To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence

I who am dead a thousand years
And wrote this crabbed post-classic screed
Transmit it to you – though with doubts
That you possess the skill to read,
 
Who, with your pink, mutated eyes,
Crouched in the radioactive swamp,
Beneath a leaking shelter, scan
These lines beside a flickering lamp;
 
Or in some plastic paradise
Of pointless gadgets, if you dwell,
And finding all your [...]

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Casta Diva

in memory of Maria Callas
 
Diva – traditional termagant, soprano tantrums,
Scourge of conductors, bane of managers;
Or drifting on a sea of crisped bank notes
With Plutus in his afluent yacht.
 
And then retirement – a spectacled, middle-aged lady
Lecturing sensibly on interpretation.
 
But in the shades the tragic heroines
Mourn for their lost vehicle – La Gioconda,
Tosca, Isolde, murdering Medea;
But most [...]

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