A British Concern - with bits of other poets

A certain slant of light;
Now that's a certain text,
With all rain to my right,
My sensations vexed.

BBC proudly states:
Sunny spells, 19 degrees.
The floods come trembling,
The wind knocks over the gate.

Southern farmers: scared'
No water to quench the thirst.
April: the cruelest month
Tempting us with new birth:

As the June comes meekly in
The wind howls and rains soak:
I would not shrug at snow in summer
Ice to remind us of somewhere else.

A short insomniac thought before sleep finally catches up

and what if you could never sleep,
the haunting years hovering at your feet?
and what if drink kept you awake to fear
the phantoms hollering deep?
how bid thy faustus self when all
are kept? how childish now the rant you swell?

You're five.

You lie asleep nursing a sore throat.
You've braved it all day and I read
News - a world of cruel things:
A man on the cover holding a dead leopard,
We've talked of tigers in the wild;
A grave discovered in a faraway land
But not the one we read in
Books before bed.
I teach you to be kind,
Even when others are not.
Meanwhile I shoot dark thoughts,
Glimmers of revenge.
I tell you to ignore the taunts
When I wish to throttle the tiny mouths
That utter them.
Your brother lies dreaming
And I know it's true
That one day all this will be yours.
Meanwhile I'll teach you to cope
With doubt, with rolling fears
With every growing of your tiny years.

And these things only

And these things only; the pearl white of winter,
a yellow leaf curls like the hand of the dead.
The not where it was of spring and the where it went.
Autumn promised fruit and fires, toasting -
Winds brought fierce wars and nothing the same.
And these things only with the flecks through
Ice remind us of the once and ever of snow.
Leaves: dead shadows.
Through white veils, faces scream
beneath savage walls, trees shiver;
bony hands against a bloodied sky
The skyline, broken-toothed, leaking disease.
And then the Spring, to wipe away everything?

And it was green

And it was green when we walked;
the grass stood tall where
now the shadows fall and come
together restlessly.
Now it is yellow, the crunch
of bones on my boot;
the skeleton of the past
lining the path with broken
fingers. You wore linen for the heat,
I was purple in pleasure
but could not see nor hear
the first leaf fall.
Snow, ice then all is slime.

Reflections

Life is lived in moments:
a bubble in green jelly,
the yellow honey of the sun,
sky as blue as your t-shirt,
as naked as your toes.
A boat nodding like the mad
and moonlight as bright as day,
the afterglow of saints.
Time distilled in fragments,
rolls the stone away.
A scent, a sight of melancholy
sets shivers through the night.
Morning in quiet glory
a birdsong to the ground
that lies in its beaded blanket.
To the mind is a
butterfly caught in amber
like the sun coming
and dipping tree tops in gold.

Clock

Time wastes, slowly ebbing, the dull scratch: idle pens
Re-writing the past through scripts gone wrong.
The conundrum of what, of who, why and when
Will the hand ever move, its Titanic struggle echoes
Eyes that cannot entertain the book and whose hearts
Lie flat like the slain: crosses dignify, mud stains.
The afternoon, buzzing a gauze of sound beyond glass
Other shadows hidden, cooler than this glare.
The silence of the machine that shuts down their hope
Straining of minds at the closing down of time.
Their questions come more slowly when the clock
Seems to slow, they wait in youth, a steady afterglow.
A bird sings past, a streak of freedom, a dart of hope
But the clock holds them back stroke after stroke after stroke.