As a child, art was my first love; I drew, chalked and painted freehand, thinking I knew it all. Then came the lesson on perspective. I couldn’t see the point in the distance where all the lines joined up. My landscape of road and houses was lopsided, a landslide tumbling down a non-existent mountain. A […]
Category: Poems
Burnished
How many brass lamps must be burnished before my wish is granted? Not even the golden lamps of autumn are furnished with a genie to do my bidding. And heaven has so many stars on which I’ve wished, all silver, like the moon, which gave me seven lines that rhyme, and this poem can be […]
Dark Future
You go to sleep and wake to a steady drip and wonder if it’s radioactive or pure and clear, like the streams you once knew. Above ground, no fresh water remains: no trace of rain or cloud or sky. There is just the twilight of your cave, the weak rays that find their way through […]
The Authenticity of Autumn
Woodland paths glimmer in the breath of dawn and shadows withdraw, musky miasmas of mulch. Leaves spin, dizzy helicopters, colours bright as fire, until they land in a dog-pile and rot underfoot. Wracked with weather scars, ancient trees slow, branch and root, their fissures adorned with fungus and spiralling mushrooms of sulphurous yellow, orange and […]
Without black there would be no contrast
nowhere to hang the moon and stars fireworks and bonfire sparks no colour to express the dog of depression no clarity of words in books no shadows in the sleep-soaked room at night the pair of complicit magpies haunting the garden (two for joy) would be all white their once glossy jet feathers and impertinent […]
Sharp Teeth
A flash of amber eyes in the twilight of the woods is answered with a growl from my own throat. I don’t claim to be a good mother, but I can howl and have a fierce heart, red as a hood. I gather them in the heat of my lupine love again, child and grandchild […]
Cyborg Skin revisited
From the egg-like membrane of her head to the crescent-mooned toes on her feet, her skin was yielding and not synthetic; soft and warm, it responded to my touch. She was programmed to be forever childlike but she possessed an adult logic, a precociousness lacking innocence, as if she knew my every thought; a hint […]
Your Voice
I have heard songbirds’ over- lapping whistles, the whisper of sparrow wings wheeling on the breeze, raindrops bouncing off dusty autumn paths, and the rattling somersaults of the last leaves from trees. I’ve listened to the sun sizzle into evening, bats flicker in cooling twilight air, snowflakes kissing a frozen window- pane, a cat purring […]
One small voice in the shift between October and November
For days, the steady pounding rain drowned out the poetry that bubbled in my soul; my small voice hobbled, stuck in the mud of an old-fashioned October. But this morning, on the cusp of November, bright stained-glass shadows dappled the sodden grass, where unexpected sun illuminated the willow in the garden disrobing yellow leaves before […]
Passing Rain
The echo of distant rain started to muffle the air and, all too soon, distance was lost to cloud closing in like wet sheep, and sheeting rain that dripped and drummed, persistent and loud on the roof. The willow in the garden blazed with green moss and elaborate dripping lichen, while I stood dazed at […]
writing in north norfolk 