Three Poems For The End Of April

Farewell to a Friend Never Met

Without being a wasteland or a wonderland my topos

Lacks a generic space, and therefore all history,

And lacklustre as the moonbeams are the fickle tops:

Mountains call to me like wolves all eerie.

Neither here nor there, then nor now, my pencil

Glides across the lines, outside the boxes to mark

A limit to the limitless, smudges by stencil:

Celan, Celine, Ceylon and Sri Lanka, dark

And brooding, farewell, Anneliese, whom

I never met; now it’s too late, but you defied

The pundits, breeding children out of gloom,

A generation out of genocide.

Your poetry and stories gave me substance and hope

While my own wandering and exodus tugged the rope.

 The Fourteenth of July

Even after they broke through the gates and found

the dungeons deep under the surface of the street

and smelled the noxious vapours of the drains

no one was prepared, could not believe their eyes,

the rusted cages through whose thick bars no sound

had penetrated for thirty years, not one beat

of revolutionary fervour, no strains

of reason’s hymn, nor sympathetic sighs.

One skeleton and sixteen walking dead,

and centuries of injustice caked upon the eyes,

a slimy silence oozing through the lead

encrusted darkness, that no one ever sees

until the future breaks open ignorance

and fear of eternal awakening in France.

 In Honour of S R

Not everyone loved him, you know; they thought him a fool.

But if he blundered with a necklace or rode down the side of the stream,

It was because he had principles, and he stuck with them.  Dream

At the beginning, loyalty to the end.  His mind was a tool

Too sharp to be blunted by gossip or innuendo.

If you asked for help, he gave it willingly,

And often looked in on his neighbours when ill just to see

If he could help: Is there anything I can do?

He catalogued and recognized vast amounts of art:

He lectured to women and wrote for children, he faced

Up to evil when it bared its ugly fangs, his heart

Belonged to someone hardly anyone knew, he traced

The origins of spirit to taboo and totem and part

Of him knew it belonged to a Law he never embrace