Idea store's Poetry Night, Bethnal Green library;

3rd July, 2025

This is the poem that I read out at The Idea Store's Poetry Night. 

The Girl on the Green Hill

Green, the colour green, the green of vegetation, the green of the grass. This colour reminds me of a strange, semi mystical vision. A mystery that, if I sit quietly, I can conjure up, like stage scenery, revealed by the drawing of a blue velvet curtain, drawn back in a dramatic silence as the audience of one, myself, seated in the theatre of the memory stares at in amazed wonder.

I was in the South of France, 1975, grape picking. I’d spend all day, sunrise to sunset, walking down one row of grape vines and back down another, filling large plastic baskets with the black bunches of Beaujolais grapes. They had to be picked at a certain time of year which was the job of the farmer to decide upon with absolute precision. Too early and they would not be ripe, too late and they would be damaged by the arrival of winter. I had finished for the day. It was twilight, a deepening, darkening sky began to fill the valleys, dark and sweet like the evening. I had eaten in the farm house at the long table that the farm hands sat around, the farmer’s wife went round the table dishing out the food, reaching over the shoulder and emptying the big ladle of stew onto each ones each plate. Large bowls of greens drenched in oil sat up and down the hefty wooden table in the dining room where we were fed generously, not forgetting the bottles of grape juice that filled our glasses like a river.

One day I then went out for a walk, down the valley and looking up at the big green hill that rose above the ground like a green moon rising above the horizon and there on the slope of the overwhelming greenery sat the girl, lost in her thoughts; lost in herself; lost in her journey from Canada to France. Alone, lonely, surrounding herself with the ghosts of her past; with a tangible emotional loss that she seemed to be lost in. Had she received an unhappy letter; had she lost a friend, or a boyfriend; had life cut her off from her roots out here in St. Laurent, France. The green hill surrounded her, bled into her until she became as green as the hill and then she seemed to disappear from sight. And now I am sitting here wondering still, who was she? What was she doing there? Who was she?

After completing a creative writing course at Bow Idea Store I was invited to read something at their yearly event that took place at Bethnal Green library; on the 3rd July 2025. I had a very good time and enjoyed the event which included singers and a jazz band.

Time stops

Time stops

When you want it to

Like a porcelain bull

Broken into pieces

Time stops

When you want it to stop

Sinking into the lake of bitumen

Like a steam engine

12 o’clock

Is a number

That floats backwards

Into the trees

It is a number

That sits on top

Of a shadow

Time stops

Like it was made to

Nothing ever fits

Into equal parts

Everything

Makes its own time

He looked Spanish

He looked Spanish

But he was more Indian

He looked carnival

But he was more gypsy

In a white shirt

And a beautifully

Embroidered shoulder bag

The way he slips by

Un-noticed

A man too exotic

For our eyes

Dream Friend

The heart favours

A flat landscape

High up on the plain

The edges are blurred

Cloudy, like cotton wool

And in the centre

Water from someone’s eyes

 In the water

A memory

I have not yet collected

And what the heart favours

Appears later in a dream

At first you will see no-one

Night after night

This new landscape is without people

Then out of the blue

You ask a question

And a dream friend appears

With a mouth full of sunflowers