King’s Square York

The square is transient space
where every hour
a thousand purposes
collide and split away.

Yet some moments linger,
hover in shifting light
among the trees,
settle in the pavement cracks.

That weeping ash
taller than rooftops
grew from graves,
its slow roots stabbing down
between the tombstones,
piercing eye sockets and yellowed bones,
and sucking nourishment from
the clammy loam

Grave yards beg a church
and one stood here,
where tourists take selfies, lick ice creams
and children stamp their feet
to scare the birds.

Crammed between the slaughtering yards,
the butchers’ shops and narrow alleyways
an ungainly barn, all awkward angles,
a stumpy tower.

The church of Christ the King

a place to mark time

the saints in their proper seasons:
Advent, Christmas, Lent and Corpus Christi
each celebrated with prayer and candles
and ashes on good Friday.

And sinners had their moment too
where every day was different
and every day the same

sprinkling at the font
rings before the altar
corpses by an open grave.

All kept in proper fashion
and all this for eight hundred years.

Now jugglers mark their sacred space with rope
where blood and incense once hung in the air
and where our forbears bowed their heads in prayer
a bunch of skinny kids are smoking dope.

Roman oil lamp

An awkward, graceless, hand made thing,
pot bellied, with a spout
and glazed in muddy brown.

It was a gift.
Who from, I can’t recall.
I kept it on my desk for years.

I’d pick it up sometimes
and feel the grittiness
that lay beneath the glaze,
marvel at the clumsy spout,
all caked with soot,
where once the flame had flickered.

I gave it away to one
whose life was shadowed then
and cold.
An amulet against the dark
two hundred decades old.

The past, the future….and NOW!

I’m a museum piece. An old dinosaur.I was born at the end of World War 2. One advantage of having lived quite a long time and kept most of your braincells, is that you can get an overview of things. It struck me the other day that I’ve lived through three distinct phases- three periods of time which each had their specific focus.

For the first fifteen years of my life the focus was on the past. The war still exerted a massive influence over day to day life- sweets were rationed and Britain was victorious- and broke. You know the old black and white films they show in the afternoon ? Well life really was like that- lived in a world of shifting greys. Clothes were grey- and if they were really white, then they didn’t stay white long, because the air in every city was sooty from coal fires.

The cultural focus of the time was firmly on assimilating the war which had just finished.Films like “The Colditz Story” “ Reach for the Sky” and “ The Dam Busters” were meat and drink to a lad of ten. I couldn’t get enough of them. Cultural attitudes to women (especially in films) were dreadful. English women only came in two varieties – “Gorblimey Ducks ! Britain can take it ! “cheerful cockney, and the fraught, tense middle class wife of “ Brief Encounter.” Divorce did happen, but was never mentioned. No-one mentioned homosexuality. Ever.

You could say that it was a period dominated by social class and a constipated moral code- but you have to remember that there were other things to think about- recent memories which had to be worked through.

That started to change in the early 1960’s. The Cuban Missile Crisis jolted the world into realising that nothing could be the same again.

It was a sobering thought- but it was also an exciting one. Cultural changes thrived under the nuclear umbrella. Wilson’s “ white heat of technology speech” promised untold technological advances; there was more money around; BBC2 arrived, and colour tv. Britain even had a space program. No more black and white documentaries about knitting in the Hebrides. The Pill, in the mid 60’s, turned sexual morality around.

Paradoxically, a world which lived under the constant threat of extinction, looked to the future. New universities were founded and I was lucky to go to one of them. The first moon landing really did unite the world, if only for a short time; fashion and music exploded into colour and sound.

I don’t really know when this wave of optimism and joy began to break- some time in the mid seventies, I suppose. What had been new became cliche; money bought out optimism and gave us an inferior- and more expensive version..

Then the communication revolution picked up speed. By the way, read “ The Medium is the Message” by Marshall McLuhan” – it still has things to say.

My dad bought me a typewriter when I went to college. Then I switched to an electric typewriter- then an Amstrad Word Processor (76k on a disk-wow!) then I moved on to a Mac Classic ( worked like a dream for years and then served as a doorstop)- and after that, a series of Macs. Each one could do more than the one before. Each one arrived in the shop faster than the one before.

Now we have an iBook, an iPad, an iPod , an iPhone, and a Kindlefire. The late Steve Jobbs would be proud of me.

I have the world at my fingertips. No more nukes. An open, more liberal society. Hundreds of tv channels at the press of a finger.

And yet, because I’m a grizzly, awkward old codger, I am not happy.

Where are we looking ? We’re certainly not looking back at the past- and I think that’s a good thing- but we’re not looking to the future either. We’re stuck in the NOW.

Take Twitter.Ok- it’s a useful messaging system- but when I look at it unreeling, endlessly, in the present and fading now, there seems to be a lot playground bullying and general bad temper. Why are they so rude to each other ? I wonder. And I can’t help feeling that a lot of the anger is synthetic.

Look at television- every new programme is a cheaper version of every older programme. No surprises, ever- that might upset the ratings

I think that what I’m trying to say is that the MEDIA- all of them, have become more important than the meaning. The message is no longer important- the messenger rules. McLuhan was right all those years ago.

So there you are- three periods history, driven by different visions- the past, the future, and now.

Let me know what you think.