Lay your sleeping head, my love....

Chalk, charcoal and pastels on black paper, and as I drew the lines of W. H. Auden played through my mind:

Lay your sleeping head, my love, 
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephermeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Full poem here.

Vicky Soto

The raw brutality of the World
is best met with the wordless gesture of symbol.

This morning I light a candle for the Soul of a stranger.
Myself grief-weary in the dark days of the year:
its brief flame bold and steady
as she was as she awaited Death
in the Springtime of her life.

Young lovers

Based on a couple I saw on the street yesterday. Almost made me wish I was young again. Almost.

A madman in Church

A new poem in the new issue of The Stone Hobo. 

Forgetting myself

I was going through a draw of old poems when I came across this self portrait. I can't remember doing it, I don't believe I ever did anything in this style ever again. I can't remember why I did it.
I can recognise the time of my life it represents: when I worked as a silk-screenprinter in World's End, the bottom rung of Chelsea's King's Road. Another memory of that time survives in the poem I wrote about a colleague who had the misfortune to be schizophrenic.

from Mothering Sunday

And I thought of a woman so benign,

she lifted all wickedness from me,

a weight I did not know was mine

until her light fell on me.

Light indeed I felt at last,

ready to stand at my own height

before a smile which travelled fast

across the windless night.

Larkin and Hitchens: Two unpopular Englishmen

Over at the National Review Peter Hitchens writes about the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin.
It's an inspired commission on somebody's part because the reputations of both men lie under the shadow of the disapproval of received opinion.

Kestrels on Hampstead Heath

I photographed this young male close to the tumulus (sometimes called Boudicca's Mound) just after sunrise a few summers ago. I used it as the cover for my poetry collection.
The poem below is about another occasion.

Poetry elsewhere

The wonderful and very overlooked Edna St Vincent Millay over at Maggie's Farm

Morning Glory

A happy find in my local Books For Change: Lyrics from the Chinese by Helen Waddell, and signed by her. When I found it I was taken aback. I knew her as an authority on Mediaeval Latin. Her book The Wandering Scholars is both enlightening and delightful, how impressive that she was equally at home with Ancient Chinese? Some research revealed that although she was born in Japan, the daughter of missionaries, these poems are her careful interpretations of literal translations.
She died in the Whittington Hospital in Highgate, London, close to where I live, and this copy of her book has come to me from her hand to my hand.
This poem is 3,000 years old.

Vile May

Rain and hail bouncing off the window. Here is a May Song from my poetry collection Mothering Sunday

When I lived in London

I believed in True Love

and the passions of youth

ran warm through my blood

my arms were wide open

my heart was my Crown

my feet were quicksilver

and I sang through the town.

When May comes to London

light hums in the air

and blossoms burst out

in the parks and the squares

dawn comes by surprise

moist with soft rain

and the rain makes the city

sparkle again.

The heart has its summer

and its autumn days too

the dusk sinks from nowhere

and drives out the blue

eyes full of thunder

which were driving me mad

are clouded and secret

and make me feel sad

I'm sailing down South

where the sea it is blue

where the weather is warm

and the fishes fly too

goodbye to you sweetheart

with nothing to say

goodbye to the rain

and goodbye to the grey