Football Poets

Soft May-month sunbeams
And iridescent rain drops:
England’s crock of goals.

Haiku 4: The Past

Listen! Sven’s Swan Song:
The cadence of misery
And futility.

(How can we forget his often bizarre substitutions and then the seeming impotence when facing Brazil last time in 2002? Let’s h […]

World Cup Haiku 2: The Squad

Walcott leaves his cot.
We can imagine Lennon.
But will Crouch just crouch?

World Cup Haiku 3: The Formation

The May-mown road sides,
Ecological death wish,
Just like 4-5-1.

Apple blossom falls,
Just like England’s World Cup hopes.
Another season.

Reading in the shade beneath the apple tree,
Each branch and bough defined by crisp-cut shadow,
(As is each mossy, mouldering gravestone,
In the valley of the shadow of death)
Searching for a Saturday Zen […]

I went on my own to visit the care home,
To see my mum, aged 91;
Someone singing “Downtown” when I got there,
A depiction of Swindon’s cupboard-bare
Season, where no rhyme or reason
Can seemingly save them from […]

Sing Robin Redbreast,
Chanticleer of flood-light nights.
Sing when you’re winging.

Roses round the door,
The roast beef of Olde England,
Heads in the sand-bags.

Pride and Prejudice?
Sense and Sensibility?
Obvious innit?

World War metaphor,
Back in the trenches again,
Back to the future.

It came upon a midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
When angels bent down to the earth,
And changed machine guns into harps,
And turned leaden bullets into golden carols
That drifted across no man’s l […]

It’s against the law
To shout and bawl
Racialist obscenities;
Fanatics are taken from the ground,
For no-one can be allowed
To abuse players for their ethnicity
Or for the colour of their skin.
It’s a gen […]

The day George Best died,
The pubs stayed open all day.
The mourning after.

Winter’s discontent;
Leaves lie on frozen rivers.
Robins watch, bereft.

In autumn’s faint dawn,
They kneel in puddled goal mouths,
Repairing their nets.

These fishers of goals,
Threading and weaving their craft,
In lonely silence.

Soon the crowds will throng,
Cheering on the v […]

On holiday in the Pyrenees,
We all talked about Arthur Mee’s
Encyclopaedias and all our yesterdays so long ago
And what a debt we all owe
To those august volumes, numbered one to ten
That we all studied way b […]

Leaves come tumbling down;
More falling with each new day:
Like attendances.

Above L.A.,
People watch themselves on TV
Watching them selves on TV.
In England,
People don’t watch TV football matches,
Where people are not there watching football matches.

Born in 1749, he lived
In that time of calendrical change,
A Julian age of Pope and happenstance,
(Where African slaves were mocked for their
Creole medicine and smallpox cures)
And a Gregorian world of […]

It was only 30 miles away from Swindon,
But it might as well have been on the moon:
We never ever went to Oxford,
Although my posh cousin did, soon
After I first went to Headington and Cowley,
In the old days of […]

Casting my mind back
Over the track
That led me to here
And this reverie after a lunch time beer,
Me with a napkin down on my knees,
Scribbling these lines up in the Pyrenees,
With cacti growing right next to […]

A short list of innocuous names,
Leeds, Luton, Aylesbury, Dewsbury,
Names once famous for textiles, hats cars and ducks,
But now forever linked with something else,
Credit cards, King’s Cross and terrorism; […]