National Poetry Day- Heroes

Like General Elections, National Poetry Day is always on a Thursday. It's this Thursday, this year. And it's more or less a good thing, an artificially created publicity event for 'poetry' that draws attention to it for its own sake. And even if it often turns out to be a matter of wheeling out good old Roger McG or John Hegley to read some of their charming little jokes, it can sometimes be even better than that. I've been involved in and attended some very worthwhile events over the years. It's even easier to do so so from the comfort of one's own website, though.

This year's theme is heroes and I'm delighted to have a back catalogue that, however thin it might look for thirty-odd years of writing poems, has several 'heroes' in it. There's the Tycho Brahe poems, the Ovid, the fawning tribute to Thom Gunn (Rastignac at 45 at 35), a couple of Mozart poems, Buxtehude, and a set of poems called Line Drawings not all of which were necessarily tributes to heroes (Diana, Versace, Kasparov, Stephen Hawking, etc.). But there was also this poem in Museum, published in 1990, dedicated to Maggi Hambling, who certainly is a big hero of mine. It's based on her painting Broken Moon (pictured), which I'd love to own and is for sale and it's my 50th birthday shortly (I don't know if I've mentioned that elsewhere).

Maggi's Moons

(for Maggi Hambling)

Your moons are the still-burning
souls of heretics whose charred
bones have long since been dust. They
are the echoes of screaming,
frozen and splintered in hard
winter silence, torn ghostly.

They see the living woven
into troubled times. And your
moon is a witch's daughter
left hanging below heaven
whose passion is now shattered
light on midnight's blue water.