Bairagibazar's in Bangladesh, in the Northland they call Sylhet,
And when the monsoon blows and the flood tide flows,
It's chiefest production is sweat.
There's a causeway ridge and a box-steel bridge
And a view for a thousand miles,
And if you've passed that way on the bull-sale day,
You'll remember a thousand smiles.
For the land is wide and the topsoil deep,
And the Surma runs clear to the stars;
Kushiara's sweep still settles my sleep,
In my dreams of Bairagibazar.

By the evening star I have wandered far 'cross a blasted and barren plain,
And the hoof-sculpt steel which is brusing my heel,
Is binding its life with pain;
The smoke lines lie smudged against the sky
And hang like haloes or crowns,
For these islet Grams in this dying land
As the greens fade to sepia browns.
For the land is bone and the topsoil sere,
And my Surma lies barren and bled.
Kushiara in fear left not one lonely tear
For the blood of my country is fled.

Sitting here alone last night,
I dreamed I heard the door,
And heard excited footsteps light,
A'patter on the floor;
I glanced up from my lonely book,
And started from my chair.
And as I gazed with keening look,
I saw my children there .....

Their faces in the corridor,
Their dancing, shining hair.
Their silent laughter by the door,
A happy, spectral pair;
Their pain-free smiles told me their time,
Was not as yours or mine.
And what I saw was mem'ries mime,
Andrew, six and Edward, nine.

My eyes grew blurred and misty then,
My hand pulled back today,
I'd seen my happy, little men,
But from two years away;
Our Christmases seemed joyful then
Those fragile, trucial days.
But they can never come again,
Not in those old, false ways.

The frantic storm-tossed gulls,
Reveal the phantom wind;
Like dust in a thumbprint.
The thrashing salt grasses tell
Where it kisses the ground.

Old Cley slants four fingers
Against a leaden sky.
A sturdy, strong old man,
With a fleeting power,
To steal from the marsh wind.

And the flood tide still runs
Up through these reed, mud creeks
And surf spit flies grey on the wind:
They tell Old Cley the deep tales
Of the ancient temples.

...who sought to enslave the wide sea;
Wood henges of a long forgotten land.
They wooed the cold sea and she came
Like the covetous hawk,
Wings spread to have and to hide.

Old Cley's way is not to own,
Nor yet the salted wind's.
But like strong lovers they
Whirl in each other's arms
And fling each other free.

In the market square in Keswick,
In the Java Coffee place,
Where the chocolate fountain tumbles
And I stuff my happy face.
A diabetic desperado
Eating sugar-laden cakes,
Drinking coconut cortado
In the lovely Northern Lakes.

And Zoë’s out there running
Or climbing up a fell,
Bursting sinews, lungs, capillaries,
While I nibble on a shell.
A cream horn cornucopia
In the Java coffee place.
A Kaffe-Kuchen-based utopia
While Zoë runs her sodden race.

And, yes, coffee in the post-noon
Might seem a wee bit German,
But I’ve spent a chilly morning
Swimming like a hirsute Merman.
In the lovely Crummock Water
That is clear and cold as ice …..
So should I? P’raps I oughter
….. one more cream cake would be nice.

While for Zoë to run up a mountain,
Or to climb a precipitous fell,
Is just swell! But to me a warm fountain
Of choc’late will do just as well!
My brisk, morning dip in cold Crummock
Was bracing, but now I’d much rather
Fill my whole afternoon (and my stomach)
With the cakes and the coffee at Java!

A dirty, grey street in the garrison town,
On a grimy and yellowing cheap manhole cover,
A brilliant lemon carnation: thrown down?
Or laid, with the tears of a desolate lover?

The derelict shell of the Art Deco shrine,
Where the lovers would wait in the sun and the rain,
Watches the flower with eyes boarded and blind,
And for one precious moment, it kindles a flame.

That perfect carnation, its colour affording
The shabby and shuttered old cinema’s walls,
A bitter-sweet mem’ry of polychrome hoardings
Long-gone from the Odeon’s entrance and halls.

The bright splash of colour defiant and brave
On that drab, dirty pavement, the light fading fast.
A small gift of thanks for the joy that you gave
And the sanctuary then, from the dark of the past.

The elbow in the stream was just the place
For the gander.  From where he stood,
Great reaches, either way, were laid,
Bare, revealed to his imperious gaze.
Each evening, calm, serene he watched.
Silent sentinel against the dying of the light.

Across the stream from where he watched the day
Slip slowly into dusk, we sat
Most evenings, sipped a glass of wine
And talked or simply let our stress recede;
Flowing out and down across the grass,
Dissolving and dispersing in the healing stream.

This small thatched house has also stood and watched
A hundred years of stillness:  watched
As season's changed, the river's flood
And ebb:  and all the healing powers of time,
Stored in each timber of the house,
Massage with loving touch, refresh our souls,
We weary travellers through this time,
Who also come to sit and watch.

Our scent on the Suffolk air,
Slant-wise down the wind and hill,
And you stand as stone, stock-still,
Fizzy with lightning life, black tipped, russet hair,
You bunch for flight, your muscles fill...

But though you turn to go,
You pause, you meet my eye,
Though all your world screams fly, fly,
You stay.  Eternities between our senses flow,
The great clay tilts; time freezes, as do I.

Your line was young when Belin made the day,
There when Nemain ruled the night,
Boudicca's hounds gave tongue, you heard their bay,
In ancient dawns you danced and boxed,
And dreamed the coming of the light.

Your kind was wise in timeless forest tales,
Belov'd you travelled with them in their tears.
The blackbird ships that dipped and filled their sails
With westward wind, bore you away,
A memory maintained for later ears.

Are you the Maker's perfect work of art?
From tips of topless ears to fleeting toes,
Explosive thews and velvet, bifurcated nose.
Deep eyes reveal your clever mind, your constant heart;
Between our eyes empathic wisdom flows.

Then, swift as light you're gone. I gaze on air
And moving heat in high-hedged Suffolk lane.
And time returns, moves forward with my heart again.
But you remain, fixed in my mind, forever there
You, fastest flash down time's unbroken chain.

The wind off a grey steel sky,
The wind keen across the marshes,
Whistling, bending through the sedge grasses.
Solitary in the fenland, I
Walk and smoke, as light passes.

Lead, quicksilver swollen Ouse,
Plovers hurled in desperate flight,
Three matches get the fag alight.
Draw it deep as I abuse
My status as a neophyte.

My post-confirmation retreat,
In winter, Hemingford Grey.
A soaking of prayer and half a day
For meditation, furtive and discreet,
And twenty 'Number 6' to light the way.

The lay-bys where the road once ran,
Now most the haunt of burger van,
Where paler, older asphalt lies,
And where the Dixie flag still flies,
Recall Art Deco motoring days,
Trunk roads, lanes and lost by-ways.
Our straighter roads, less lovely than
The lay-bys where the road once ran.

The smell of summer afternoons,
Hot rubber, tarmac, petrol fumes,
And twenty nicer spots sped past
Before our driver stopped at last.
That picnic fixed in time perhaps
Because my father’s chair collapsed,
And Gala Pie, boiled eggs and ham,
And lay-bys where the road once ran.

Those haunted lay-bys of my youth
Speak happy lies and dismal truth,
And memories of those dead-end runs
Return to me ….. and do my sons
Remember still my old MG?
And cramped day-trips they made with me?
When I was lost and sadder than
Those lay-bys where our roads once ran.

The morning mist is lying in the valley of the Brett,
And a golden sun is breaking through and rising.
A cock pheasant’s calling in the dewy, green new wheat,
And young summer waits beyond the pale horizon.

Through fuzzy new-growth greens, one still glimpses winter browns
On the branches of the bushes and the trees.
But a week from now those browns will be swallowed up and drowned
By a thousand different shades of new-born leaves.

The cow parsley’s higher than the little muntjac’s eye
And new nettles nip my ankles as I’m walking.
And the frantic skylarks shriek as they flitter in the sky,
And my world feels full of promise this May morning.

Coming past Rise Farm up the hill to Hill House lane,
The roadside colours take my breath away.
There’s a brilliant Golden Rain, a copper bush I cannot name,
Then the reds and snowy whites of hedgerow May.

Preston’s lack of any buses and a halfway decent bandwidth,
And the anarchy of building sites’ confusion,
Are more than compensated by a Biddle’s Sourdough sandwich
And our Preston hill-top’s blazing May profusion.

But the world outside my Suffolk is a roiling thundercloud.
War in Europe, global warming, cost of living.
The world is run by gangsters, stupid, populist and proud.
And our fragile peace and order’s almost riven …..

I will focus on the beauty of my narrow, Suffolk land.
Withywindle’s Vale, my bastion, redoubt.
For there is all I need of beauty here and clay, not shifting sand
And I think that’s what life’s always been about.

When it's cold and the snow and the wind blow down,
Through the streets of our ancient Lavenham town.
When a blazing log fire keeps away the night's cold,
And its lights play on roof beams a thousand years old,
I choose the deep reds of the Sumaridge blend,
And the food and the friendship at our Number 10.

When the sun shrinks the flow in the stream of The Brett,
When the ladies perspire and the gentlemen sweat,
When my throat gets so dry from the heat and the dust,
There's one place I must be and I know that I must,
Take a dew-beaded glass of the Sumaridge White,
In Number 10's courtyard, sun-dappled and bright.

When red letter days fall and I seek a location,
To gather the clan for some great celebration,
I know where to go so return yet again,
To Jo, Rod and friends at my own Number 10;
So a Wayfarer's toast to the Bellingham Turner,
And their Number 10, Sumaridge, Suffolk taverna.

Like gems they flash in towering halls
Of memory's vaults, from long dark walls
They sing their songs, recite their lays,
Of bittersweet and long dead summer days.

Some flash like diamonds, hard and cold,
And some, like Suffolk Cyder's gold,
Have been restored, and dance again
In sun and sunken Suffolk lane;

And some return to tear at me,
Bright silver sixpence, cold beneath the tree.

We stand against this massive Suffolk sky,
We walk these grassy paths as season's fall,
The fox and hare and hind and you and I,
And golden memories spread, renew their call
With every mile we walk, re-gilt again,
'Till only warmth and love and gold and you remain.

We touch our past with this our summer solstice pagan rite,
We dance, we break our booties, roll our rears,
Eavis impersonators in the hay-scent Suffolk night,
We quaff our Suffolk cyder, New World Wines, like summer tempests flow our beers.

Mat's systems smoke to hard-house heavy drum and bass,
Our electronic shaman leaps and writhes within his decked and dazzling shrine,
Our mountain-mighty music man transported to a state of pulsing grace,
Archbishop of the church of groove, he shifts our funk-soul paradigm.

Not Glastonbury this, not frowned upon by Merlin's ancient tor,
Nor can we gaze from here on Westland's mist-girt levels,
Suffolk's Great Clay supports our dancers' grassy floor,
And Suffolk's massive sky here cloaks our summer revels.

Pavilions in the hay-field ring the scents of roasting meats,
The night draws on, pale thoughts of light the eastern skies adorn,
And Mat's night music mellows, rises to the rising sun and greets
The day, Pan's Prelate, Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

The gilded barge, the tree-clad slope,
The soft, white hair of soft white older folk;
The fawn-clad gents, the ladies low-slung busts,
Their regiment, The Kings Own National Trust.

Possessed of chair and tea room table place,
Mistrustful of my cheerful smiling face,
Belligerent and bellicose with disapproving stare,
The fierce old duffers misinterpret, tut and glare …..

….. I do not want to be old before I am wise,
I do not want to see the world
Through Daily Mail eyes.

I will not rant for young joy’s removal,
I will not have that puckered mouth
Of disapproval.

Lord, give me that kindly smile of toleration,
That slow turn of the head, that warmth
Of moderation.

I will not rage against the dying of the light,
I will not mind going gentle
Into that good night …..

The great hall lies empty,
With a sullen, coiled quiet.
And we know, on stand,
Away in the morning mist,
Are the foe, fuming,
Their days of sun regretted memory now,
Returned to a dismal, damp dawn.

We are the thin, grey line,
Waiting in the thin, grey light,
Waiting to receive the venting of spleens,
The foul-mouthed abuse, from the holiday flight.

We are the vilified few, the vigilant few,
Waiting in the great, dead hall,
Deemed "unfit for purpose" so come!
Meet with our mediocrity, our gall!

This hall was beautiful,
A lovely void, when built.
Great, strong, beetling insect limbs,
Suspending graceful roof curves,
Geodesic, geometric, weightless.
A vast hall marvelously
Bounded by light.

Then, like squalid cancers
Cramped and crabbed, came sub-spaces,
Offices and booths and desks
And shops, shabby, shoddy, mean,
Sprawled, crouching, squat like bloated toads,
Their drab functions heresies,
In such a hall.

These damper, crisper early mornings
These later, russet, misty dawnings
The smell of new-mown grass is gone
Now woodsmoke heralds frosts anon.
But here, reflect on what has been
Recall midsummer landscapes seen:
The rapeseed, dazzling, in the dawn,
The golden sway of ripening corn.
The thick green grass, the fat, slow cows,
Those darkly verdant rippling boughs.
The sun-filled vast blue Suffolk sky,
Our rills and rivers running dry.
The startling, rare blue linseed field,
The early browns of rapeseed yield,
The golden silk of barley’s wave,
The bounteous pledge these mem’ries gave.
That promise, seen now, gathered here
In silos, barns and Suffolk beer.
Those darling buds of May now all are fled,
And autumn’s mellow fruitfullness now lies ahead.
Give thanks for this our harvest home,
For this, our lovely temperate zone.
Thanks for the immortal, guiding hand
And this our living, giving land.

No lakes, no mountains, nor
Calf-sapping shingle on the Dunwich Suffolk shore,
No RSI stone paving pavement nor,
That endless Brighton straight to crucify her core …..

Today she runs my heart’s land here,
The gentle Suffolk farmland, woods and tracks so dear,
She runs beneath our massive Suffolk sky, blue-clear,
Between the happy roads of mine and Mr Pickwick’s yesteryear …..

I recall a Suffolk summer then,
Four Thatches, Rosedean, Preston long ago.
Four grubby little savages back when,
We rode the Tri-ang steeds of Ean Stowe.

Running down the songlines of my life,
Those songs of golden joy; or songs that wield a whetted knife.
Songlines sprung from Chedburgh, Rede and Preston days,
Those bittersweet but lovely melancholy lays.

Did you, old place, know me when I returned to you?
Remained there some trace of me in the air?
Or in the earth? When I walk these clay-soft velvet folds
Of greens and browns, do the nodding hawthorns
Nod “hello” and “welcome back” to me?
Do I remember you or is it you remembers me?

As I ascend some half-remembered dusty lane,
And grasp a fleeting image once again,
Does the pale old grit of asphalt `neath my shoe
Recall a lighter smaller tread, does it remember you?
Who walked there by my side and held my little hand,
When first we walked that lost and happy land?

On Preston’s haunted winter hill,
A Roman sentry stands there still,
Against the dawn and twilit sky,
He guards the ghosts of years gone by.

On fields behind the ancient barn,
The Sentinel his vigil keeps,
Now crop and hedge his strong right arm,
Does guard, while yet his cohort sleeps.

He watched the new religion come,
His pantheon reduced to one,
A church was raised beside the yew,
And now, perhaps, he guards here too.

What vicious hells your dark eyes saw?
What shrieks and screams assailed your ears?
Do you now watch and feel for evermore
Your battle terrors chasing down two thousand years?

Or was this land our sanctuary from war?
A haven free from death, from slaughter and from fear,
Built you a life here, family, stout oaken door,
Which yet you guard, and is it love that keeps you ever here?

Above the lovely Cromack Water,
Through the vale of Buttermere,
Stands a whitewashed, ancient dwelling
Watching down five hundred years.

Wood House watch the shining water,
Watch the play of light on water,
Watch the mirrored peaks on water,
By the vale of Buttermere.

Still within your ancient structure,
Stand the spars which gave your name,
Oak-strong heart of ancient timber,
Hidden still, yet still remains.

Wood House watch the shining water,
Watch the play of light on water,
Watch the mirrored peaks on water,
By the vale of Buttermere.

As the skin of wood and water,
Cloaks the Lakeland’s granite stones,
So the later bricks and mortar,
Clothe Wood House’s wooden bones.

Wood House watch the shining water,
Watch the play of light on water,
Watch the mirrored peaks on water,
By the vale of Buttermere.

As the climbing, running Fells-man’s,
Sparsely gristled shanks and shin,
Hide his core of steel and granite,
Lakeland strength is strength within.

Wood House watch the shining water,
Watch the play of light on water,
Watch the mirrored peaks on water,
By the vale of Buttermere.

Autumn sun, the Fells were golden,
We returned and rested here,
Views unchanged since Turner’s blazing
Genius captured Buttermere.

There within Wood House beholding,
Cromack with the hills enfolding,
Found we peace our souls responding,
In the vale of Buttermere.

Wood House watch the shining water,
Watch the play of light on water,
Watch the mirrored peaks on water,
By the vale of Buttermere.

A fat man came to Freetown, convictions in his hand,
He saw the sad deficiencies of that a foreign land.
His past he brought to Freetown, a strange meeting between
Conviction and indifference, the fatted kine and lean.

Sa'Lone, its languid torpor, he'd laughingly compare,
To thrusting streamlined Albion, the tortoise and the hare.
But in looking on darkness, a light began to dawn,
Eroding preconceptions, evaporating scorn.

And like a chain of voices, crooning in his ear,
That paradise seduced him, but filled him too, with fear.
And so, clinging to the wreckage, of what he knew before
He fled before it claimed him, that sultry foreign shore.

And now in grim, grey Dover
He keens on view forlorn
Of his world in the evening
That other, in its dawn.