Here I’ll be posting new poems, as and when they arrive.

Below is the sonnet I was invited to write for the ‘Strike Sonnet Chain’ published by Whaleback City Press in October 2023. The pamphlet is a sonnet corona (ie it comprises fourteen 14-line poems, with the first line of the first being the same as the last line of the last). Each sonnet also uses the last line of the preceding one as its starting point.

Walks

A gust of nothing new diverts my thought.

The things that occupy my mind are old –

French words or words for the sounds

birds make, or the country names of flowers.

It’s like this when I’m walking in the woods.

What do you think about? someone asked

because I had been gone for many hours

and I could only answer nothing,

although I did remember singing

as I tramped and I also remembered

sheltering under an ash when it rained a bit.

I’m afraid that when I turn the pages of my

scrapbook mind I’ll find they’re empty.

O will I have nothing to show for the long miles!

This is a prose poem from my new pamphlet let him bring a shrubbe about the composer Gerald Finzi, published by The Maker’s Press. As well as writing music, Finzi was a collector of apples and cultivated many old varieties in his Gloucestershire orchards.

song of the apples

 which is the song of how the blossom came early and was beset by hail and frost which blackened the flowers and made of them many sorry piles lying about the ankles of the trees, and these were not tears nor any kind of symbol

 which is the song of the little knots like bunions that arose against all hope and could be held between forefinger and thumb and measured weekly with string, and some were yellow and rough to the touch like sand and some shone greenly but not one was to be tasted being still bound unto the branch

 which is the song of how the wind came and threw some apples down upon the ground where they lay like a copper and gold rubble to be pecked at by the thirsty blackbirds and rolled about by the boys

 and this was a sign for gatherings of friends and of the children of friends and for picking and singing with cheerful voices long into the warm dark chords of the dark

Here’s the poem I was commissioned to write for the Stella Jockel Young Composer competition. The two winning compositions for unaccompanied four-part choir were performed in Sheffield City Hall in March 2023.

Sheffield Nocturne

Don’t close the curtains: the dark wants to come in

and the stars are plentiful as apples in autumn. 

Somewhere there’s a city, buried in sleep as we

should be, but it is too cold for love or dreams

in this high room where we must suffer winter.

We could speak of once upon a time, but it is cold.

We could speak of the colour of the sky, but it is cold.

You say you hear music. I hear an owl far off

or is it a new soul calling across the rooftops?

Let’s count the lives we might have had

until each star has turned for home

until the empty orchards set their fires and burn.