Tag: Poetry

A piece of news, soft and sad

I haven’t posted here for a while; life has been busy and tiring. Time to hear what the Oracle has to say about things, and, as usual, she already knows the news. Not anyone I knew personally, but a mother is a mother.

A piece of news, soft and sad

The words blow away in this brisk wind
too many leaves already dead
and sloes shrivelled like prunes.

We tread on rotting fruit
where wasps and hornets sugar-skim
making for the green morning.

A mother died before the light
and never saw this new day
colouring slowly with summer

but the jays shriek anyway
and blackbirds sweep the hedges
a cat whisks her impudent tail

because of the day
the green of it
and the sweet rain passing.

Burning

The poem the Oracle gave me was to be expected.

Burning

Death drips slow as honey from this melting sky,
and the day-lit moon dissolves like a pearl in acid.

I watch yellow leaves drift in a restless breeze,
hot as deserts that pulls this way then that,
but always away from the green that fades
like a childhood memory, of sun shade dapples,
cool on the skin, of petals cupping morning dew.

And I hear the murmuring among the trees,
the papery voices of the dead and dying,
Who will be next?

The forgetfulness of being

The forgetfulness of being

Beneath the skin,
the drapery and decorations,
we are all the same, they say,
all have drunk from the same source,
swum the same amniotic sea,

but why do some forget the tenderness of its touch,
the fingers’ brush so soft,
the whispered words of the waves
that fill every tree that has leaves to speak?

The meadow lies silent in the heat, and no birds sing.
In this silence so much is forgotten,
but your eyes have never changed,
nor your step that parts the faceless crowd,
and I remember that we are not all the same.

Night fishing

The Oracle gave me a handful of words that made an instant poem.

Night fishing

I went fishing for stars in the ferocity of the night,
searching for the sacred in the softness of the sky,

but there was no pool where brown trout slept,
no skim of shifting reflections beneath weeping hazels,

only an empty universe, rushing away from my questing hands,
the hurtle of bright pinpricks, no more than laughing gas.

Morning meadow with pheasants

As I was staring at the Oracle’s words, wondering how to make sense of them, one of the pheasants started cough-crowing outside. Suddenly I knew what they meant.

Morning meadow with pheasants

The morning cries out to me
with the voice of the pheasant,
the great glossy jungle fowl,

and I wonder how they last through the night,
the chicks in the nest, when fox and weasel prowl,
and the long grass hides nothing from gimlet eyes.

The sky looks down, and I look
for the fabled haloed beneficence,
the sun-smile of protecting motherly arms,

see only gnarled, cold fingers that refuse to die,
teeth that glitter in the dark, hear the pulsing
steel pump in the chest that never slows.

We are all chicks, downy and wingless,
the darkness full of gimlet eyes and insatiable bellies.

A quiet life

The Oracle’s message is a harsh but just one.

A quiet life

I drift above cool clouds,
above the billowed beauty of wind-blown roses,
the rising rain mist.

I soar above the world’s worries,
remembering only the good things.

I sleep in pink drifts,
away from the gull-screaming sea and salt-sprayed cliffs,
close my eyes and ears to the small boats sinking,
the children too weak to cry,

and I turn up the sound of complacency
that tells me it’s not my problem.

And I would so like to believe
the nodding-headed person with impeccable teeth,

but the wind brings the stench of death,
the beached whales of the end,
and whispers that it is my fault too.

Peacocks

I visited the Oracle yesterday evening rather than this morning because I knew I wouldn’t have the time or the peace and quiet to compose something. I’m certain that the words she gave me were ones I’d never seen before, and the first attempt at a poem gave a strange micro flash instead. The second attempt was a poem, but I didn’t have a title for it. This morning, looking at wikimedia for an illustration, I found this. Woman with Peacocks. And I had the title.

Peacocks 1

Light-fingered, honey-tongued chatting to the assistant, he lifts the swallow-tailed suit from the rail, slips into the shadowy aisle, through the screaming alarm to the car where the woman waits, her cardinal red dress lifted, light-fingered from another store. She drives fast, too fast to see, fast as the flicker of kingfisher wings, so fast they join the music in the trees, the swooping bird symphony with neither judge nor conductor, only light, colour, and this moment.


Peacocks 2

Fingers of light, honey-harmony,
cast shadows, dark as moons where owls cry,
and a woman runs, loose hair flying, red-gowned.
Prey or predator?
She races headlong through the singing light,
the calling dark.
I must, she says,
and her fledged arms swoop,
sharp as the edge of a tongue,
graceful as the curved neck of a swan
into the flickering kingfisher-glass gloom
of a summer forest.

Winter cycling

Winter cycling

Watching the wind in the moaning branches,
black as winter and rocks in a night sea,

listening to wave-crash and water, howling
though blow holes, blacker than the lightless depths,

tasting flying leaves or small leaf-birds, tossed
whistling from bush to bare field,

I see time passing, circling buzzard-gliding,
blood pulsing from ventricle to aorta and back,

running out like tides and sands, ships and spray,
things leaving, things coming back.

Raw

I took all the words the Oracle proposed, in the order (more or less) that they appeared, so what follows is, I suppose, what she wanted me to write. I think I understand what she means.

I can see that this blog is now filling up with irritating glitches. The font has changed, the size shrunk. The beginning of the end.

Raw

She rips through their warm meat
like sipping honey, nibbling chocolate,
licks their inhumanity away with her rasped tongue.

We need less bite in the wind,
fewer heartaches,
and no more sadness in wild waves.

Let water be still as this evening lake,
clustered with moorhens and swans drifting in circles
from nest egg to white beauty.

She watches now, sated, eyes narrowed slits,
recalling past pleasures or future,
that she sees drifting on the mirror water.

She is all and none of us, neither mistress nor sister,
a voice in the wind, the reeds, the pulse of blood in the ear.

Broken wings

I don’t know why the Oracle gave me such a sad poem on such a beautiful hot cloudless day. The painting could go with the words, at a stretch, but I chose it because I like it.

Broken wings

Can a smell be sad,
leave its melancholy on the tongue,
its ache deep in the flesh?

I always think of a ship leaving,
white sail on the horizon,
blue and blue then gone.

Gulls beat long, indifferent wings
then bank, soar, wheel back to shore
on the day’s last long-fingered beams,

and the sky swells, cloud-black,
storm-singing, spilling diamonds in the rain,
your whispered promises,
pocking the water,
sinking without trace.