Just heard that Shot Glass - the American on-line poetry magazine - has taken three of my poems including one of the few love poems I have written - An Anniversary of Flight  - and a poem about loss called Leaving. I'll post them here sooner or later.

Should also have mentioned that I have two poems in the 10th anniversary anthology for Carillon magazine - Ten Forward. It is an excellent collection and I recommend to all. The poems are Nutty Cluster which is about growing up in Barry, South Wales and Going To Church   which was written following a writing weekend at Woody's Top organised by Paul Sutherland. Here they are: 

Nutty Cluster

We had come in the rain that winter evening, to Mass.

From the balcony I watched the priest moving with a swagger

of vestments about the altar; a drone of lulling Latin sustaining
a congregation held tight in their obligation and damp coats.
Their expiration - waxen, mildew, incense - rising up to me,

the smell measuring off a sad, dogged virtue still.

The walk back was happy though; a family shriven
light with righteousness, putting aside the week past,
not yet obliged to face the one ahead; she said we could fill
white paper triangles in the sweetshop by the corner -

allsorts, ruffles, nutty cluster- small sandbags against want.
At home the furniture was pulled forward to the red coals;
a borderline defined against darkness and cold. Out there,
beyond the backs of the circled chairs was Indian country.

We were hermetic here; colluding in our secret wisdom -  this was
the best that life could offer -  signalling our joy in steady dips
into the small bags as the cornered television glowed. We
watched contestants tried to win things. People laughed

as others sacrificed themselves for the chance of bounty.
She rejoiced in the doubling of money as the striking of a blow
against where and what she now was and would forever be.
“I like to see them getting something for nothing”. She said it

emphatically, hard-eyed as an acolyte in a growing faith; the argument
airtight, and the saying of it a simple mystery and no less.
It was sympathetic magic which could not be denied; these TV poppets,
keeping the fires warming, holding the darkness forever at bay.

We had come in the rain that winter evening, from Mass.

GOING TO CHURCH

Driving through chalk wold proved like kneaded dough,

aquaplaning along shiny slick spider web roads,
I am going to church. Through car windows lies

exhausted prairie steaming like piled pelts  -

an abraded landscape anonymous of hedge, fence,
farmhouse. The mist lifts: Haugham church

becomes a vacant ark precarious on the hill top; 

a cynosure no eye will turn towards, guiding no-one
with bell peal or promises – saved but not sacramental.

Squires, tenants, faith all ebbed away, leaving

this spatchcocked church, a spineless gallery,
cold triumphs and tragedies recalled across wall

and window. Hudson, Eve, Pearson, Anton: names,

like blade bones thrown on the flagged aisles,
rattling about this reliquary, foretelling nothing.

Spire-spiked in its allotment of hawthorn, holly, elder;

a church redundant amid scoured fields once
swarming with those who cut and carried stone,

sawed wood, turned earth, sowed, planted, harvested;

who stayed honest too long to the covenant binding all
together to this place. Their fields have been stripped

right before them. The community of the faithful,

working now in factory, bar or office; wondering at
the provenance of the plenty on supermarket shelves.

Here a fox is dug deep into a grave. Here a yew, roots

half torn up and leaning, becomes a lych gate receiving
the dead. Here is a church unworthy of the coming.

Busy time recently.Two poems in Roundyhouse 35 - including Yr Ysbryd Glan which I wrote at Aberdaron in the Llyn peninsula. The title means Holy Spirit and Aberdaron was the last parish of the great Welsh poet, R S Thomas. The church was a last stop for pilgrims to Bardsey - the island of 2000 saints. Also, for those with an iPad or iPhone try downloading the free App The Disappearing. My poem The Governor's Bath House is on it. The ideas was to create an App for the city of Sydney which published poems related to the theme of disappearing and which were Sydney focused. Gps technology allows someone to be at a place and summon up a related poem. Mine is located under the place name The Domain though half of the poem relates to the Hero Of Waterloo - the best Irish pub in the southern hemisphere. Also shortlisted in the Fermoy International. I'll post all three here when I get time. Here they are:

YR YSBRYD GLAN*

*The Holy Spirit
(written at St Hywyn’s, Aberdaron - R S Thomas’s last parish)

The organ stop says it all:

 “swell to great”. You tried.

It was hard here, where each

swing of the oak doors bellowed

over pew and stall the rank

smell of soul-wearying work

in sour fields, of returns

diminishing. Other pilgrims,

like books falling shut, folded

here, crooked in prayer over

kneelers on unrequiting stone.

They raised their eyes, as you

might from altar or missal,

seeing windows suck in light,

distort it, like a reverse prism,

to render priests and people

monochrome; mere tintypes

pegged to walls as instructive

bas reliefs, supplicants in a biblical
tragedy happening elsewhere.

All here were hostages to

the faithful  departing. Some

for Bardsey and the saints;

praying against the current,

the chop of the Sound at night,

eyeing moonbows  over the bay

as poor omens. Others, who shared

your liturgical rhythms, looked

in the dark beyond surplice and stole,
to the graves rising from the wave break

up the hill field; each headstone,
in the shadow of the falling sun,

a slate rung on a stone ladder

propped against the cemetery apex.

The sparse assuring detail of name

and date blank to the congregation.

Only anonymous blocks bulked up behind

you;, squat pitons marking

out a long familiar sheer ascent; scored

deep on their backs  where generations

scrabbled for purchase in the heave

above farm, pulpit, tolling bell.

THE GOVERNOR’S BATH HOUSE

(“we know not the builder nor his son” W H Auden)

The governor’s bath house is not there;

a few cubes of stone

stand still, the rest crated and carted

by command to a new project. A tour guide

slips me a story about governors – Bligh,

Brisbane, Macquarie, Darling – I can walk

their streets, drink in their bars, but see

instead the mason’s initials chiseled neat

on the stone face.

                        At the Hero of Waterloo

rub a finger over a shamrock, a careful

“TM” cut below – the sandstone yielding

to the tool as a lover to an embrace;

graffito of a craftsman transported,

repossessing his self in shameless lavish

of his time.

Take the black candlestick

in the museum – convict’s section – mere

turnings, shards of metal wrought, twisted

compelled to become something degraded

scrap had no right to be – a carrier of light.

The governor’s bath house is not there.

Reading "Beth Shalom" at the Black Swan, York

The Ladies of Dona Sofia

This poem is in the latest "The Seventh Quarry" and I can heartily recommend the magazine to all.

THE LADIES OF DONA SOFIA

One by one the ladies of Dona Sofia
hatch from shuttered sleep, look up,
smell the spent storm, red with sunrise
and African dust, moving its rucksack
of cloud, towards the Sierra Bermeja.

Out they come, tentative, like pupae
unspun prematurely from chrysalides,
each touched gently by the sun moving
across the apartment block face.
Sessile dolls suddenly wrenched free

their limbs rejoicing, they clean balconies.
This is a synchronous choreography;
a bulerias where all hear the rhythm,
know the steps, feel the beat; all hold
the seed of sorrow close to their heart.

Each one cloths a window’s damp smear,
as if waving desperate goodbye
to a lover, until a pin sharp reflection
emerges, like a magic painting,
in which each, in sequence, see blue sky,

apartment blocks, ladies cleaning windows.
Tonight these imagos will metamorphose
their drab for Mass; they will imagine
sins to commit, finger beads for Nostra Senora
de la Rosaria, scrub clean their souls.

Trisagion (Thrice Holy)

1

Tiresias the seer comes towards me,
stands in sun-faded red flowered dress
transparent bag stuffed
with gleanings of street and shore.
He holds out a present of driftwood
bleached and salty, entwined like albino snakes.
Tells me what the birds have said today
in couplets I cannot understand:
reclaiming this temple mound from saint and sinner
he dances off.

2.
In the Cafe Caryatids an old man rests,
blue painted chair tilted in the doorway.
He sat there yesterday, will be there tomorrow.
Teeth and pullover holed and brown, he stares
mute at the road, a drone of tourists passing.
Bacchants and satyrs, they follow the unbrella thyrsos
snake through cafe chairs and shop front T-shirts,
short-stepping in rhythym after a guide; yellow tights,
black ankle boots, she is a queen,
finding honey in the columns and slabs
littering the temple site of Apollo; the residue,
a carved henge, faces westwards, leads nowhere
now, admits to nothing; a lizard's eye
unblinking red, through which
shutters click and cameras flash; the moment
when light folds into darkness remaining elusive.

3.
The kouros at Apollonas reclines obtuse against the hillside,
breathes out asphodels in wave froth to the edge of the cliff.
Tourists climb and slither in search of the shot
to validate memory's convivial hyperbole.
Unrealised Dionysus, a marble moraine,
a black smudge against the darker quarry wall,
suffers them; but dreams of standing free of this rock umbilical-
the headland a plinth, floating between sea and bluer sky,
his arms raised in welcome to sail and oar.

When the gods went villagers dropped hammers,
stopped chipping against the hard grain,
returned to their goats and groves - their piss-poor soil.
Those terraces, tribal scars cut into the mountain sides,
in turn, abandoned for easier fleeces each Summer boat
disgorged; a new mythology of excess is today's orthodoxy.
Dionysus, be content to lie weeping ferns into the pockmark pools

Feeding The Cat

Two of my poems have been included in the Cinnamon Press anthology Feeding The Cat which has just been published. They are The East Yorkshire Crematorium - which is mentioned in an earlier post - and a long poem in three parts caled Trisagion. In Greek that means Thrice Holy and is part of an Orthodox liturgy. The poem was written on the island of Naxos in the Cyclades and works with the idea of the ancient sites carrying a residue of the old religion which has been overlayed by Orthodox Christianity and now has a religion of sun seekers and tourists on top of that. Probably doesn't work but Naxos is a great place to sit and write ! I'll post Trisagion when I can find it on my PC !