WHEN YOU'RE WEARY ...

A road far travelled is a
Road never travelled enough:
Beyond the horizon
Where the dust of the track
Colours the fading embers
Of the sinking blood-red sun,
And a lonely heron lazily
Beats her path to home;
There in the dying moments
of the day the urge for rest
Mingles with the irrepressible
Anticipation of tomorrow -
Adventure meets exhaustion
And the deep-hued heart of
Africa beckons through
The pulsing of cicadas and
The star-spattered hours of
Darkness to herald the joyful
Coming of the dawn
And of another day....


Africa under my skin
September 2011

CHANCE ENCOUNTER

Such stories to the lizard
Must belong! Clandestine,
Waiting, hidden in her ancient
Cleft between the deep-hewn
Rock of ancient empire, and
Byzantine church. Tales, not
Tails, of power, whispers of
Passion and murmurings
Of fear – she hears them all.

And as the town is sacked and
Then abandoned, she claims
Her space again, and later welcomes
Pirates to her parlour, booty
And bounty both illicit stored.

Come soldiers, bishops, priests
And fisherfolk across the years.
Our lizard stays her course through
Changing DNA, and still is here
To welcome tourists in the heat:
Most to ignore, but some to step
Aside and wonder at her welcome:
Side’s watchful ancient, armoured,
Gentle, scaly confidante.


A quiet moment in a shaded ruin
-not quite alone!
Turkey, September 2011

WHO’S HOME, WHO’S HISTORY?

Wavelets lapping on fallen
Corinthian columns tell
Of empires lost, of flaunted
Pride brought low: for here
Stood ancient Side (See-Day) port
And Roman bastion, high-walled
Against a deeper, hidden fear.

But of this fallen column,
What is known? Glistening in
The umbral early evening
Light, what secrets does it
Long to tell? Of him who,
Slave-lashed, hewed it from
Its distant marble home?
Of them who dragged it, mile
On mile, with many falling by
The way, with only sun-baked dust
To honour as their epitaph?

Of them, to praise some secretly
Derided Caesar, who carved it
To an elegance where beauty
Got the better of defiance? Or indeed of
Those who hauled it then aloft, a column
Stately in its honour of Apollon,
God of the higher arts, and of the Sun?

But later, then, the anger
Burns and boils: insurrection,
The scuttling of the fleet,
The sacking of the city and
Its holy, self-aggrandising
Pantheon: the answer to the
Hubris of the gods.

So how do I remember,
How re-learn, the history
Of the classics? For this is Asia
Minor, home of the dead -
Of empires come and gone;
Strange home too, and
Stranger grand-parental rooting,
To one of countless fallen soldiers
Wasted on Gallipoli’s barren,
Blackened, shrapnel-tortured earth.

Home of another kind, to the living
Daughters and sons of Ataturk, a
Nation caught between her neighbours –
Greece, Syria, Iraq, Iran (and troubled
Kurdistan): her peoples holding faith and
Ambiguity beneath the azure beauty of
This sky and sea – as I with them add
One more tear of loss, and hope
Amidst this middle-earthen
Cradle of the world.

On holiday in Side,
Anatolyan Pamphilia,
Turkey:
September 2011