We can’t blame Helios for burning at full swelter, as he has always done. Dedalus may have made the wings but Icarus was drawn, like all who followed sun or moon or Mars and tumbled helter-skelter, mystified by darkness, dazzled by light and heat, aiming for the unknown. We neglected the familiar, colour-blind to Earth […]
Category: Poems
A poem to sum up my feelings in this post.
Chalk Marks, Bears and What Lay Beneath
When I was a child the pavementwas a canvas, a joyful defacement:I made colourful chalk marks on the grey,a street artist, until the rain cameand washed them away.Hopscotch boxes led my feetacross the concreteand cracks warned of bearswaiting to eat meif I didn’t stay in the squares.I was curious about what laybeneath the heavy grey;grass […]
Can’t See the Wood
It used to be a rare thing to be lost for words but here I am grasping for synonyms that have slipped down the rabbit hole. I used to write every day but, lately, the air does not move around me. It’s windy outside, the […]
Aghast
The beaches were awash and reeling with sunburnt flesh, already peeling, and tempers flared up in the sun at polite requests to please move on, oblivious to the growing shadow of the Covid reaper. Do they not know the way to measure social distance? After several months of abstinence, entitlement had taken the place of […]
Unexpected
Immersed in a poem, I was a lovelorn mermaid enchanted by vampire squid in fluorescent coral glades. Raised from the deep by the ring of the telephone, I looked out at the garden, dappled green and overgrown. I spotted it suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, the unexpected flash of an electric blue […]
Sprung from Richest Rain
Early spring ice melts channels in mountains, fields and hills, loosens hardened sods under the metal plough’s thunder. Grey crusts and clods break in the furrows’ crumbling wake, surfed by flocks of gulls and crows pillaging carefully crafted rows. Later in the ripening year, earth fulfils the farmer’s prayer; tender growth greens the plain, rapeseed […]
When all else fails…
there is the shade of the willow tree the stone gnome sleeping peacefully the deer that chew its healing leaves the green light shifting in a gentle breeze the piebald magpie with its chatter about things that do not really matter the cat that climbs its crooked branches the scraps of sun in rays and […]
A Little Love Song
You embrace us in your hills and pastures, and suckle us from softly gleaming rivers. You nurture us with fruit, plant and grain, and show us how to grow them all again. You teach us how to flourish together like trees in forests and birds of a feather. And what do we give you in […]
Peaceful Protest
Today, I woke to daisies, their childish sunny faces embroidered in the buzz cut of yesterday’s mown grass. Escaping from the tendrils of untamed honeysuckle, an anarchy of roses, peaceful and perfumed, dew-washed and breeze- blown, outside a writer’s room. Nature bears no banners scrawled with hateful phrases, she demonstrates her power with branch, thorn […]
Broken
van Gogh wrote: ‘The conscience is a man’s compass.’ Our compass broke, we have no common sense or sentience, and Earth is barely turning – into a bad joke. We harvest palm oil and rainforests choke, oceans on this so-called blue planet are drowning in a mass of plastic, and fur-coated men grin as polar […]
writing in north norfolk 