Memoirs In Verse

Listen to: A Soliloquy on the Anga The people of this village, bound in time And place to earth, wave and greet me smiling, And hold me warm in courtesy's embrace. Well-favoured by distance does this village lie, Amid their valley's cool, grass-scented air. The fertile valley stretches broad and long; As morning’s rain gives rise to perfumed mist, With hints of lazy smoke from village fires, The voices of the village men returned From hunting, carry laughter through the hills. Yet what strange practice I witness here Beneath the sandstone hill-top's weathered brow; For watchful dead as if in judgement sit, With skin and tissue dry, like aged parchment, And watch their living kin through sightless eyes. Their bodies have their kin preserved by smoke, As smoke preserves their memory, good and ill, To rest upon a fragile, timber seat. Loved ones recall their lives, their loves and strife, And, as if living still, are they consoled. Oh, when will people grieve, if in their eyes

Listen to:  The Monsoon Break On An Oil Field Our ship’s alone—for many weeks we’ve toiled,  Nurturing those rigs and platforms like flowers, Their roots searching within the Earth for oil, Reaching for that dark ichor of ancient life.   Throughout the days of May, the monsoon gathered,  And compelled Fair Weather to yield her claim, And leave us among the lonely platforms, clustered,    As a flock around their shepherd, watchful but alone. Stiffening breezes proclaimed the summer’s tumult,  And the cumulus obeyed the season’s call to fly   Eastward to the warm monsoon’s embrace, beneath the blue-mantled ocean’s sky. Now, helicopters drone on their final flights like bees,  That dip among the blooms shimmering in the heat, The rhythm of their wings beating in the breeze, To carry home their drowsy weight, replete. A host of nimbus crowds the darkening skies, And rain spills from that brooding refuge In silvered cascades—for millions the joyful reprise  Of each summer’s gift, that life-

Listen to: Siren of the Celebes Perhaps I knew more of the captain's death than the troubled mate's report revealed. I'd seen his tired eyes some days before, and though not last to see the man alive, had I borne witness to his suicide? I looked across the bay beyond the port, and shaded my eyes as the setting sun dipped beyond the dry and distant hills, and I grew chilled, unsettled, as I read, for doubt with guilt conspired in my mind. All captains bear a burden in command;  in time, their lonely duty wears them down. Yet, how could I have better helped the man? Had he conveyed such grim intentions then? What might I learn by hindsight's perfect lens? I turned the page of that report and read on… ‘...1900 hrs: the captain dined with the officers as usual. He chatted with the chief about the spares needed for the engine room, all the usual maintenance and routine things. …2000 hrs: The third mate took over the watch. The captain joined him on the bridge, checked all

Listen to: Medevac This poem is about a medevac operation by two pilots on an oil field west of Mumbai (Bombay). Flying conditions were appalling. The American pilots remained true to their word when they declared many weeks earlier that if we needed them, they would come. The pilots were ex-Vietnam veterans and had flown gunship and medevac operations there. The pilot’s voice crackles, ‘Papa Charlie, this is Kilo Lima,’ the ship’s hove to, plunging and heaving in the writhing swell, ‘ETA your helo-deck, zero three minutes—Are we clear? Over.’ I glance at the lacerated diver, the bastard’s going through hell; at last, the chopper beats towards us in the hot and humid air. ‘Roger, Kilo Lima, deck’s clear. We’ve got a damned heavy sea.’ Now I can hear the percussive drumming of the huey's rotors, ‘Copy that, Papa Charlie—it’s like goin’ into a hot LZ!’ My crew stand ready by the deck as the bird approaches, and the chopper beats above us in the hot and humid air. The wind, salt and r

Listen to: Sallie Doubt, like winter brings, A chill darkness to my day, Yet fair spring emerges.

Listen to: Killing the Cook A rage of hideous screaming stirs and hastens me below, The cook babbles, pleading in a banshee’s cry of dread, A hair’s breadth line of blood beneath his fleshy jaw does show, The heedless, hell-bent riot of sailors soon will have him dead. ‘Drop the butcher’s cleaver before you harm him more!’ The cook’s bloodied neck now caused me great alarm, ‘He steals our food, I’ll carve him into meat and bone!’ ‘Is it true, Cook? Speak man, before you come to harm!’ ‘Tonight, the crew have prawns, and all men eat the same!’ The cook now starts to argue, which the sailor’s cleaver quells, ‘He’s a damned and cursed liar! You might have the prawns, This thieving bastard cook feeds us the heads and shells!’

For Annabel Listen to: Ode to a Pilgrim As I beheld the twilight at the end of day, The trade winds gathered from the south and east, White-crested waves broke hard against the hull,  To cast cascades of spray upon the breeze.  A scattered flight of calling migrant birds  Bore witness to our steady progress south, And called me from my watchful solitude, Beneath the saffron and rose-washed light of dusk. The unruly breeze brought sooty terns to feed And seek their prey among the dancing waves, Then soon the albatross came soaring by,   In silhouette against the twilight sky. As heaven’s amber hues gave way to night, In gusting wind, that pilgrim stayed beside  The ship, to fly within my widest reach,  And hold me fast with her piercing watchful eyes. With skill and sovereign grace our pilgrim Discerned her path across the boundless ocean, While I employed mean time and precious sextant,  To grope my way amidst the sun and stars. My feeble feats of ordinary pilotage,  Were naught to suc

Listen to: Noon at Sea The sun spurns the landsman’s mark, Of the clock tower’s hourly chime,  She keeps to her diurnal path, And to her shining zenith climbs.   I, braced against the deck’s,  Unruly heaving, pitch and roll, Stand bullied by the punching wind, And hold her in my sextant’s eye.  The vernier proves her progress, Towards the summit of the day,  Then I bear witness to her crossing, My meridian at noon that day.

This poem is about a cleaner whom I came to know quite well. One day I asked him what he did during the war, his reply shocked me and I thought his story deserved to be recorded. Listen To: Portrait of a Cleaner The old cleaner bent to his mop and swabbed the washroom floor. ‘You surely must have been there, Alf, what did you do in the war?’ He was small, silver-haired and stooped, an invisible man to most. He rarely spoke, a quiet man, in simple work engrossed. He looked long at the mirrored wall, when a younger man replied, ‘Oh, I had a busy war, boy,’ and then spoke on with pride. ‘I was a miner here, in Pontypridd,’ his lilting voice compelled me, to pause, to stand and listen well, and so he told his story. ‘Over two hundred of us left, we volunteered to fight ’gainst Franco and the fascists, to help freedom in her plight.’ He was no lettered Thomas, but made my time stand still, his were the annals of working men, and like the mariner, held me by his will. ‘We came home, beat, in

Listen to: An English Boarding School She said I “must get away from” him. Now, fifty years later I’m reading his diaries, page by page. Perhaps I’ll find out soon why I needed to escape. My new home, a boarding school, was ‘character-building’, they said; perhaps you know the type? Regimented and authoritarian. Our spartan, cold dormitories reeked of sweat-stale boys, or suffered the wild west wind, blasting through uncurtained windows. Our cold and cheerless walls echoed with the relentless clatter of shoes on cold, stone floors. My constant reminder of the austerity I endured. Dull and bovine seniors, Empire-quality demented thugs beat, harassed and humiliated us, sometimes naked, under freezing cold showers, from dawn until dusk. Under a crippling lack of welfare, I longed for someone to be decent, to know me and care. Once vibrant and curious, I withered like a fire-blighted pear. Fear gnawed at my stomach and tore at my mind. Often I hid, alone and alert, ready to flee at unfatho