Sea Child

I shall return alone and let the tide,
risen again, embrace you for its own.
You are the boy who numbered clouds as friends,
saw soldiers in the waves, tigers in spray.

Awakened by the sea, you need not sleep
again in one who cloistered you so long,
prisoner to a promise unfulfilled.
Your sad ordeal is over; here is peace.

I am the coat of mail that you put on
to face a harder world at childhood's end.
Colleagues invented me. I called them friends
at your expense, you had to hide away.
 
Here is a place for you to gaze and play.
See how the sunlight gleams on Greenan sands
where once you left small footprints. Only you
can find their path again. My child, goodbye.

New Regime

We are the resurrection of the dead
forgotten ways. We cultivate despair
in veiled anathema of womankind.

We are the ancient writings reassessed
by gunlight in the aftermath of war.
Ours is the only truth you need to know.

Lines from a London Flat

High on the wall, a leather cap. The kind
John Lennon liked to wear, its gloss of black
catching the bare bulb glare. This room is red,
blood red. The ceiling, white. The naked floor
stretches rough pine between cracked skirting boards.
A mobile phone, kingfisher blue, proclaims
its presence with a triad, soh mi doh,
repeated twice before I cross the room
to comfort it, holding its sleek cool form,
this little speaking thing, close to an ear
that once, in 1967, heard
descending chords, the start of Strawberry Fields,
played on a mellotron, (although it might
have been a martinet for all I knew).
The moment passed, but everything had changed.
Something had come of age. Now, looking back
at Maharishis, kaftans, beads and bells,
I will not rush to join with Mark Lamaar
and others of his kind who point and sneer,
but, as the day grows old, and from the street
below there comes the sound of voices, young
men on the town, and girls in twos and threes,
I reach the leather cap down from the wall
and wander out, as if it mattered, now.

Hampton Lock

We cycled on the water. No-one thought
to ask us how we managed such a feat,
nor could we tell. It seemed so natural
to choose the smooth canal. The water lapped
around the tyres, a gentle splashing sound
rose to our ears and made us sing aloud.

At Hampton lock, freewheeling to the bank,
we joined the tow-path once again. We thought
to use the lock would take an age. Besides,
somehow we knew that if we had to stop
between the lock-gates (as we surely would)
we'd sink like gold on setting down our feet.