Poet, author, actor, director, broadcaster, & screenwriter

OTHER INTERESTS

Leo enjoys folk song and classical music. While at university, he played solo piano and chamber music in university concerts. He has always sung in choirs, and regularly plays as a church organist, being passionate about the music of J.S.Bach.

Patrick O'Ferrall, a friend of his from both school and university, is a keen amateur violinist, who first played the Bach D minor concerto for two violins aged sixteen with his father. Patrick's first wife died of cancer, and he married again. For the wedding, he asked Leo to write a poem. Leo's answer was to write a marriage poem derived from the three movements of that Bach concerto.

Let loose this music of blessing's energy.
Old gods are present - a laughing Green Knight,
A leprechaun or two - in the company
Of Johann's angels fiddling with this light.

Here in a dazzle of squirrel-scurrying
Child-scamper through the beechwoods hand in hand,
Part the bushes as - hush - the queen and king
Appear to lead this silver-jerkined band.

Here, whether hands together, or hands apart
This couple touches always. Argument?
Mere stretto in the fugue. Heart beats with heart
Into cadences white with ornament.

***

Then these cloisters, cool with remembered pain,
Where glimmers of memory, hovering in the air,
Fashion an interchange of soul, mind, brain,
Into such union, luminous with prayer,

That pain, by being cherished, can become -
As each past wonder's radiance reappears
Through suffering's damaged fog - a sum
Total of blessing compounded from tears.

***

Back to the energy which never fails,
A total dance of union at high speeds -
Prestissimo triplets racing up their scales,
In which first one and then the other leads:

Mutual interdependence. The dance spins far,
Far, far out into a whirling energy
Of cosmic rays and hurtling stars.
The dance goes on, into infinity.

© Leo Aylen 1999

At Oxford University, Leo was a member of the running squad which included one man who ran the 800 metres for New Zealand, one man who ran the 1,500 and 5,000 metres for Britain, and the world record holder for 800 metres. Leo was a member of the team which did the first ever run from Land's End to John O'Groats. He has continued to run non-competitively ever since, often with his dog.

Hill topped. One breath, one quick look round:
The solid earth danced and rejoiced,
Glad in the knowledge wings had been found
For him by the air, as he, poised .. poised ..

On the edge of a cloud, stepped off his hill
And gave himself to the bounce of the wind
Which scattered him thistledownwards till
The rush and hush of the river within

Him met the river which rose to meet
His wind-wings diving the flower-crammed sky.
He floated through meadows rippling with freed
Leaf-life spread which, as he raced by,

Laughed at his sudden-blest two-legged gait,
While he, blown down by the gift which the air
Gave to his hilltop head, cascad-
ed himself on the plain of everywhere.

© Leo Aylen 1992

Having done some rock-climbing, and having had one summer on snow and ice in the high Alps, pressure of his professional life demoted him from climber to fell-walker. He loves mountains, and takes as many opportunities as possible to get away to them.

Iceland, towards the mountains

Iceland, Snaefellsjökull

Sestina - The Poet's Nightmare

Grope forward. Hands stretching for holds. Void. Darkness.
Emptiness. Blank. Stretch further. Heaving nightmare
Of an infinite nothing-vista. Struggle
Through marshland void to reach a void of ridges,
Gullies, and lava-flow. What chance survival?
Impossible to see hands before face.

Somewhere behind this darkness, a dark face,
Composed of nothing more than well-warmed darkness,
Welcomes me to a void, but built. Survival
From cold with snow-block shelters? In this nightmare,
The nightmare shapes itself to a landscape. Ridges
And gullies form as aids to this vague struggle.

Out of the vagueness, void. But through the struggle
Against the void, directly up the face
Of the sheer void, we can traverse to ridges
Still formed from void, from non-finger-hold darkness,
But, by a tiny fraction, more solid nightmare
Than total void. Now, might there be survival?

So bang fingers against the frost. Survival?
Nail-scratching clutch and slither. Balance. Struggle
From finger-hold to hold. Boot-edge scrapes face
Of sheerness. All around a swirling nightmare
Of mist, snow-scurrying. But the blank darkness
Turns to grey cloud, horizons, lines of ridges.

Up, struggle up, edge leftwards to the ridge's
Relative relaxation. Now, survival
In the ice-wind. But up. Up from the darkness.
Now we can walk; use legs; step. Now this struggle
Yields some results. Now we can see a face
Of a companion also climbing nightmare.

No longer void now, the elusive nightmare
Becomes rock hard, sharp as the granite ridge's
Jagged hand-holds. Hard and smooth as the face.
But now there's solid chance of our survival.
There is a solid ridge up which we struggle.
Might there be sunrise? An end to this darkness?

So we confront each darkness, risk its nightmares,
Struggle through each night's void-land to its ridges,
Chalking up each survival on our marked face.

© Leo Aylen 1976

first published in Sunflower (Sidgwick & Jackson) ( also published in Dancing the Impossible: New & Selected Poems, (Poetry Salzburg).

On Dunkery Beacon		In the mountains of the Lesotho border

He continues to work for his chosen charity, Helwel, which organises community development in KwaZulu.

Mdukatshani, KwaZulu, the 'Place where the Grass has Lost its Way'		On the way to Nongoma, KwaZulu, to meet King Zwelithini

Since childhood, he has been passionately fond of animals and the natural world, and wrote about the environment long before it was fashionable to do so. One of his Arvon poetry prizes was won for a long poem called The Day the Grass Came, (published in The Ring of Words, Arvon prizewinning anthology 1998), a vision of an ecological Armageddon. First performed in the Royal Festival Hall's Purcell Room, its second performance was sponsored by the Biology Department of Principia College, Illinois, the Christian Science university of the United States. The Biology Professor was attempting to recreate - in an area of a few square metres - the original prairie grass and its special ecology, since the prairie has totally disappeared from Illinois.

Queen Charlotte Islands: in the devastation left by the logging companies who clear-cut virgin rainforest

The day the grass came
I'd climbed to the top of the world
Asphalt gas tip volcano's crater of scum-covered tar
Sloping, slithering, down a solidified lake
To mini-gasometers squashed into rust
Squatting by scaffold bars wrenched into s's and squirms,
Railway lines jaggedly mounting black air
Tangled with cranes crooked over the dangling chains
Clanking on corrugated huts swaying high
On their tracery mounting, clunking on piles
And piles of ladders climbing themselves to confusion …
Everything leading to nowhere …

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