The new English national anthem

God save Jude Bellingham

so he keeps scoring 'em,

helping us win.

Send him victorious

happy and glorious

long to win games for us -

God save the king.

Cyrus

Cyrus was king of the first Persian empire

and rightly termed 'Great' for extensive conquests.

But also great for conquering vanity ?

No terracotta army for him;

no huge pyramid like a pharaoh;

no ayatollah's flashy mosque

and who knows what the arab Mohammad

would have doe if he'd had the resources.

A simple structure of weathered stone

not grand enough for a tourist attraction

Cyrus' tomb still stands in Iran.

Nobody else got out of the van

but I walked and stood and honoured the man.

Tweets 27

Life ?

I've tried it.

There were some good times

but I don't think I'll bother again.

NO  KINGS

What sort of democracy is it

when the elected 'parliament'

can't restrain the president ? 

If it's not the slugs and snails

then it's little boys with footballs

wreck my plants.

Is being addicted to phones

any worse than being

addicted to television ?

Will I get any poetic inspiration?

Well if I do, all good and well

and if I don't, so what the hell?

ALMOST  UNBELIEVABLE

A young girl walking along the pavement

reading a BOOK.

A QUESTION OF SIZE

I'm always pleased when I get some small matter right;

it helps offset the larger I got wrong.

Novelists write to please their readers;

poets write to please themselves.

Family life

Boys brawling, sister crawling,

baby bawling, eldest scrawling,

husband trawling, promise galling,

night falling, dreams calling.

TYPICAL

The bird fluttered upwards vertically.

Watching I waited for its singing

but it just flew away. Typically

Shelley got skylark; I got starling.

At the top of the plots

I sat here at sunset a week ago and bemoaned all vanishing Nature.

In past years I had watched bats hunting along the allotments hedgerow

but last week there was nothing flying except a partying blackbird.

Today I enjoyed the glowing sunset, silken sky and a single cloud

and as the land darkened, the sky above the streamside trees exploded

to a distant forest fire enfringing the whole width of the horizon.

The lonely cloud evaporated and Venus edged slowly eastwards

narrowly missing a collision with a plane from the nearby airport.

Then suddenly a twist and a turn in the air above my head !

A bat fluttered by and then another - relief, Nature ascendent.

PEACE PLAN

We'd clear the rubble from bombed buildings

and build some new ones, re-span bridges,

renew power and water networks,

re-create whole cities from scratch.

But what we can't do is raise the dead,

or heal the hurt or calm the hatred.