Robert Cole

So, that’s our Mystery. We’re about done.We’ve spoken verses about what went before,drawn versions of the present day, and runwith visions of the stuff that lies in store. Away to the West, sunset orange cloudsare reddening with gold and silver dues.My hopes, our hopes, lie East where crazy crowdsof age-old stars are peeking through the blues. One day they too will go, or be transformed,torn…

Being Jack ‘n’ Diane in #fablesGNW

Nichola Woolley Nichola Woolley is to play Diane in ‘Fables from the Great North Wood’ by Robert Cole @brockleymax on 3 June. #fablesGNW Michael Sookhan Michael Sookhan is to play Jack in ‘Fables from the Great North Wood’ by Robert Cole @brockleymax on 3 June. #FablesGNW TICKETS: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fables-from-the-great-north-wood-tickets-150007758243

Beth

Westminster People

Look, over there, it’s the Village people bursting through doors of burning perceptions, lost in the trappings of process and protest, spinning in self-serving circles of wishes, prowling, confusing and failing to listen with convictions they want to believe in.

With convictions they want to believe in, look, over there, it’s the Village people, prowling, confusing and…

Dressington Avenue, SE4

Lichen

Beneath the lifting London mist, the worn coat feels wintry heat spread across its back.

In the trees, on the walls and rooftiles, sun-green morning lichen attends the change of season.

The End of Winter

Crocus, Hilly Fields, London.

The End of Winter

All of a sudden, the bitterness is gone.

The air is still bare, the grasses grey, the leaves sheathed and the blossoms’ eyelids closed,

but there’s warmth in the pale afternoon and for the first time since September the light is surprising.

@thetimes, 28 Jan 2019

with apols to @hwallop @callummay @patrick_kidd

Alex de Piro O’Connell, has siblings with names like Othello, Ambrym and Minnie, Labna and Bimbi, and her fava-ful chickpea, Falafel.

J A Cole (1920-2005)

“Why, I’ll see thee at Philippi,” my Dada said to me. Me? I dodged in alarmed bewilderment the stag-ey words filled with sure intent. Dada looked me straight in the eye.

I’d just joined the family crowd. “Hi,” I’d offered and nothing else. Why was I addressed? This satisfied lament — all the stuff about Philippi —

ward-sick Dada gave to me. I got it two days later…

J A Cole (1920-2005)

“Why, I’ll see thee at Philippi,” my Dada said to me. Me? I dodged in alarmed bewilderment the stag-ey words filled with sure intent. Dada looked me straight in the eye.

I’d just joined the family crowd. “Hi,” I’d offered and nothing else. Why was I addressed? This satisfied lament — all the stuff about Philippi —

ward-sick Dada gave to me. I got it two days later…

Silence falls on the sunlit square of turf outside Dartford’s library. A soldier with a rifle, all plinth and age-stained bronze, looks down. Poppy people stand with closed-eye stares. November colours shuffle in the trees.

The silence is the thing: the unfilled gap between. I think of dugout silence, the fire step, the Woodbines whiled away; the rat-lice trench-foot days that screwed the minds w…

Lt Jon Wesley Davies

Emma, Tilly, Jojo, Maurice and Beth 19 Feb 2012

No prayers nor bells: we shoot in scuttling shells up and down the line. We go and return, passing Arras, Béthune and Neuve Chapelle, the Bois de Noulette, Messines and the Marne.

From Calais, past Flesquieres and Verdun, with only the Alps in mind, we hurtle through demented days, dusks gilded by sun and black rain, in skirmishing battles of the road. Through grey-day pallor we see the brown, wide-open acres where they fought; and sense the eerie emptiness reploughed.

At night, headlamps flare and brake lights bleed sudden fear of hasty death into my heart, spearing the tensioned tedium like a dart whose aim is true, then redirected, then gone.

All around here they died for us; now they lie under stones etched and erected to the left and right, at Mametz and Loos; at Langemarck, Vendhuile, Cambrai and Lens; on either side of this paid-for auto-route, dotting countryside, cresting horizons.

Between Le Touret and Richebourg L’Avoue, on land once used by field ambulances, thirteen thousand men of no known resting place are remembered. It’s ground holding my great uncle Jack, too. There, inside a fence, under mown lawns, lies John Wesley Davies, 31, of the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

Further on, teams of gleaming windmills now stand where once cold trenches were dug. In place of mud and bloody hell, turbines mourn in silence: generating clean warmth, dry light, hot food. These are monuments also: testaments to doomed youth on euro no man’s land.

In volleys to and fro, we, the fragments of dead men’s shattered futures, pass fast and glide, stuttering only at péage queues. In our comfortable distress, our health and holidays, our years, we have the breath they did not have. In our petty rages we drown the fading echoes of their cries, their tender patience, their lingering goodbyes.

Peak Green

I see Young George in the kitchen window. He’s playing keepie-uppie on the grass: kicking and flicking and watching in stoccatoes of concentration. He’s changed since last time I saw him. Before, he was scoring self-commentated goals and finessing his celebration routine. Now, he’s grown across the shoulders, in calf, chest and crown.

In June, the youthful year, warmed by soft rain and…

Normally, I’m full of anxieties – or if not full, full enough. Routinely, now, the London days are easy and free, non-threatening, reassuring and calm; and the trains, the petrol, the rope and heights are covered by a rising tide of balm. The waters will, of course, fall back again. For now? I’ll savour lifejoy’s summonses.

Dungeness, May 2018

Edwina is my rinkydink. She and I walk a fine line: hours at a time. She talks, listens, and watches me cry hours at a time. Hours at a time.

We’ve discussed my ingrowing multi-layered sadnesses, the malfunctioning neurones, the crosses and noughts, the things I fear, the petrol, the rope, the heights, and the trains.

The scrappy form paper I’m about to sign records my treatment plan. It précises

The morning fog lay heavy on the hill above my house; the frost sat in the grasses, on the benches, and in the trees. I noticed chestnut buds, firmly formed, shapely but not sticky; crispy orange shopping bags caught in twisted bramble thorns; and the muffling of ordinary noises of the day. The sun was there, invisible, above the circle of stones: I sniffed the cold, looked round again, and…