In August 1975, Keith Armstrong, the late Gordon Phillips and the late Mike Wilkin were guests for 10 days at an international writers' conference held in the Grand Hotel, Molle, Sweden. As part of the programme, they performed their poetry in Elsinore, Denmark.
NUDE BATHER AT MOLLE, SWEDEN
You set the seal on these cliffs,
lying
with your dew-drenched body
burning away minutes in the sun.
Turning, the world turns with you.
Your blonde hair crackles with the light
and life
throbs inside you like a sea.
You are the rise,
the set
of a sun-fruit globe.
You are a bulb, naked,
a blister on the rock of caged ages,
pinned to the earth by your heaving breath and
the whole breath of the world.
KEITH ARMSTRONG
INDIGNITY
for Keith Armstrong and Mike Wilkin
Elsinore,
low-lying as a Claudius.
Around its porous castle walls
we stalk with Hamlet,
poisoned by the threat of closing time,
yet in the irony
of leaving things far too late
must satisfy
a last indignity.
Free to join us,
some Ophelia,
not fatherless,
or grief-stricken,
but, maybe, a little deranged,
(though still persuasive)
picks up my guitar to sing something cool:
How to undress a man
in the name of democracy.
She will not go quietly to that watery pool.
Elsinore, August 1975
G. F. Phillips
