Wilderspool Causeway

You have the shells that we picked up
from the beaches we walked on
on those rainy summer days
down near Barafundle Bay.

My problem with The National Trust:
I feel my thoughts have been greenwashed.
A ranger’s bland deep gold and green
says to me ‘It’s all been seen.’

Woe against the world:
you’ve seen it and it’s good.
The times we were alive
were finely synthesised:
a café and a run
on Hastings waterfront.

In the frost you found a bird
on a branch above the brook
and in the yellow of its wings
there was a flight you hadn’t seen.

Woe against the world:
you’ve seen it and it’s good.
The times you were alive
were finely synthesised.
A café and a run
at Romsey, Ganger Farm.

In the crematorium grounds
sculpted gardens radiate out
from all those parallel rooms –
is there a ferryman en route?

Woe against the world:
you’ve seen it and it’s good.
The times you were alive
were finely synthesised:
a café and a run
at Boscombe in the sun.

Woe against the world:
you’ve seen it and it’s good.
The times you were alive
were finely synthesised:
a café and a run
on Hastings waterfront.

For Peter Robinson

With all that brickwork, a shed ablaze
and also, through intersecting lines,
the sky at the far horizon,
there’s a gift for the burning bush
observed through rain-smudged glass,
in writings on negotiated walls
or in the voices of students on their way to class.

I once overheard you and Iain Sinclair
among porticoes on London Road.
It was something about the architecture of hospitals.
Do places retain a memory of pain?
In building anew, what do we remove?
Your eyes roam through famous and common land,
find what makes a town distinct

on the margins: gasometers, factories,
an odd inland gull, people on unique trajectories,
made new or strange by weather, politics,
light catching off glass by the Oracle offices
as though fire radiates across the valley
from a business park and cobbled together
nature reserve or gesture by Sonning.

Then the pause, the interregnum:
thoughts of Liverpool and stations in-between,
a life transplanted and re-planted
as a now quite utterly unique breed
in a Thames Valley influenced by the Far East
seen through a lens of past industry
with modern trade on credit seen for what it is

and mainstream media interests
less significant than the cracks on the road,
geese proliferating by Kennetside
road ends, salvaging moments
against the currents of memory
in fleeting cloud glimpses and aphorisms
converging in time and halting,
as you said, but only for now,
in the grounds of abbey ruins.

Margins of Reading – a poem by Alex Saynor for Peter Robinson

(i.m. Gareth Richards)

From the embankment of the Thames
by wind-ruffled waters and still Mildmay oaks
we’d watch and wait, alert to the newness of the day,
for cousins’ single-mindedness and strength in boats

to emerge from a mid morning heat haze
from a stream off the Brocas, before a hopeful search
through indescribable scents in charity shop doorways
for Ben Shermans and deleted Pulp albums

incongruously nestled by Sir Christopher Wren,
suit jackets and glasses that looked like Graham Coxon’s.
I can still hear you through the dictaphone
breathing stories Jarvis could have taken on

and, before Shazam, ‘I think last night…’
was lost in broken fragments, endlessly reconstructed
before Steve Lamacq played ‘Your Ghost’ on the evening session
and we could piece it all together on Maidenhead Road.

On your dad’s bookshelves, seventies brown and mid-orange
framed the bearded head of the ‘forgotten Spurgeon.’
We were doubled up unaccountably,
or perhaps because the book was also forgotten

soon to be unforgotten, reforgotten and unreforgotten.

Now we have our sad allotted nights
in our own configurations of time and light
taking form in the mind’s private dark rooms
to imagine you on stage again in Camden,

on the deserted streets around Caledonian Road
or after trademark fried chicken in Highbury Fields.
Saying prayers on the streets of North London,
it was the individual he loved and not the group.

To a zealot’s ‘Community goes deeper than friendship’:
‘So you’re not a great friend, then.’

And he’d take the foolish things to shame the wise
as with baffling knowledge of Pokemon
tour dates became proxy wars in village halls
as Gareth’s base stats and anti-metagame

switched advantage to the weak or despised.
And he’d remember the praise, but he’d remember the slights
through long Essex days and deep Penzance quiet.
Hurt and joy combined in the eyes
but for all that wonder, he’d forgive every time.

Report on club website – champions!

Written by me, uploaded by Coach Pete

https://www.wefc.club/news/u13-rangers-v-winnersh-barbarians-2703962.html

(written in one of the Covid interludes when social distancing was not emphasised as it had been)

After so many days without contact,
I can feel its place now –
the laying on of hands.
Still in the Co-op car park,
it looks like a pause for prayer,
meditation on the Saturday morning
grey-white sky, a moment to bring to mind
the things we’ve done or will,
but no – on the lady’s back
is a baby carrier, a momentarily
well-defined existential burden
not the weight of guilt for past decisions
marring a view of crows around pylons
from Bulmershe pavilion.

The hands are of those adjusting straps,
attending to the wide-eyed bobbing head,
ensuring there’s a cushion for the neck,
reassurance for that suspended time
around the shoulders, watching from behind their mum
benign meandering dogs, families strolling
under amorphous cloud forms
skirting crows around pylons.
The laying on of hands in constant support
of a thousand forms and moments:
milk or tube yoghurts, more strap adjustments,
human thermostats attentive
to all the climate’s subtle modulations.

The child is pre-guilt (forget Original Sin
on the Sussex Coast) – before transgression.
Where is that compelling argument
articulated in a sterile conference hall
on powerpoint from the pulpit,
hopped-up on notes and congregational shrapnel,
that children are born and die sinful?
The laying on of hands by cousins, aunts and brothers
from security to security, with mixed beliefs
in higher forms of providence, prop the oblivious
in the backpack carrier. Does it really take a wafer,
or some symbolic token, to show us sins forgiven?