Written Early One Morning In Southern France

(for here is poetry’s coast)

Down the hills the moon sinks into purple grapefields

wined in the brown roomy earth of southern France

hock country rich under a relentless sun

but not for many – for here the peasant scrapes,

and the brown hen, Maggie, scratches in the dry, gravelly path,

a religious creature eking a living out of hard rock.

Blue blue are the waters of the running sea

in the slushy sandy beds of the Mediterranean.

Green green riotous green lovely on the splashy film of the eye

rising from those blue waters : in the rich morning

you can pause and wonder what monstrous tide

draws you back to the inhospitable round of daily work in UK crass cities

for here is poetry’s coast where the bronzed fantasies

play out their nude pageantries on Neptune’s blindest shores

where thieves and perverts move.

Dark, dark, and still…..in the hills

the poverty scrapes like our brown hen, but the Mercedes

carries its exhibitionists back to inland camps

where labourers plot to run their considerate kings

to palm-fringed parks on ocean shores.

Considerate reader, do not hymn this poem overmuch.

(from “The Light Of Day (I)”)