Suburban April Sunday, Early morning dawn chorus wake up, Hangover church bells chiming, No milk for tea, Run out of bread, Buy the papers, Study the tables, And have your wife disturb your concentration By shoving an article from the Observer in your face. Stuart Jeffries in Paris, Recounting how left bank philosophers Complain that […]

I opened the door to a gunmetal Belfast sky, And clothed in my English prejudice, I took a Good Friday walk up to Stormont, Over odd bits of carpet soaked in disinfectant, Past stickers on the Beech tree trunks, “Fight the Good Fight.www.org.”, Through celandine, speedwell and anemone, (Or is it anenome?) Through springtime woodland, […]

(On Seeing a Satellite Dish Discarded on a Disused Railway Line) Dish! Oh Dish! Satellite-Murdoch Television Dish! The object that so many people wish! You used to stare so far away on high, Receiving all those signals from the Sky, Omnipotent with rampant power unbounded, Now melancholic, supine, you are grounded; But TV Dish, I […]

We all want a trophy, Instead of constant atrophy.

Do you remember collecting autographs, When the football specials steamed back west, When the last faint gleams of terrace street sun Slipped behind the shadows of the stands, And the ground went abruptly quiet and numb, When the crowd made its hot chocolate way home And the terraces and streets were suddenly empty; And do […]