POETRY
Spell Bound
for Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and 53 million households on 20 July 1969
Held captive by the Moon in sixty-nine,
you and millions more held in her gaze,
as three young men of action, for all time,
set down first footprints, earning world-wide praise.
This silver mistress of the sequined skies,
this dusty, cratered orb – her tranquil stare –
beamed out at children spell bound with wide eyes;
a magic trick of light streamed everywhere.
And you, dear Prince, sat silent, mesmerised;
a pilot lost in trails of lunar dust,
the world revolving in blue-irised eyes,
revealing sleepy corners of earth’s crust.
A Prince can hold a Moon; a Moon a Prince.
Each holds the other spell bound ever since.
~25 August 2020
inspired by The Crown, Season 3, Episode 7, ‘Moondust’
PROSE
The Constant Curiosity
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Alicia stirred. A blinding light penetrated her closed eyelids. She remembered falling, remembered flying, remembered the Raven.
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“The Raven!”
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She sat bolt upright. A lambent glare glowered over her. Struggling to make sense of her surroundings, Alicia slowly rose to her sandaled feet. Everything ached. A bevy of bruises crowded themselves across her nimble knees.
​
She peered into the astonishing light that hedged her. Here and there she could make out small triangular trees and a dozen or so statuesque shrubs. To her right were some rather square looking rocks, and to her left, an archway overhung with clear-petalled flowers: like a topiarist’s arboretum.
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Her jet-black eyes, having grown accustomed to the harsh light refracted all about her and fencing her in, fell upon a wide basin in the centre of the garden. She moved closer to it, caution, for once, getting the better of her. It was engraved with strange runes and archaic words. Words and runes which she recognised and should be able to name, but the knock to her head had dislodged their meaning from her now.
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Almost at once a new sensation filled her body, a noise she had not noticed in a long, long time. A hunger. Not for knowledge but for food. And now, her belly ached. She stretched her arms above her head and blunt agony assailed her bare knuckles and a sharp ‘ping’ resounded around her like an echo in a bright bubble. Again, slowly this time, she reached upwards and her tentative fingertips touched smooth, curved glass.
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“The Glasshouse!” This was the Glasshouse the Raven had signalled her about.
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Oh, Alicia! Why, oh why, had she been so curious?
PLAYWRITING
DISMANTLE THE SUN - FIRST DRAFT
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1
Bare stage, spotlight, spade. A mound of earth.
VO: How many has it been? Ten, twelve? Maybe more. But who’s counting anymore. This is how it always is. The death, the digging, the dirt. The bones consigned to their graves, to the smoke, to the wind, to the worms and ants and dark places of the earth. And they are just bones. Just flesh. Just nerves and backbones and fur. All the fuzzy stuff of life. All that is pretty and perfect. And the soul?
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A figure moves into the light and contemplates the ground.
​
VO: The soul is elsewhere now. It is in the information I seek from the stones in the woodlands, in the Heuglin’s nest outside my backdoor, in the leaves blown and scattered sideways through the air. It is everywhere, and nowhere. It is in my hands when I wring them and my mouth when I speak. But you are gone.
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The figure picks up the spade and scatters a shovelful of dirt.
And the point is now to live.
The figure exits with the spade.
2
A
The trouble with death is not that it is final, but that it is forever. It is longer than life, it outweighs the balance, it is not nothing. Matt died. You only die once. You only die once as the you you are. Yes, there may be other lives that you fall into, or choose, but you are not you, this version of you dies once. And lives once. How am I still here? What is it that sees me through all these deaths, one after the other, like dominoes, like lemmings. The years feel like a tightrope stretched from point to point and it is I who have kept my balance, yet I feel so unskilled to do so. What is that song lyric about another shot of whiskey at the end of the rope?