april *is* cruel but november is worse.

It is my father's 70th birthday today. He was 48 when he died.

I wrote this for him 25 years ago.



Guy Fawkes Night


My father used to play with fire
and would burn anything at hand:
candles, coal, kindling wood, Catherine wheels,
incense in strange brass lamps,
bitter dry nettles and uprooted sedges.
His splendid proud bonfires danced
taller than me and as high as the hedges.

In the fog, in the rain, in the thick Cheshire dark,
my father used to play with fire:
with silver and crimson and indigo sparks
he lit all our faces with glittering light
that burnt and flared and spilt apart
confounding the wet, black night.

In a brown city of shadowed streets
my father lives now in dimlit rooms
surrounded by old lamps and candle ends
and mirrors the color of the moon:
pale shades of the brilliance that he believes gone.
But still through the deep, wet Cheshire gloom
the flames that he kindled blaze on.