I'm always writing or thinking about poems, and I will post some of my latest works on here as I write them - but to start with, below you can see some poems from 2021, when I was lucky enough to be able to travel round southern Germany and France; and, first, here's one of my most popular works from Shadow Cast by Mountains. It was inspired by meeting an elderly woman in a war cemetery in Belgium in November 1998 (the 80th anniversary of the end of WW1).
Mrs MacDonald Visits Her Father
She felt the ebbing tide
And went to the loch shore
To gather sea shells.
She last saw him
Marching off, tall
To her, and special,
But smaller with every step
He took away from her,
Unremarked in kilted uniform.
Soon he was nothing more
Than just another
Claggy lump of Belgium.
From eighty hard
Highland winters she came
To a green field
He knew only as mud
To bend painful knees
To kneel before him,
And arranged her shells
To spell out one word -
DADDY.
My new book, which I've provisionally called Reunification Day focuses on my life in Germany and takes me around that country, and on to France, Ireland and the nations of the UK. I am on the side of the victims of war, of refugees, of the dispossessed and the natural world. Here's one of my poems from 2021.
The Afghan Family on the U-Bahn
They are mountain people,
stocky and strong and at ease.
He sits sturdy, and beside him
his wife in bright headscarf,
a two year old boy on her lap.
The bigger brother’s standing
part hidden by the pushchair,
stretching round to poke
and be poked back, kittens
soft-pawing with sheathed claws;
It’s just part of the game,
but I feel a brutal lurch of horror,
dragged to a sudden
darkness by a scream.
His father feels it too.
Gently he pulls the child
into an embrace, and hugs
the most precious thing in the world
tightly to his heart,
right into his heart,
protecting it forever.
I look down and notice
the boy’s artificial legs
and prosthetic feet.
A father and a son, fumbling,
all I find is a blank page
in someone else's book.
Munich, 09.07.2021
In the summer of 2022 I was lucky enough to visit the former East Germany. The city of Dresden suffered greatly in the Second World War, and the Cold War delayed its restoration.
Dresden - Between
The sun glints gold
on the statues and the cross
forged by the son of a pilot
hammered out by hand.
The river flows quiet
beneath bridges it engulfed,
soaking the Old Town’s roots;
New blocks are fitted-in
Between the blackened stones,
repairs patched painfully
by the slow sweated toil
of three generations.
The hundred-year-old trees
cast late-spring shadow,
scarred where their trunks
explode from the ground.
My new book will also feature many poems inspired by Germany's landscapes and wildlife. Here's an example:
Patched and Darned
The world weighs
heavy in a backpack,
though the snow-path
weaves a thread of silver
through crystal-coated pines.
Close-woven wool
lies against a heart
patched and darned,
a gift, but one long past.
A raven glints
brilliant black eyes
in ice-fractured sunshine
beneath a dome of diamond.
Spitzingsee, 28.12.2022