E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Poem day before my 56 th birthday   The perfect poem is out of sight, around the bend, Part optic fibre cables being laid underground, Part cherry blossoms staggeringly impermanent, Outrageous as Stravinsky music in the air,   Part finely shattered, gold-re-joined, Satsuma vase, Part so-brazenly broken national laws, Part of the world as it moves around other worlds, Part so personal it embarrasses even itself,   Part cruelly stern as a witchfinder general, Part wonderfully iconoclastic as a witch’s brew, Part cat sleeping, part cat leaping, part paw, Part mouse that got away; part all the pain   We ever knew, and then some, and then some more; The treasure under the floorboards under the stairs, Is being written for someone else’s birthday, By someone else; won’t ever be written, to be true,   Because perfection is the enemy of any friend To what is troubling to imagine, harder to rephrase. That won’t stop me from summoning this one up, Stolen from the mystery shelf where languag

  Snow   In Hampstead for Warfarin blood tests I meet a lady with a cane at coffee after who lives near Keats' house, whose mother knew Louis MacNeice;   whose husband, post-pacemaker, jumps from helicopters to ski; and I recite to her the poem 'Snow' about the sudden world, particular,   indivisible, and we speak of books, how at Easter, she hides them in her garden for her grandchildren, like chocolate eggs; and then she leaves;   and I reflect on the world of strangers, the world of blood, atomic, riven, how this April the coldest winds are being driven to us from Russian forces;   how the white snow looks like surrender being torn up into a polyglot roar of refusal, anger, and civilian defiance; how I am thankful to the invisible maybe   of creation for more hours in this flurry of experiences, talking, being vulnerable, less dead than I could be, than others are, as snow unseasonably becomes real.     Ap