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.

The Giant's Causeway

On emerald green, I stopped at the sea
And thought my way to you.
These miles of chopping blue
That marked the distance in us.
It was cold - I remember - despite the sun
My cheeks burned with the wind.

What did I think, then?

Perhaps I saw your face in all things,
Or heard in the waves your whisper,
Your voice.
Imagining the lap of the rocks
And warm earth between,
Enticing forward.

I also wondered then, if on that immigrant's
coast your thoughts sailed back to me?

Daffodils - St Annes 2006

The daffodils came early that year,
Bringing green shoots to the brown-fogged
Miser of winter, its snow now seeping the earth.
In the park, where children sing soon to scream,
They budded yellow at the tip -
Threatening to burst and to spill
Beneath the war memorial. The brooding
Soldier and all his loss made good
By the earth's solid promise to renew and forget.
The daffodils came early that year,
How could they see the hard frost that would
slaughter them like the fresh mown grass,
would bite at their heads like animals?
The frost came later that year:
As unexpected as the letter,
The phone call late at night,
Always the same - news that can't wait.
The young do rise the old do fall.
Young boys smile and want to fight,
Girls become women come what May
And daffodils will nod their heads
While the walkers pass by on their way.

Spring

Heaving sighs breathe heavy into the aisles of yesterday,
A raven chokes above the bleak sky and rain plods the ground
Damp with leaves ushering under boughs less golden.
White upon white slowly ebbs back as brown monotony
Retakes its hold on innocence; again the earth whispers.
A punctuation mark of a crow streaks the leadened sky
Heavier than air, falling in droves on droves of misery.
The hills shiver in their cold canopy of frost which cracks
At water’s insistence, soon to break with idolatry of the missing:
All those ghosts of time clanging in the midnight frieze.
The blunt heads of daffodils come rashly early
Cannot sink back, claw back into some other place til
Sun arrives finally to light hard places and set black shadow.
Now, very now, a snowdrop pokes out its finger to test
And bravely comes to life.

am

Embarrassed, morning lifts her eyes,
Stares light shafts, paints in colour.
Coffee buzzing, coughing like a man - awake -
only just, Percolates and fizzes.

Softly, through a gauze of silence
Voices and a hum of low traffic;
Broken sirens and snapped out market stalls.
Silence packed away with clattering force.

The air seems crisp with a hope electrical pulses
A new place of desire and hope - and dread
Dawn now blushes strangely like
A shy lover after the night.

To kiss night out and embrace with the mistress
Day, a liaison of broken promises.

Empty Rooms

Vacant, as they might say,
Left open, solitudinous spaces
Swarming with memories
Of things yet to come:
A thousand legends viewed
Through mists and ghosts.
A hundred times and the
Vision flocks and peels.

The bags packed, all gone
Imagining the place alone
As we slide along in holiday time
The posters down, windows closed
A summer’s sparkling sea
Washes the memory clean
Salt purifying and in drying
Crystallises

The sun. Lights up the faces,
Shadows cower in places
It’s the theory of these spaces
Which shall keep us all warm.