Poetry

First Year

Oh, Tom, I’m wearing my lucky pants in the reading room
but you still turn away. Come back. I’d like one night with you.
I’d like every slow day in your arms. I can’t read this Bible;
I’m taking my time but the lines run away into the rain.
I’m a cat on an ice box longing to touch your hair.

- Winner Hamish Canham Award 2019. Published in Poetry News

Prayer Trees, York Minster, 3/1/26

Four o’clock and a Wolf Moon
when I slip in by the East Door before 
they lower the Advent Crown and bin the trees
that have lit up the Chapter House
spilling along the Nave,
the one decorated by Carr Juniors -
a medallion with each pupil’s face
Jude, Amelia, Mohamed, Darya,
the one from Blossom Dental,
tiny brushes and toothpaste tubes in baubles.
Melchior, Balthasar and Caspar
have almost reached the crib
under the Rose Window, they are inching 
their way across the Choir Screen
and soon the luggage labels will be gone
that visitors tied to the prayer trees:

Please pray for the young people
in the fire in Switzerland, those who died
and those who survived. Bless their families.

I wish I could go and see Wicked

Remembering our beautiful angel, Grace

Save the Octopus 

I want a new US president

I wish Max Richads dog cold cume bak alive

Gus (age 2 almost) wishes for a “PIGGY”

Give the homeless a place to call home. 

- Published in Ten Poems about Cathedrals Candlestick Press, 2026)

i.m. Tobias Hill 1970-2023

I flip through the pages of Zoo, 
thinking of all those poems you didn’t write 
though you were ‘generous to the end’.
In 1996 your photo on the cover 
of Midnight in the City of Clocks
had my sixth form girls swooning
before I even read the title poem 
that got all those fevered pens moving.
I read today you had a stroke aged 44
and afterwards couldn’t write poetry,
that you died last week of a brain tumour.
I had a stroke too, I have had brain surgery.
I’m so sad to read you weren’t so lucky.
You’ll never read the poems they wrote
that day in the school library.
The book falls open at Dr Crippen in Love.
The way it ends. He starts to walk again.
He’d go a long way to see perfect stars

– Third prize, Verve Poetry Competition, 2024