always accepted criticism with equanimity, never argued for a particular word or line, just quietly took on board the suggested amendments.
His poetry was rarely dramatic or impactful, and not over-worked – just somehow right. And right for his reading voice – measured tones, matter of fact, relatable. There was little of the confessional. But in his collection, Kate, he did reveal some more personal matters – by the time-honoured means of assuming different personae: an Alice in Wonderland figure, a young African wife, various others. In person he remained fairly private too: on rare occasions he let slip a few revelatory aspects of his past to close friends. His was not the easiest of lives.
In his early 60s Graham turned to the academic side of poetry, winning a Hawthornden Fellowship and completing an MA at Bath. He was highly successful in poetry competitions too, came 1st in a National Stanza competition, 2nd in the BBC Proms competition in 2016 – where his poem was read by an actor to a full house in the Royal Albert Hall – and 2nd at Poetry on the Lake, 2019. There were countless other placings or commendations, few of which Graham ever announced himself.
He also came 3rd (from 16,000 entries) in the Bridport Prize, 2018. That astonishing poem, Resurrection, is part of his funeral service.
Graham’s earliest publications were children’s’ books. But in 2008 his first poetry collection, Vermeer’s Corner, appeared – a beautiful hand-bound book from an American publisher, consisting of one poem for each of Johannes Vermeer’s 34 known paintings. It’s still a favourite collection of many of his friends.
The Chongololo Club, from his time as a teacher in Zambia, was published in 2012; Kate arrived in 2015 and Cottage Pi later the same year. His most recent – and highly acclaimed – work was a collaboration with Rosie Jackson: Two Girls and a Beehive, which focuses on the life and art of Sir Stanley Spencer.
Cottage Pi, it should be noted, was in many ways a homage to the tiny house Graham bought near Rattery. It was called ‘Pine Cottage’ when he moved in but he had that officially changed to ‘Poet’s Cottage’. And ‘Pi’, the mathematical constant, has a value of around 3.142 – the precise distance in metres from his front door to the edge of the A385. That’s very Graham.
In that cottage, which he loved so dearly, he had recently been working on a poetic autobiography – one poem for each year of his 70 years. Many of these are light and funny, but there will be others he didn’t have time to share, covering the darkest parts of his life, of which there were quite a few. The last poem in the series is Epilogue, desperately sad, chronicling his decline.
He left us with many happier memories, like the writing expedition to Topsham, where he emerged from the Antiques Centre proud as Punch, clutching an ornate flowered chamber pot – and promptly wrote a poem about it. His knowledge of the natural world was phenomenal: butterflies and moths were his passion and he knew the species names of most of them from all over the globe; in the plant world he specialised in Geraniaceae – Cranesbill and Geraniums to you and me – speaking of their types and cultivars like old friends.
Most writers have their own quirks of vocabulary. There are some words which – in the way he used them – will always seem peculiarly Graham’s: pesky, transmogrify, handkerchief, ruddy…
‘Ruddy’ was the only swear-word you’d hear from him. Sometimes we wished he was a little more cantankerous. There were three of us old blokes at Poetry Teignmouth: two opinionated, argumentative curmudgeons – and Graham’s unassuming presence. He could deflate an argument instantly, just by nodding his head and looking wise.
His driving was a little less forgiving – to sit beside him was quite exhausting: every gear change demanded firm muscular input and lots of arm movement; to turn a corner he leaned energetically; parking was a hyperactive exercise, after which he yanked at the handbrake so hard you’d think he wanted to pull it out of the floor. But that forceful, impatient style was so unlike him in every other possible way.
Much of Graham’s career was as an Art Teacher. It was an interest he came back to, creating new paintings for our Poetry Festival exhibitions of artwork and for two of his own book covers. The work which stands out is ‘Resurrection’, his ironic reworking of a famous Stanley Spencer piece.
Both that painting and his ‘Resurrection’ poem are typically Graham Burchell - wry and ironic, well-observed, clever. But they are also un-typical: focusing on himself was something he rarely did, either in conversation or at perhaps his very favourite location – behind the lectern at a poetry festival.
And that image will be among the fondest of our memories – the avuncular figure, excellent poet and reader of poetry, warming the people of the audience as they take in his every well-chosen word.
Graham was in at the very beginning of Poetry Teignmouth and was a crucial part of our annual poetry festivals – it was often through his enormous circle of friends and contacts that we were able to entice some of the biggest names in poetry to our little town.
And what fun we had. It was a privilege to share so many happy times with such a wonderful man. RIP Graham.
Ian Royce Chamberlain
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Graham's last full reading was with co-author Rosie Jackson, of poems from Two Girls and a Beehive. It was recorded at the end of March for The Poetry Place programme on West Wilts Radio and was broadcast on Sunday 30th May 2021.
Here is the link for the show's Play Again page: https://westwiltsradio.com/shows/the-poetry-place/
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
We lost our good friend Graham on Fri 21st May. He had fought a debilitating illness with bravery and humour. His parting was peaceful, for which we thank all the people who cared for him at Derriford Hospital.
What an interesting character Graham was – he had lived in many countries and had fascinating stories to tell from all of them. For years, his Facebook profile picture was of a fit young man having fun in the Zambia days.
None of us knew him then, so this appreciation can only start at the point when he settled back in Devon in the early 2000s. It was not until after the death of his mother that he was able to resume travelling. Over four consecutive winters he visited Egypt, Australia, St Lucia and India – from all of which he brought back fine observational poems. Most Octobers he went to Italy for the Poetry on the Lake celebrations, becoming almost a fixture.
In late April he sent his funeral plan to friends and family. It was headed: Detailed Notes for Funeral of Graham John Burchell, Poet and Procrastinator. Which is so typically Graham – wryly amusing, self-deprecatory…
There are so many more adjectives needed here: reliable – always on time for events, always where he said he would be. And modest, good-humoured, mild-mannered, easy-going, never pushy…
All these qualities came to the fore in editing sessions of the Litmus group, where seven or eight poets close-studied a piece of writing from each of the others in turn. After 14 years we had become close-knit – could sometimes be brutally honest about a new poem which wasn’t quite working. Graham always accepted criticism with equanimity, never argued for a particular word or line, just quietly took on board the suggested amendments.
His poetry was rarely dramatic or impactful, and not over-worked – just somehow right. And right for his reading voice – measured tones, matter of fact, relatable. There was little of the confessional. But in his collection, Kate, he did reveal some more personal matters – by the time-honoured means of assuming different personae: an Alice in Wonderland figure, a young African wife, various others. In person he remained fairly private too: on rare occasions he let slip a few revelatory aspects of his past to close friends. His was not the easiest of lives.
In his early 60s Graham turned to the academic side of poetry, winning a Hawthornden Fellowship and completing an MA at Bath. He was highly successful in poetry competitions too, came 1st in a National Stanza competition, 2nd in the BBC Proms competition in 2016 – where his poem was read by an actor to a full house in the Royal Albert Hall – and 2nd at Poetry on the Lake, 2019. There were countless other placings or commendations, few of which Graham ever announced himself.
He also came 3rd (from 16,000 entries) in the Bridport Prize, 2018. That astonishing poem, Resurrection, is part of his funeral service.
Graham’s earliest publications were children’s’ books. But in 2008 his first poetry collection, Vermeer’s Corner, appeared – a beautiful hand-bound book from an American publisher, consisting of one poem for each of Johannes Vermeer’s 34 known paintings. It’s still a favourite collection of many of his friends.
The Chongololo Club, from his time as a teacher in Zambia, was published in 2012; Kate arrived in 2015 and Cottage Pi later the same year. His most recent – and highly acclaimed – work was a collaboration with Rosie Jackson: Two Girls and a Beehive, which focuses on the life and art of Sir Stanley Spencer.
Cottage Pi, it should be noted, was in many ways a homage to the tiny house Graham bought near Rattery. It was called ‘Pine Cottage’ when he moved in but he had that officially changed to ‘Poet’s Cottage’. And ‘Pi’, the mathematical constant, has a value of around 3.142 – the precise distance in metres from his front door to the edge of the A385. That’s very Graham.
In that cottage, which he loved so dearly, he had recently been working on a poetic autobiography – one poem for each year of his 70 years. Many of these are light and funny, but there will be others he didn’t have time to share, covering the darkest parts of his life, of which there were quite a few. The last poem in the series is Epilogue, desperately sad, chronicling his decline.
He left us with many happier memories, like the writing expedition to Topsham, where he emerged from the Antiques Centre proud as Punch, clutching an ornate flowered chamber pot – and promptly wrote a poem about it. His knowledge of the natural world was phenomenal: butterflies and moths were his passion and he knew the species names of most of them from all over the globe; in the plant world he specialised in Geraniaceae – Cranesbill and Geraniums to you and me – speaking of their types and cultivars like old friends.
Most writers have their own quirks of vocabulary. There are some words which – in the way he used them – will always seem peculiarly Graham’s: pesky, transmogrify, handkerchief, ruddy…
‘Ruddy’ was the only swear-word you’d hear from him. Sometimes we wished he was a little more cantankerous. There were three of us old blokes at Poetry Teignmouth: two opinionated, argumentative curmudgeons – and Graham’s unassuming presence. He could deflate an argument instantly, just by nodding his head and looking wise.
His driving was a little less forgiving – to sit beside him was quite exhausting: every gear change demanded firm muscular input and lots of arm movement; to turn a corner he leaned energetically; parking was a hyperactive exercise, after which he yanked at the handbrake so hard you’d think he wanted to pull it out of the floor. But that forceful, impatient style was so unlike him in every other possible way.
Much of Graham’s career was as an Art Teacher. It was an interest he came back to, creating new paintings for our Poetry Festival exhibitions of artwork and for two of his own book covers. The work which stands out is ‘Resurrection’, his ironic reworking of a famous Stanley Spencer piece.
Both that painting and his ‘Resurrection’ poem are typically Graham Burchell - wry and ironic, well-observed, clever. But they are also un-typical: focusing on himself was something he rarely did, either in conversation or at perhaps his very favourite location – behind the lectern at a poetry festival.
And that image will be among the fondest of our memories – the avuncular figure, excellent poet and reader of poetry, warming the people of the audience as they take in his every well-chosen word.
Graham was in at the very beginning of Poetry Teignmouth and was a crucial part of our annual poetry festivals – it was often through his enormous circle of friends and contacts that we were able to entice some of the biggest names in poetry to our little town.
And what fun we had. It was a privilege to share so many happy times with such a wonderful man. RIP Graham.
Ian Royce Chamberlain
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Graham's last full reading was with co-author Rosie Jackson, of poems from Two Girls and a Beehive. It was recorded at the end of March for The Poetry Place programme on West Wilts Radio and was broadcast on Sunday 30th May 2021.
Here is the link for the show's Play Again page: https://westwiltsradio.com/shows/the-poetry-place/
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Up
Because he led me up the garden path,
up above Cornwood to a hedged terminus with sentinels
of nettle, I feared that the me he saw would be teased
from the body he knows I fail to service, to run enough,
like a car left to rust in the quiet of its garage.
We managed a stile, a horse field, plodded a lane, followed
a track to a creaky gate and climbed beyond farm buildings
(tired too it seemed of being up), up past a free-
flowering buddleia kissed by a silver-washed fritillary
and its nymphalid cousins, up until it looked hopeless.
We'd expected a wood or open moor, so we retraced
to a car still cooling its engine, took the road to the left,
crossed a bridge and swayed between maze-high hedges.
There was too much up to talk, just heat, heart thump,
campion, and grass growing through tarmac.
We turned north to a path that became dry scatter
leading us up until we did come to open moor;
a rising treeless field of flowering gorse, bombed
with granite boulders in some Olympian war.
I found one to sit on, had coffee and chocolate.
We could have driven up, I said. He nodded,
pulled his rucksack on to his shoulders, asked if I was up for it.
Everything the underside of his boots touched, inclined,
yet still I followed, up over Rook Tor; not really a tor at all,
and he pulled ahead, got smaller.
The me inside my struggling body (just there to feel its pain),
set challenges. Just get as far as that flat rock.
I was going to make it. He was already there,
hand on hip, king of the castle, looking down on me,
knowing I wasn't physical.
Forty years before, he had to show me how to kick a football
to keep it low, to get it to go, under a goalpost.
Yes, he tried hard not to pose,
while for me, the last steps to Penn's Beacon's great cairn
burned in my blood and joints.
I touched the placed stones, felt how cool they were,
stepped into them, reached for the highest,
released my frown, smiled at the sky, smiled at him,
knowing the only way from there
was down.
Cottage Pi 2015
We Need a Name
(Heard melodies are sweet,
those unheard are sweeter –
'Ode to a Grecian Urn' – John Keats)
for music found in the stillness
of a wood skirted by wind.
The sun finds a way in with breves
and dotted-crotchets: preposterous
rhythm softened and absorbed.
Even basal stones are mossed,
muted like drums wrapped in velvet,
and clefs, notes, dynamics are danced
from staves and poised soundless
like Beethoven on the page.
Here's a mid-chord, mid-bar moment
without time signature,
where a metronome falls in
with the beat of your heart.
Here's a shift to a place where music
like a smart child, is seen but not heard.
From 'Light Music', a charcoal drawing by Geoff Nickolls
and from a collaborative trip to Wistman's Wood.
Poets, Painters and Printmakers, 2012.
O Brook
She loves it for the gasp in its name O
steep banks
tumbles
a constant wetness at its edges
like bleeds on cheap paper
she loves it for the islands it makes within itself
they could be organs heart lungs liver
she loves the high places it comes from
that it no longer smells of the hard men
that mined up there in rain and snow
she loves how it changes its tune
when she approaches
how it stops talking to itself
to tell her that it commiserates
then laughs because it is April
and even the rain when it comes
is fresh and green
she loves how two fritillaries
circle each other in a love tussle
while they cross to the far side settle
and drink lilac from the same thistle
Moor Poets Vol. III, 2013
and in a slightly different form, in
Kate, 2015.
The Chongololo Club
We call it bush but it's trees.
We are a club following a path between,
looking for life.
Leaves drip.
There are puddles from a recent storm.
Not for the first time
Henry is told not to touch, to leave it alone!
He doesn't hear or doesn't want to.
With thumb and finger
he has it off the ground, not sure,
eight inches of chongololo, black as night-oil
on a brush of legs.
Others shriek at his bravado.
He offers his catch to Clara – thrusts it
an inch from her face
so she may sense her distance from it.
Her squeal is the kind that could shred leaves,
have lizards flatten on trees,
and turn frogs to stone.
Henry is yelled at; told to put it down.
He disobeys, drapes it across his palms.
He cannot see its eyes, its fear.
He still has to grasp why it coils into a fat badge
or craps in his hand.
The Chongololo Club 2012.
I Lay my Head...
on a bed where so many have lain before,
my eyes considering a flat ceiling
for the first time in a brace of displaced days.
I shut them. It's ten in the morning here.
I try to sleep, roll to the left, think about gravity,
how it sticks me to the mattress in this student cell,
abused for generations in a college that sits
so gently in its green.
I ponder all the homesickness festered here,
all the essays contrived, the alcohol, vomit,
tears spilled, love made on this single bed...
...my eyes jolt open. I'd become foetal, slept,
woke to two tiny cockroaches exploring
the far border of my pillow.
At the edge of my dream I'd heard a bird let go
its exotic riff, its assemblage of hoots and gulps.
It repeats them, repeats, pulls me up, floats me
to the window because, I'm in Sydney
and I need to know.
Breakfast Under a Yellow-bellied Sun 2019
Pinjarra and me
Pinjarra, the saltwater crocodile at Melbourne Sea-Life Aquarium
We came into the world in the same year
you
chased out of a shell
and into the muddle of mud and mangrove
me
snipped slapped weighed and wrapped
for you
it was crocodile breath the press of a mother's teeth
and the first flush of river
for me
it was the touch of fabrics voices the breath
of last adult meals and afternoon light
perhaps we were born on the same day
same moment to be axis points on a globe
you
with your long leathered face
silent hunger and cold blood in brackish water
me with my green bones and jellyfish flesh turning
towards cathedral bells beyond the walls of the room
we are each sixty five years old separated by glass
along the way we've made mistakes
you
for being in the wrong place after a flood
for becoming stranded on a Queensland farm
me
how long have you got
now look at us
Breakfast Under a Yellow-bellied Sun 2019
Happiness...
could be waking early
a brief snatch of wakefulness
in which I witness a bright morning
the unsustained reward for early risers
worm-catchers
and before common sense floods in
or clouds bloom I might be tempted
to get dressed to go and bathe in it
wallow in shafts of sharp-angled light
and stretched shadows that exaggerate
and wrap over the higgle and history
of shapes around here
if only for a few seconds I may consider
filling a flask grabbing my rucksack
jumping in the car driving at speed
to the high moor singing with Abba
parking striding greeting sheep and ponies
returning to bird song as I search
for a sheltered niche an al fresco room
with a flat rock armchair to sit on
near a brook that keeps the music flowing
from where I may lean back gaze
at endless blue wait for butterflies
and bees
and sip tea.
Cottage Pi 2015
Resurrection
I know they ashed my flesh, milled my bones,
sealed the flour of my body in a casket,
and buried it out of sight on the north side
of the churchyard, to be half sunk flotsam,
caught in a wave of tombstone buoys whose tip
and sway through the calm between tempests,
cannot be measured by those who disposed me
to memory.
I know it was October. I was ashed but still here.
On a moonlit night I crawled out
feeling damp turf against toes, knees and palms
that I no longer owned. I sensed without discomfort,
a chill washing over skin no longer worn.
Tongueless, I tasted the air, the turn of leaves
about to drop.
I know I was not alone. Others came out of the earth,
looked skyward. There was light, birdsong, voices.
One brushed dirt from clothes with fingers
long since whispered to dust.
Here stood the assured and the confused, leaning
on lichen-crusted markers of their mortal lives.
I know one had his old moon face buried into folded arms.
Others, dressed in the way of their day, greeted
like old pals across the gap; a spark
between their eternal bed and the next.
Many, like me were naked.
Perhaps we were the burned ones;
alternative members of the same occasional club.
I know a young man in a white collarless shirt,
reached out a hand that was once his own.
His other pointed to stone-carved words;
Charlie, who fell asleep in nineteen nineteen,
in his seventeenth year. He blinked, not at my nakedness.
We didn’t care. And I know in a far away voice
he said, I believe this is your first?
Because he led me up the garden path,
up above Cornwood to a hedged terminus with sentinels
of nettle, I feared that the me he saw would be teased
from the body he knows I fail to service, to run enough,
like a car left to rust in the quiet of its garage.
We managed a stile, a horse field, plodded a lane, followed
a track to a creaky gate and climbed beyond farm buildings
(tired too it seemed of being up), up past a free-
flowering buddleia kissed by a silver-washed fritillary
and its nymphalid cousins, up until it looked hopeless.
We'd expected a wood or open moor, so we retraced
to a car still cooling its engine, took the road to the left,
crossed a bridge and swayed between maze-high hedges.
There was too much up to talk, just heat, heart thump,
campion, and grass growing through tarmac.
We turned north to a path that became dry scatter
leading us up until we did come to open moor;
a rising treeless field of flowering gorse, bombed
with granite boulders in some Olympian war.
I found one to sit on, had coffee and chocolate.
We could have driven up, I said. He nodded,
pulled his rucksack on to his shoulders, asked if I was up for it.
Everything the underside of his boots touched, inclined,
yet still I followed, up over Rook Tor; not really a tor at all,
and he pulled ahead, got smaller.
The me inside my struggling body (just there to feel its pain),
set challenges. Just get as far as that flat rock.
I was going to make it. He was already there,
hand on hip, king of the castle, looking down on me,
knowing I wasn't physical.
Forty years before, he had to show me how to kick a football
to keep it low, to get it to go, under a goalpost.
Yes, he tried hard not to pose,
while for me, the last steps to Penn's Beacon's great cairn
burned in my blood and joints.
I touched the placed stones, felt how cool they were,
stepped into them, reached for the highest,
released my frown, smiled at the sky, smiled at him,
knowing the only way from there
was down.
Cottage Pi 2015
We Need a Name
(Heard melodies are sweet,
those unheard are sweeter –
'Ode to a Grecian Urn' – John Keats)
for music found in the stillness
of a wood skirted by wind.
The sun finds a way in with breves
and dotted-crotchets: preposterous
rhythm softened and absorbed.
Even basal stones are mossed,
muted like drums wrapped in velvet,
and clefs, notes, dynamics are danced
from staves and poised soundless
like Beethoven on the page.
Here's a mid-chord, mid-bar moment
without time signature,
where a metronome falls in
with the beat of your heart.
Here's a shift to a place where music
like a smart child, is seen but not heard.
From 'Light Music', a charcoal drawing by Geoff Nickolls
and from a collaborative trip to Wistman's Wood.
Poets, Painters and Printmakers, 2012.
O Brook
She loves it for the gasp in its name O
steep banks
tumbles
a constant wetness at its edges
like bleeds on cheap paper
she loves it for the islands it makes within itself
they could be organs heart lungs liver
she loves the high places it comes from
that it no longer smells of the hard men
that mined up there in rain and snow
she loves how it changes its tune
when she approaches
how it stops talking to itself
to tell her that it commiserates
then laughs because it is April
and even the rain when it comes
is fresh and green
she loves how two fritillaries
circle each other in a love tussle
while they cross to the far side settle
and drink lilac from the same thistle
Moor Poets Vol. III, 2013
and in a slightly different form, in
Kate, 2015.
The Chongololo Club
We call it bush but it's trees.
We are a club following a path between,
looking for life.
Leaves drip.
There are puddles from a recent storm.
Not for the first time
Henry is told not to touch, to leave it alone!
He doesn't hear or doesn't want to.
With thumb and finger
he has it off the ground, not sure,
eight inches of chongololo, black as night-oil
on a brush of legs.
Others shriek at his bravado.
He offers his catch to Clara – thrusts it
an inch from her face
so she may sense her distance from it.
Her squeal is the kind that could shred leaves,
have lizards flatten on trees,
and turn frogs to stone.
Henry is yelled at; told to put it down.
He disobeys, drapes it across his palms.
He cannot see its eyes, its fear.
He still has to grasp why it coils into a fat badge
or craps in his hand.
The Chongololo Club 2012.
I Lay my Head...
on a bed where so many have lain before,
my eyes considering a flat ceiling
for the first time in a brace of displaced days.
I shut them. It's ten in the morning here.
I try to sleep, roll to the left, think about gravity,
how it sticks me to the mattress in this student cell,
abused for generations in a college that sits
so gently in its green.
I ponder all the homesickness festered here,
all the essays contrived, the alcohol, vomit,
tears spilled, love made on this single bed...
...my eyes jolt open. I'd become foetal, slept,
woke to two tiny cockroaches exploring
the far border of my pillow.
At the edge of my dream I'd heard a bird let go
its exotic riff, its assemblage of hoots and gulps.
It repeats them, repeats, pulls me up, floats me
to the window because, I'm in Sydney
and I need to know.
Breakfast Under a Yellow-bellied Sun 2019
Pinjarra and me
Pinjarra, the saltwater crocodile at Melbourne Sea-Life Aquarium
We came into the world in the same year
you
chased out of a shell
and into the muddle of mud and mangrove
me
snipped slapped weighed and wrapped
for you
it was crocodile breath the press of a mother's teeth
and the first flush of river
for me
it was the touch of fabrics voices the breath
of last adult meals and afternoon light
perhaps we were born on the same day
same moment to be axis points on a globe
you
with your long leathered face
silent hunger and cold blood in brackish water
me with my green bones and jellyfish flesh turning
towards cathedral bells beyond the walls of the room
we are each sixty five years old separated by glass
along the way we've made mistakes
you
for being in the wrong place after a flood
for becoming stranded on a Queensland farm
me
how long have you got
now look at us
Breakfast Under a Yellow-bellied Sun 2019
Happiness...
could be waking early
a brief snatch of wakefulness
in which I witness a bright morning
the unsustained reward for early risers
worm-catchers
and before common sense floods in
or clouds bloom I might be tempted
to get dressed to go and bathe in it
wallow in shafts of sharp-angled light
and stretched shadows that exaggerate
and wrap over the higgle and history
of shapes around here
if only for a few seconds I may consider
filling a flask grabbing my rucksack
jumping in the car driving at speed
to the high moor singing with Abba
parking striding greeting sheep and ponies
returning to bird song as I search
for a sheltered niche an al fresco room
with a flat rock armchair to sit on
near a brook that keeps the music flowing
from where I may lean back gaze
at endless blue wait for butterflies
and bees
and sip tea.
Cottage Pi 2015
Resurrection
I know they ashed my flesh, milled my bones,
sealed the flour of my body in a casket,
and buried it out of sight on the north side
of the churchyard, to be half sunk flotsam,
caught in a wave of tombstone buoys whose tip
and sway through the calm between tempests,
cannot be measured by those who disposed me
to memory.
I know it was October. I was ashed but still here.
On a moonlit night I crawled out
feeling damp turf against toes, knees and palms
that I no longer owned. I sensed without discomfort,
a chill washing over skin no longer worn.
Tongueless, I tasted the air, the turn of leaves
about to drop.
I know I was not alone. Others came out of the earth,
looked skyward. There was light, birdsong, voices.
One brushed dirt from clothes with fingers
long since whispered to dust.
Here stood the assured and the confused, leaning
on lichen-crusted markers of their mortal lives.
I know one had his old moon face buried into folded arms.
Others, dressed in the way of their day, greeted
like old pals across the gap; a spark
between their eternal bed and the next.
Many, like me were naked.
Perhaps we were the burned ones;
alternative members of the same occasional club.
I know a young man in a white collarless shirt,
reached out a hand that was once his own.
His other pointed to stone-carved words;
Charlie, who fell asleep in nineteen nineteen,
in his seventeenth year. He blinked, not at my nakedness.
We didn’t care. And I know in a far away voice
he said, I believe this is your first?