A little poem for my children’s Okuizome (?????) – a Japanese ceremony performed when children are 100 days old. They are given their first chopsticks and ‘eat’ their first piece of fish. I use inverted commas, as they only pretend to eat!

According to my wife, fish used in Japanese ceremonies must be very fresh, and served with their heads still on.

The ceremony dates back to the Heian period of Japanese history, 794 to 1185 CE.

Although the ritual
is a thousand winters old
the fish are still fresh!

Last year I recorded four poems for Poetcasting, the poetry podcasting site put together by the enterprising Alex Pryce.

Poetcasting is a brilliantly simple idea – ask contemporary poets to record a handful of poems and distribute them on a blog as MP3 downloads.

I recorded four poems – ‘Hiroshima’, ‘The Devon Vihara’, ‘Love Hotel’ and ‘The Tower of Babel’.

I’ve just posted a Christmas poem over at Lateral Action: ‘The To-do List Before Christmas‘.

You probably need to be a computer geek/productivity nerd to get all the references, but hopefully you’ll find something to enjoy in it even if you’re not as sad as Lou.

Merry Christmas!

Rain falls with twilight –
the city’s fingers drumming
on our umbrella

First published at Copyblogger.

My poem Babel appeared in Magma 32.

The inspiration was Bruce Nauman’s ‘Raw Materials’ exhibition at the Tate Modern. Nauman lined the walls of the Turbine Hall with loudspeakers playing a motley collection of voices – you can hear a virtual version of the exhibition here.

My poem ‘The Move’ appears in Magma 35. I will be reading it at the launch reading next Monday 3rd July.

EDIT: It’s now archived on the Poetry Library website.

My poem ‘Bookmark’ was published in Magma 27.

I was thrilled to appear on the same page as Mark Doty – but the editor Tim Robertson assured me this was pure coincidence.

Bookmark

For Paul

To me you were incessant,
pestering, encroaching on my time,
a fly that kept landing
and landing on the page
that had to be brushed aside.

To you I was incredible,
sat on my arse with a book
while you waited with a ball
and a carpet of flawless grass
rolled out to touch the sky.

Now I have all the books I want
on shelves beyond harm’s reach
and time to read them twice
but the field has shrunk to a photograph
and we’re both too big to fit inside.

My poem ‘Astonishment’ was published in Issue 3. of The Wolf magazine. This page has a recording of me reading it at the launch.

Here’s the text:

Astonishment

For Isobel, aged 4 months

You’ve just arrived from nowhere.
We can see it in your face. Enthroned
on your royal blue rocking car chair,
you lift a clean astonished gaze
to meet our clean astonished faces,
as if you can’t believe we can’t believe
you’re here. As if life were always like this.
We’ll do our best to break the news gently,
we’ll make you laugh, we’ll make mistakes,
we’ll teach you to be Isobel,
to play the game we always play
that constitutes our life together –
but don’t believe all we say.

~

You can’t hear me yet, so I’m writing this
for a girl who’s climbed the stairs to her teens,
who can turn and hear my younger self
telling how Once upon a time
a fairy princess with a Tintin quiff
held court in a Greenwich flat
where Anton, Paul, Jane, Lee,
her Mum and Dad and I
played awkward courtiers in jeans
and t-shirts, and drank her health
to excess; while she sat and mused among us
with her wrinkled hands and lucent gaze,
ancient and slow as a tortoise,
quick and light as yesterday.