POETRY
Here is my selection for FEBRUARY
I have been publishing my poems on the internet for eight years.
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY,
AUSCHWITZ
(27th. January)
This place is stark and cold.
Old people, huddled in the snow,
Listen to fine words and bonds -
Remember those that went before.
Like ash, the gentle snowflakes fall
As smoke weaves up like memories.
Beyond the dignitaries and lights
A deer slips past the silent crowd
To where ghost trees wait, thin as hope.
DAWNS
LAUDS
Bright white moonlight over dark trees -
The luminescence of snowdrops.
A thrush, clear voiced on misty air,
Repeats his song across the dawn -
A benediction to the Spring.
BREAKFAST IN ORLANDO
As light begins to fill this motel room,
I watch day break across an alien land :
Strange trees; buildings, unrecognisable
From shadows of the sauna heated night,
Disclose themselves in startling shapes and hues.
HANGOVER
A childhood pudding of rice :
Add the blackcurrant and stir.
Today, white clouds leach purple -
Day breaks like a massive bruise -
Here's Saturday with a scowl.
MILKING
Hoar frost on window panes
Etched with icy flowers.
Star decked, black velvet sky
With a hard frost glinting;
Cold - the cattle steaming.
LARKS ASCENDING
Beneath a mass of threatening cloud,
I’m wrapped against the forecast snow
As I stride out across Larks Hill.
Below, the streaming vehicles groan
Down Harvest Ride and on to town.
Yet here, above the traffic’s drone,
Comes birdsong over tussocked grass -
Too far to carry from the hedge
But clear above the gusting blast.
Casting about this grassy space
I spot them, dots against the sky,
Riding in air too cold for snow,
Braving this February day.
Whilst others shelter in the hedge,
These tiny crested, feathered scraps
Defy the worst that Winter brings.
Miraculous, daredevil birds
Sing out a challenge and a prayer :
An invocation to the Spring.
PORK SCRATCHING
He never understood the name
the older boys chose for him –
only that it made them laugh.
But everyone got funny names
when playing down The Rec –
Rabbit was fast, Mouse was small
and Ninny had this fuzzy hair.
“You get pork scratchings in the pub,”
his Dad told him when he had asked,
“Those friends of yours must all be daft.”
Daft or not, they let him play
in every evening kick-about –
as long as he had brought his ball.
“Because you’re big, you go in goal,”
they told him as they picked the sides,
“The other kids are just too small…
and you won’t have to run at all.”
Daydreaming, with the ball down field,
he came-to, thinking of his Mum,
a corrosive impulse made him scratch
his eczema’d arm – flaking and sore.
FEBRUARY 14th.
Look at the pictures on this calendar :
It is the perfect day on Kiribati, *
The sky a seamless blue and azure sea
Where men go out to fish as all men must.
Here small lagoons are made as heart shaped traps :
Each heart a triumph for the waller’s hand -
Meticulously formed from piled stone -
With one small gap where fish swim over sand.
In England’s cold I face your heart of stone
And hope this day to find that secret gap
Where, eel like, love can find the only way
Into your heart, inside love’s tender trap.
* Pronounced : kee-ree-bus
KIRIBATI is an island nation of coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean.
EARLY TODAY
Early today, close by the border of night's dream, a thrush sang :
Through thinning darkness before dawn I heard his song repeat.
Insistently he sang, scattering remnants of soft sleep,
Commanding me, "Awake, awake."
The moon hung full and white above dark trees
And he had come this time, clear voiced on frosty air,
Above snowdrops massed where in the snow he'd fed :
So thankful then for meagre gifts.
Now, on season's cusp, he has returned to claim domain
And share this benediction to the Spring.
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