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Report for United States Bankruptcy Court says City law firm approved off balance sheet transactions that disguised true state of Lehman Brothers’ finances

Linklaters, one of London’s premier law firms, is battling to defend its reputation after a US report into the failure of Lehman Brothers showed it approved controversial deals that shifted billions of dollars of debt off the balance sheet in the years before the bank collapsed.

The hard-hitting report found that the crucial deals, which were also sanctioned by Lehman’s auditors, Ernst & Young, were described as “window dressing” by bank staff and masked the precarious state of its finances while it was under scrutiny from regulators and investors.

Linklaters is expected to come under intense pressure to reveal the full extent of its dealings with Lehman in the run-up to the bank’s crash in September 2008. The firm is one of the “magic circle” of solicitors operating in the City, which in recent years have expanded rapidly to compete with US rivals.

The impact of the bank’s crash has been described as incalculable by some economists after governments around the world were forced to implement trillion-pound bailouts for their own banks caught up in the disaster. Investors are preparing lawsuits against the bank and are expected to turn their fire on lawyers and auditors advising it.

The report, for the United States Bankruptcy Court by examiner Anton Valukas, claims Lehman booked fund transfers as sales and failed to disclose them in regulatory filings in the US. Valukas alleges that Lehman turned to Linklaters after New York law firms said that they were unable to approve the deals under US law.

It was common practice to use so-called “Repo 105″ agreements at Lehman to sell and buy back funds, but their frequent adoption in the two years before its collapse amounted to balance sheet manipulation, the report said.

Linklaters dismissed suggestions that it played a central role in disguising Lehman’s mounting debt pile. A spokesman confirmed that the firm gave opinions on several transactions, but said it was not aware of any “facts or circumstances that would justify any criticism”.

He also pointed out: “The examiner, who did not contact the firm during his investigations, does not criticise those opinions or say or suggest that they were wrong or improper.”

Valukas said that the part played by auditors Ernst & Young was also crucial to hiding the fund transfers, and amounted to professional negligence.

UK regulators came under scrutiny in the report for their role during Lehman’s collapse. While Hector Sants, the Financial Services Authority chief executive, refused to give evidence directly to the US investigator, he published written evidence that showed a series of transatlantic telephone calls during which the US authorities begged the UK to help facilitate a possible takeover by Barclays.

The FSA’s evidence claims that Christopher Cox, then chairman of the US regulator the securities and exchange commission, was still lobbying the FSA at 3pm on Sunday 14 September – hours before Lehman called in administrators. Cox wanted the FSA to waive rules that required Barclays to hold a shareholder vote before the deal could take place.

Barclays later bought Lehman’s US businesses from the administrator.

Nine-minute duet with Beyonce already being touted by some as successor to Michael Jackson’s Thriller

With some grunts, G-strings, heavy product placement and an enormous amount of hype, the 21st century’s take on feminism and social commentary arrived this week with the video to Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s duet, Telephone. Within 12 hours of the video being released on the internet it had half a million hits and nearly as many blogs eagerly dissecting the possible meanings behind the nine-minute video.

Already being touted by some as the successor to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Telephone continues Gaga’s tradition of elevating her songs with clever videos. This time she and director Jonas Akerlund have created a melange of Russ Meyers, Quentin Tarantino, Thelma and Louise and the brief incarceration of Paris Hilton to make a film about lesbian murderers, set to the lyrics of a woman complaining about people phoning her in a nightclub.

While Beyonce is clearly the more talented, her brand of sexiness looks dated next to Gaga. Bloggers have been decoding the meaning behind the sunglasses made of cigarettes, but one might just as well try to decipher the dress Gaga once wore made of Kermit the Frogs: she does it because it’s funny.

Gaga, never averse to ascribing depths to her work where others might see shallows, has claimed that the video’s meaning came from “the idea that America is full of young people that are inundated with information and technology”. Her intention, accordingly, was to “turn it into something that was more of a commentary on the kind of country that we are”.

For
Forget outrage, just enjoy it

Some taboos are still alive and kicking. Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s prison “lezz-ploitation” video has caused outrage, featuring as it does butch dykes, chicks with dicks, horny female prison wardens perusing lesbian dating sites – oh, and a bit of mass murder.

Early in the video there is a scene in the prison yard featuring a lesbian snog between a butch lesbian in leather and Lady Gaga, who is wearing a pair of sunglasses made from burning cigarettes. It’s hard to know what to be outraged about first. The answer is, nothing – the answer is just enjoy it.

It’s a cross between Tenko, Prisoner Cell Block H, a ghetto-girl Malory Towers and Thelma and Louise, as re-imagined by David Lachapelle and Betty Paige, only this time our heroines don’t have to die. Instead, they drive into the sunset in Beyonce’s “pussymobile” after Beyonce has turned to her (we assume) lover and said: “You’ve been a very, very bad girl, Gaga.”

Women in prison exploitation movies took off in the 1950s thanks to the influence of pulp magazines with films such as Caged and So Young So Bad. But unlike them, there are no sadistic male guards in this one. While there are obligatory scenes such as the strip search (“I told you she didn’t have a dick,” says one guard) and the cat fights with the queen bee gang leader, the chicks are all doing it for themselves.

It’s a silly, sexy, funny film for a song about the nightmare of having a mobile phone, ridden with product placement from the phone company logo on Gaga’s screen to the cans of Diet Coke rollers in her locks, and it feels very zeitgeisty – a big, female power fantasy. These aren’t just tough but hot tough chicks who can take care of themselves – like Trudy Chacon in Avatar, the cute Latina helicopter pilot, who’s the sort of person you want looking after you if you find yourself in lost in a mad sci-fi jungle.

In terms of “all girls together” videos, it reminded me of Britney Spears’ One More Time, only Lady Gaga has moved beyond the lame message of turning yourself into a Lolita schoolgirl, and has instead decided to turn the world completely lesbian – and good on her and her tattooed sisters in their studded leather bikinis, roaming the world avenging themselves on bad people.

Stephanie Theobold

Against
The same old boring sexism

Say what you like about Lady Gaga – everyone else does – but when it comes to colour and controversy she certainly delivers. She’s appeared in hats shaped like lobsters, shoes resembling armadillos, dancing in a white latex catsuit in her Bad Romance video. She’s regularly seen wandering around with a small china teacup and saucer in hand, apropros of nothing (this last affectation gets no less irritating).

What we get now is a cartoon-ish explosion of sex and violence. It starts with Gaga being taken into a women’s prison, led past bra-clad, tattoo-covered inmates, who are writhing against the doors to their cells – and occasionally pausing (as you do) to lick the bars. Gaga is wearing a low-cut outfit, and as she gets thrown into her cell, she’s stripped by the guards, revealing just a pair of fishnets and black plasters over her nipples.

When the cell door closes, she throws herself against it, and although her pubis is pixelated, the screen grab enables her to rebuke those tired old rumours of hermaphroditism. “I told you she didn’t have a dick,” says one guard. “Too bad,” says the other.

There follow lesbian kisses, a mass poisoning, and a double act with Beyonce – the two drive off in a lurid vehicle nicknamed the “pussy wagon”. Gaga has apparently said that the video was inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s work, but the references reach further back to the 1960s exploitation flicks of Roger Corman and Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.

These references coat the whole video in a slick film of irony, and make the whole enterprise seem occasionally funny and always ridiculous. But also, strangely, a little bit dull. Because if there’s one thing that we’ve seen a thousand times over the past few decades, it’s old-style sexism dressed up as new-style irony. Does the fact that Gaga seems to be winking knowingly at the camera as she dances in a bikini make the vision any less predictable, any less boring, any less reminiscent of sexist video after sexist video that you’ve seen in the past few years? Nope.

It’s a disappointment from someone who seems to be popping with so many ideas. Gaga will do something great, I’m sure. But this isn’t it.

Kira Cochrane

Thames tunnel, created by Marc Brunel and son Isambard in 1843, reopened to walkers for first time in 145 years

“How they got the performing horses down here God only knows”, says Robert Hulse, as he leads visitors into the gloom under the Thames for the temporary public reopening of one of the truly astonishing wonders of the Victorian age.

The Thames tunnel was today reopened to walkers for the first time in 145 years, giving punters a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see close up a remarkable feat of engineering – and a top tourist attraction visited by millions.

“The eighth wonder of the world awaits,” Hulse, director of the nearby Brunel Museum, told visitors today. That description may surprise those who know it better as the Tube tunnel between Wapping and Rotherhithe – but it might be only a little hyperbolic.

The tunnel is being opened to the public this weekend as the finale to London’s East Festival. A Victorian fancy fair, with fairground performers and musicians, will also be held in the tunnel.

It was a crowning achievement of Marc Brunel and his then teenage son Isambard Kingdom, but it was considered a nightmare to build.

Brunel – a Frenchman, as the British sometimes choose to forget – thought it would take three years to complete. It took 18. One newspaper wag called it The Great Bore.

But it took so long because it was so revolutionary. The tunnel was, says Hulse, “the birth of the Tube; the birth of mass urban transport.”

It was dug in appalling conditions by men with short-handled spades working in cages, being constantly showered by water from a river that was, at the time, an open sewer.

“They weren’t just showering in sewage; they were ingesting it,” says Hulse. “Best not to dwell on that thought, but it is the worst job you can imagine.”

There was also the frequent danger of getting burned, with gas lamps igniting the methane found below the surface. Men tended to pass out after two hours, owing to a lack of air, and were carried back to the surface.

Only six men died as a direct result, although how many might have died indirectly – from cholera and dysentery– is not known.

One man who very nearly died was young Isambard, swept the length of the tunnel by a flood wave, only weeks after a confidence-boosting banquet was held in the tunnel with the band of the Coldstream Guards blasting out Rule Britannia to terrified, silent diners.

But live he did, and in 1843 the tunnel opened, although not for its original intention.

It had been planned for moving cargo because of the chronic congestion on the Thames, easily the busiest river in the world with around 3,000 tall ships and 10,000 boats on it each day. “They used to say it took longer to get stuff across the Thames than to get stuff across the Atlantic,” said Hulse.

But it proved too expensive to get the cargo down there, so was instead opened as a must-see tourist attraction: a shop-lined tunnel under the river. At its middle point, the tunnel is just 14ft below the river bed.Many refused to walk through. Hulse says: “You have to remember that in 1843 to walk under a river the size of the Thames was like walking on the moon.”

In the neo-classical archways, stallholders sold Thames Tunnel gin flasks, pin cushions, snuff boxes, coffee cups and cigar cutters.

Hulse says: “It’s a very early example of what is known as aggressive marketing of site specific merchandise. Or what you may know as tourist tat. Stallholders used to say: they’re not just souvenirs – they’re trophies. If you walked through the tunnel, you were one of the brave.”

There were also sword swallowers, Ethiopian serenaders, Indian dancers, Chinese singers performing horses and a steam organ.

Not everyone was impressed by the tunnel. George Catlin, the American painter, said you emerged in Rotherhithe “in the midst of one of the most unintelligible, forlorn and forsaken districts of London, or the world”.

In 1865, the tunnel was handed over to the East London Railway. Today the tunnel still has some of its original brickwork, as well as 19th century soot from the steam trains which came through from 1869.

This weekend’s walk-throughs are very different affairs from those in 1843, when 50,000 people turned up on the first day. For one thing there is health and safety. Visitors are asked to wear latex gloves because of the risk of leptospirosis and Weil’s disease.

After this weekend’s events the next opportunity to see the tunnel will be in the spring, when the East London line reopens. But then you will need to keep your eyes on the glass as the trains drive through it.

As a celebration of wisdom and experience, and of their role in shaping poetry in this country, the poet laureate invited some of our most eminent poets to contribute original work on the theme of ageing

This remarkable gathering of new work by senior British poets has been some months in the planning, but it seems appropriate to publish the poems over the weekend when we celebrate Mother’s Day (though Father’s Day would have been equally apt). “When I am old, I shall wear purple,” wrote Jenny Joseph in “Warning”, once identified as the nation’s favourite postwar poem, and her beautiful but less well-known “Lullaby” is reproduced here. Roger McGough – perhaps the nation’s favourite poet – revisits his own confidently youthful “Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death” 40 years older and wiser. And poets we have all grown up with – Dannie Abse, Peter Porter, Roy Fisher, Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Fainlight – speak here as freshly as ever, not least Gillian Clarke, whose career was crowned recently when she was appointed national poet of Wales. The Scottish makar, Edwin Morgan, is absent because of illness, but I urge readers to make sure they own a copy of his Collected Poems, published by Carcanet. The Caribbean poet James Berry, too, would have been present but for bad health. Seek out his anthology News for Babylon (Chatto).

All of these poets have helped to define the nature of poetry in this country and are responsible for the rich diversity that now flourishes here. They may be contrasting poets – Porter and McGough at opposite ends of the spectrum – but collectively and individually they have made a difference. Some are charismatic performers of their own work – Abse, in particular, has helped to make the poetry reading a sparkling entertainment without ever compromising his art. Fisher, along with poets such as Michael Horovitz and Christopher Logue, has worked with poetry and jazz. McGough and the other Liverpool poets drew huge audiences. Poets who came after these world-class performers had to raise their game, and audiences who attend readings in their hundreds now will never have encountered a poet mumbling and shuffling next to a glass of water before fleeing back to his university with the cheque.

Porter, whose Better Than God was shortlisted for last year’s Forward prize, has spent a lifetime making the difficult dazzle on the page. Fleur Adcock is one of the most formally skilled poets of our time and, along with Feinstein, Fainlight and Anne Stevenson, provided a role model for women poets at a time when sexism and tokenism were nastily predominant. Clarke is a tireless evangelist for poetry and founded Ty Newydd, the Welsh writers’ centre, one of the most idyllic places in the UK for studying poetry in week-long courses. Anthony Thwaite and Alan Brownjohn share her sense of altruism, sitting on committees that give awards or support to much younger poets. Linda Chase runs the flourishing Poetry School in Manchester. Maureen Duffy, well known as a novelist, has always kept poetry close to the centre of her writing life. To see Nina Cassian perform her poetry is awe-inspiring. Gerda Mayer and Lotte Kramer are fine poets who should be better known.

I invited the poets here to write, in any way they chose, about ageing. Our society, I believe, is turning gradually away from its obsession with “yoof” and “slebs”. We are beginning to realise that we face, at the very least, an uncertain future, one in which wisdom and experience – and respect – will need to be accorded a more important role. A good place to start is to read and listen to some of our most distinguished poets and, through them, to assert the importance of poetry in our culture. As poet laureate, it is a privilege to say to these poets, on behalf of their readers and the poets who follow on from them, a loud thank you.

Listen to a selection of the poets reading their poems

The Old Gods
By Dannie Abse
Listen to Dannie Abse reading “The Old Gods”

The gods, old as night, don’t trouble us.
Poor weeping Venus! Her pubic hairs are grey,
and her magic love girdle has lost its spring.
Neptune wonders where he put his trident.
Mars is gaga – illusory vultures on the wing.

Pluto exhumed, blinks. My kind of world, he thinks.
Kidnapping and rape, like my Front Page exploits
adroitly brutal – but he looks out of sorts when
other unmanned gods shake their heads tut tut,
respond boastingly, boringly anecdotal.

Diana has done a bunk, fearing astronauts.
Saturn, Time on his hands, stares at nothing and
nothing stares back. Glum Bacchus talks ad nauseam
of cirrhosis and small bald Cupid, fiddling
with arrows, can’t recall which side the heart is.

All the old gods have become enfeebled,
mere playthings for poets. Few, doze or daft,
frolic on Parnassian clover. True, sometimes
summer light dies in a room – but only
a bearded profile in a cloud floats over.

Born in 1923 and brought up in Cardiff, Abse has published 14 books of poetry; much of his work draws on his Welsh roots and Jewish inheritance. His most recent collection is New Selected Poems 1949-2009.
 

Mrs Baldwin
By Fleur Adcock
Listen to Fleur Adcock reading “Mrs Baldwin”

And then there’s the one about the old woman
who very apologetically asks the way
to Church Lane, adding “I ought to know:
I’ve lived there since the war”. So you go with her.

This comes with variations, usually leading
(via a list of demented ancestors)
to calculations of how much time you’ve got
before you’re asking the way to your own house.

But it’s not so often that you find the one
about how, whenever you hear of someone
diagnosed with cancer, you have to hide
that muffled pang that clutched you, at fifteen,
when you saw Pauline Edwards holding hands
with the boy from the Social Club you’d always
      fancied.

Born in 1934 in New Zealand, Adcock spent part of her childhood in Britain, where she has lived since 1963. She is the author of 10 books of poetry; a collection, Poems 1960-2000, was published in 2000.
 

What I Regret
By Nina Cassian

. . . never having heard the voice of the Dodo bird . . .
. . . never having smelled the Japanese cherry trees . . .
. . . never having punished the lovers and friends that
               deserted me . . .
. . . never having asked for honours that I deserved . . .
. . . never having composed a Mozart sonata . . .
. . . never having realised that I’d live long enough to
               regret all the above . . .
. . . and much, much more . . .

Born in 1924, Cassian is a Romanian poet, composer, journalist, film critic and translator. She has published more than 50 books of her own poetry. Having fled the Ceausescu regime, she was granted asylum in the US and now lives in New York.
 

Old Flame
By Linda Chase
Listen to Linda Chase reading “Old Flame”

He turns my hand in his hand
as if to catch the light,
separating my fingers
to see my rings, one by one.
Questions and answers follow –
country, stones, when, from whom
and then my other hand
because this ritual has been
going on for fifty years
and there are no surprises,
as he counts the parts of me
and the decorations I choose.

But today I wear a bracelet
he has never seen before,
knowing that it’s to his taste,
that it will spark new attention
beyond his routine inspection.
Between the larger stones,
sit dashes of orange abalone,
keeping spaces in between
irregular chunks of turquoise.
He fingers them around my wrist
and I’m a girl again, fluttering
through her jewellery and her life.

Chase, born in 1941, is an American poet, living in Manchester, where she set up the Poetry School. The Wedding Spy and Extended Family are published by Carcanet; a new collection is due in autumn 2011.
 

Blue Hydrangeas, September
By Gillian Clarke

You bring them in, a trug of thundercloud,
neglected in long grass and the sulk
of a wet summer. Now a weight of wet silk
in my arms like her blue dress, a load
of night-inks shaken from their hair –
her hair a flame, a shadow against light
as long ago she leaned to kiss goodnight
when downstairs was a bright elsewhere
like a lost bush of blue hydrangeas.
You found them, lovely, silky, dangerous,
their lapis lazulis, their indigoes
tide-marked and freckled with the rose
of death, beautiful in decline.
I touch my mother’s skin. Touch mine.

Born 1937 in Cardiff, Clarke is a poet, playwright, editor and translator. Her most recent book is At the Source (2008). She is the national poet of Wales and lives on a smallholding in Ceredigion.
 

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold …”
By Maureen Duffy
Listen to Maureen Duffy reading “That time of year thou mayst in me behold … “

Poets don’t grow old gracefully:
recall old lusts with Hardy
or clamour like Yeats for new.

“How are you?” people ask them, meaning
“Goodness, you’re still alive.”
“Are you still writing?” signals
“If so, you’re quite forgotten.
I haven’t seen any reviews,”
and “Aren’t you going gently yet
into your good night?”

Gower, his loins frozen by Venus,
piped of a king and his bounty of wine.
Did he who’d sung of every turn and twist
of love regret the arrow’s sting he’d begged
Love’s priest to tear from his heart
as he lay apart from his chaste wife?
Merlin the magus, besotted in old age
entombed in the rock by Nimue for his lust
must have been a poet too.
How else could he have cast such spells?

When David was old they brought him a virgin
hoping for a new Song of Solomon.
Help us all then Lady, Sappho’s own goddess,
to sing your song until the last bittersweet note.

Born in 1933, Duffy, a poet, playwright and novelist, has published dozens of books, including five volumes of poetry.
 

Ageing
By Ruth Fainlight
Listen to Ruth Fainlight reading “Ageing”

i
Since early middle-age
(say around forty)
I’ve been writing about ageing,
poems in many registers:
fearful, enraged or accepting
as I moved through the decades.

Now that I’m really old
there seems little left to say.
Pointless to bewail
the decline, bodily and mental;
undignified; boring
not to me only but everyone,

and ridiculous to celebrate
the wisdom supposedly gained
simply by staying alive.
– Nevertheless, to have faith
that you’ll be adored as an ancient
might make it all worthwhile.

ii
Ageing means smiling at babies
in their pushchairs and strollers
(wondering if I look as crazy
as Virginia or Algernon –
though I don’t plan to bite!)
Realising I’m smiling at strangers.

It means no more roller-skating.
That used to be my favourite
sport, after school, every day:
to strap on my skates,
spin one full circle in place,
then swoop down the hill and away.

When I saw that young girl on her blades,
wind in her hair, sun on her face,
like a magazine illustration
from childhood days, racing
her boyfriend along the pavement:
– then I understood ageing.

Fainlight, who was born in New York in 1931, is a poet, short-story writer and translator. She has lived in England since the age of 15. Her most recent book is Moon Wheels (2006).
 

Long Life
By Elaine Feinstein
Listen to Elaine Feinstein reading “Long Life”

Late Summer. Sunshine. The eucalyptus tree.
        It is a fortune beyond any deserving
to be still here, with no more than everyday worries,
        placidly arranging lines of poetry.

I consider a stick of cinammon
        bound in raffia, finches
in the grass, and a stubby bush
        which this year mothered a lemon.

These days I speak less of death
        than the mysteries of survival. I am
no longer lonely, not yet frail, and
        after surgery, recognise each breath

as a miracle. My generation may not be
        nimble but, forgive us,
we’d like to hold on, stubbornly
        content – even while ageing.

Born in 1930 in Lancashire, Feinstein has worked as an editor, a university lecturer and a journalist. As well as 10 collections of poetry, she has written 14 novels, five biographies, short stories and TV and radio plays.
 

On Hearing I’d Outlived My Son the Linguist
By Roy Fisher

Two days since I heard you were gone
suddenly in your forties and with me still not quite
     eighty

and hour by hour today with no whole word all
the emptied patterns of your talk come crowding
into my brain for shelter:
bustling, warm, exact. You’d be interested.

A British poet and jazz pianist, Fisher, born in 1930, has published more than 30 books of poetry. Poems 1955-1987 came out in 1988.
 

Lullaby
By Jenny Joseph

Only when we are in each other’s arms
Babies or lovers or the very ill
Are we content not to reach over the side;
To lie still.

To stay in the time we’ve settled in, that we’ve
      scooped
Like a gourd of its meat,
And not, like a sampling fly, as soon as landed
Start to our feet,

Pulling one box on another, Ossa on Pelion;
Getting the moment, only to strain away
And look each day for what each next day brings us:
Yet another day;

Pleased with the infant’s health and the strength of
      its frame
For the child it will grow to,
The house perfected, ready and swept, for the new
Abode we go to,

The town in order and settled down for the night
The sooner for the next day to be over,
The affair pushed straight away to its limit, to leave
      and notch up
Another lover.

Lie still, then, babies or lovers or the frail old who
In dreams we carry
Seeking a place of rest beyond the crowds
That claim and harry.

We are trying to reach that island for the festive
      evening
Where our love will stay –
Waylaid, prevented, we wake as that vivid country
Mists into day.

Stay on this side of the hill.
Sleep in my arms a bit longer.
This driving on will take you over the top
Beyond recall the sooner.

Born in 1932 in Birmingham, Joseph has written poetry for adults and children, as well as fiction. In 1986 she was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial prize for Persephone.
 

Lunch
By Lotte Kramer

She came in muttering to herself.
Old age had not destroyed
Her height and bearing.

“You walked across? Such a rough day.”
The waitress in her chat
Showed slight concern.

“Roast beef today and apple-tart.”
The plastic turban gone
Her face was naked:

The twist and movement more revealed,
Her bones, a brittle grate, with
Beauty burnt away.

Are these the only words each day,
The only other hands
Holding a plate?

And as the radio crackled jazz
her unheard, gutted mouth
Was never still.

Born in 1923, Kramer left Mainz in 1939 on one of the last Kindertransport trains. Her books include Heimweh-Homesick and Family Arrivals.
 

Lieselott Among the Blackberries
By Gerda Mayer

Caught on September’s
blackberry hook,
her hands reach out
for the sweet dark fruit;
wholly under
the blackberry spell.
“Hurry up, Lieselott,
it is late.” (Plenty
of time! She
feigns deaf and dawdles.)
Old woman tasting
the last of the fruit,
in sunny oblivion,
in a still brightness.

Like Kramer, Mayer, born in 1927 in Czechoslovakia, was a Kindertransport child. Her books include Prague Winter.
 

Not for Me a Youngman’s Death
By Roger McGough

Not for me a youngman’s death
Not a car crash, whiplash
John Doe, DOA at A&E kind of death.
Not a gun in hand, in a far off land
IED at the roadside death

Not a slow-fade, razor blade
bloodbath in the bath, death.
Jump under a train, Kurt Cobain
bullet in the brain, death

Not a horse-riding paragliding
mountain climbing fall, death.
Motorcycle into an old stone wall
you know the kind of death, death

My nights are rarely unruly. My days
of allnight parties are over, well and truly.
No mistresses no red sports cars
no shady deals no gangland bars
no drugs no fags no rock’n'roll
Time alone has taken its toll

Not for me a youngman’s death
Not a domestic brawl, blood in the hall
knife in the chest, death.
Not a drunken binge, dirty syringe
“What a waste of a life” death.

The greyness of the sky is streaked
Along its width with shades of red;
The pity of the world has leaked
But who are these whose hands have bled?

McGough, born in 1937, made his name as one of the “Liverpool poets” in The Mersey Sound (1967). He presents Radio 4’s Poetry Please.
 

Random Ageist Verses
By Peter Porter

Here is the body fearfully beautiful
The pushy you of just nineteen –
How could you know, in shin or skull,
What’s dead already in the sheen?

Immersed in time, we question time
And ask for commentators’ rights.
The amoeba has a taste for slime
Among its range of appetites.

It’s always too early to die – Oh, yuss!
Says Churchill, dew-lapped TV hound
To The Man on the Clapham Omnibus –
The ice-cap’s melting; seek high ground!

The relief of growing old – it’s easy
To take long views and shun the short.
Consult the frescoes in Assisi:
Ignore the Kinsey and the Hite Report.

Like Auden, I have always felt
The youngest person in the room.
His too too solid flesh might melt
And show him God. I’ll need a tomb.

“Senex Scintillans” – we’re bright
As glazing on a Peking Duck.
The Elderly insist Insight
Is not worth much compared to Luck.

Hers is a most convincing face,
“Col tempo” lightly in her hand –
Age lived-through need show no trace
Of lines time likes to draw in sand.

Who is this young architect
At work on death’s blank inventory,
Correcting everything correct?
It is Thomas Hardy, OM, he!

“Gone is all my strength and guile,
Old and powerless am I.”
So, Joseph Haydn – all the while
Comes “Laus Deo” in reply.

Born in 1929 in Brisbane. Porter’s collections have won a host of prizes.
 

The Password
For Peter
by Anne Stevenson

Memory, intimate camera, inward eye,
Open your store, unlock your silicon
And let my name’s lost surfaces file by.
What password shall I type to turn you on?

Is this the girl who bicycled to school
A cello balanced on her handlebars?
Shy, but agog for love, she played the fool
And hid her poems in the dark of drawers.

First love of music bred a love of art,
Then art a love of actors and their plays,
Then actors love of acting out a part,
Until she’d try on anything for praise.

Siphoned to England, she embraced her dream,
With Mr Darcy camped in Hammersmith,
Bathed in a kitchen tub behind a screen,
Pretending love was true and life a myth.

Waking with a baby on her hip,
Yeats in her shopping basket, here she is,
Thin as a blade and angry as a whip,
Weighing her gift against her selfishness.

Three husbands later, here she is again,
Opposed to her own defiance, breaking rules.
Not mad, not micro-waved American,
She trips on sense, and falls between two stools,

Finding herself at sixty on the floor,
With childhood’s sober, under-table view
Of how in time love matters more and more.
Given a creeping deadline, what to do?

Look at the way her wild pretensions end.
One word, its vast forgiving coverage,
Validates all her efforts to defend
Every excuse she makes, and warms with age.

Stevenson, is an American writer and poet, born in 1933. She has lived in Britain for over 40 years and is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, books of essays and literary criticism, a biography of Sylvia Plath and two studies of Elizabeth Bishop.
 

Silence
By Anthony Thwaite
Listen to Anthony Thwaite reading “Silence”

This silence, with you away –
These silences, day after day –
Silence itself, pure and cold and grey –

Once I welcomed it, heard
Nothing but peace, even a bird
Disturbing it. Without a word

Silence welcomed me, took
Me in friendliness, shook
Melancholy out, thrust a book

Into my hands, so that I read
Hungrily of what lay ahead,
Not thinking of the dead.

                                                Alone,
Silence lies along the bone,
Grey, cold as a stone.

Thwaite, born in 1930, has published 15 volumes of poetry. He has been a publisher, the literary editor of the Listener and the New Statesman, and is an executor of the estate of Philip Larkin. He has worked for BBC Radio, and from 1973-85 was editor of Encounter. He is co-editor of The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse.