This poem is one that I regard as being one of my finest pieces.

The Masquerade, 2019

Eugene and the masquerade have gone.
Alone, I face the desolate whiteness of my empty sheets
and think back to the night when faces shone
as voices bubbled thoughts over dancing feet.
Now, these black lines resurrect the memories
of faces and masks of the night
spiralling in a room to the rhythms of delight.

A chance meeting with an Irish youth
who spoke of poetry and love
his mind hidden behind the mask of a beautiful face.
It was a dance of actors as they played their parts
in the drama of their mutable lives.
I see you Eugene: your sun-freckled face,
your Connemara clothes,
you speaking love of poetry
for its own sake.

Now I sit alone, facing the desolation
of my empty sheets, as thinkers must,
confronting the chilling challenge
of pauperous paper
‘alone, important and wise.’
Now returned, fired by an exultant dance,
fuelled by the frenzies in my mind,
confronting experience with my pen,
capturing, before it dies, the fleeting chance.
Facing my ghosts and demons in the dark
by wielding my nibbed rhyme
to slay the shibboleth of beauty
knowing it was but a moment
in the long conflict of time.

Beauty is made from dust, Eugene,
and to dust your face must return.
Into these sheets, your memory, I wind
the decaying remains of the passing day.
Your youthful words were noble in the mind,
brief poetry blown, by the wind of time, away.
Your face now wrinkled, grey, like mine,
that moment turned to ashes of inevitable decay.

I left the dance, where strangers spoke
of poetry, behind their masks,
like actors in a play
acting out their momentary parts
recorded now by a writer with a pen,
imprisoning in words,
a chance occurrence captured
and unravelled on the sheets
the record of a youth long dead
resurrected and turned to stone
as I carve your alabastrine shrine.

Why do we love beauty?
The soul is seen beneath
the masked realities of life.
We must be heroes to grasp
the fleeting glimpses of a face
before it’s blown away by slow decay.
The image of a beautiful face –
is that worth pulling from the graves of change?
Can the pen cheat death?
Bring back one moment from the lime
the death-dark, grave-grey sepulchre of time?

I battle with the demons of my past
severing the Gorgon’s head with my pen.
I resurrect the dancers from the dead
bring back to life the moment when
a youth spoke of his love of poetry
for its own sake.

You, I have immortalised, Eugene,
carved with my pen your monument,
honouring the moment when
I chanced upon your life
and loved the beauty of your words and face.

But soft! I think I scent the morning air
as the white sheets spiral towards an end.
I can be as cold and passionate as the dawn.

Eugene is asleep now
in the arms of his beautiful friend
his eyes closed, as in the sleep of death.
The dancers have departed,
their masks discarded,
but I alone continue with the dance,
here with my isolated shrouds,
laying to rest the monuments of death,
immortalising one poetic man
chiselling out the features of a face
to represent the stature of a mind
of a youth who existed once
who spoke of poetry with grace
a youth who was but a dream
a youth with a hidden face.
Now I am old, I inter into these lines
an image as cold and passionate as the dawn.

Poems from my juvenile years

The content previously on this page has been deleted. This is to save space. Previously, on this page, dated 9th October 2021 were poems written I was very young – Finity, Waiting 1965, Aphrodite 1965, Artemis 1966 and some discussion of my longer poems.

last updated 3rd September 2023.

1964 – poems by a working-class kid

3rd October 2019

I was thirteen, going on fourteen, a kid growing up in a working-class city. I wrote poems. Before 1964, I had written only eight pieces but this rose to 28 in the year in question. Not the kind of poetry you would expect any teenager to write and, especially, not one who attended a secondary modern school in a working-class city. Take for example this piece,

Moonlight poetry, 1964

The sweet scent of a Jasmine bush
drifted, like a spirit, across the still night air.
The dark world was silent:
the trees did not rustle,
the insects were quiet.
A declining moon
hung in the South-East
and edged the land in a pure white light.

I sat under a Beech tree
and looked at the moon.
Its light hypnotised me,
I gazed transfixed
my eyes unmoving.
Slow, slowly I began to fill up with
that silver moonshine.

When my soul was full,
it began to move.
Near, nearer,
close, closer,
went my soul and on to the moon.
There it merged with the white ball,
it sank into it and was gone forever.
I am now without a soul.

Not a theme or a set of sentiments typical of a teenage boy whose only access to poetry was the shelves of a public library. Back then, I knew no one else who wrote poetry and certainly none of my classmates ever did anything like that. They were too busy playing football and chasing girls. Activities I refused. My head was buried in books about oriental mysticism and Western philosophy. Subjects not taught in the school I went to. I continued to write poetry for most of my life. Now, in my seventieth year, I continue to edit what I call my ‘Juvenilia.’ I continue to write poems. I am very happy that nearly everything I have written survives and fills two volumes of my collected anthology of poetry.

If any of my readers are thinking of throwing away their juvenile out-pourings, I would strongly urge them not to. Being able to look back at what I wrote fifty-five years ago is not only very pleasurable but also tells me a great deal about the kind of child I was back in those now far off days. Sometimes I read through my early work and wonder at it; I wonder how it could possibly have been written by the kind of teenager I was.