the moon greets the dawn shimmering from night’s silent well breaking the stark silence of a winter morning, a single crow calls in sleep’s dark cocoon there are sounds no one else can hear beyond the heart beat, air in lungs and surge of blood in ears from the depths of sleep, muffled ticks are […]
Tag: Tuesday Platform
Sprig Spell
I build the spell with witch hazel, a woody frame to brighten gloomy days with spidery flowers in sunset sprays, sublime with spicy scent. I bind the spell with tendrils of evergreen ivy to ward off evil spirits, its heart-shaped leaves glossy with friendship and fidelity. I add some sprigs of rosemary to help you […]
Choking Nature
Humans record artistic impressions of patient Nature’s handiwork in a line of wind-tattered trees, a blanket hem along the skyline and curving sculptured hills, where skylarks rise from barley singing, and dissolve into the darkening welkin. Hills become shadows, the silence palpable over still-hot fields. And yet, in boroughs, towns and cities, greedy humans waste […]
Dragon Hunting
Down by the green and weed-choked lake, among pungent soil and undergrowth, rotting wood, irises and lilies, is the breathtaking kingdom of dragonflies with their large, iridescent eyes and delicate, dazzling, vivid wings, It must be the sunniest part of the day: they need the sun for energy to zip and dart in jerky flight, […]
Lazy Days
The air is intense and fragrant with meadowsweet and elder, the burn of summer a reminder that everything is changing. Seasons will always come and go, the moon and love will wax and wane, giving us another reason to lie down in green meadows, breathe in the sweet trickle of bee-kissed honeysuckle and slumber lazy […]
Sick Room
It is the season of drifting scents, honeysuckle morphine in the dark and the ether of phlox and stocks. Outside, the first summer roses fade. He wants to take secateurs, deadhead delicate corpses, but cannot bear to touch petals the colour of bruised skin or inhale the cloying breath of flowers like the ones in […]
Nature Always Finds a Way
In the hedgerow, a robin spills its joy at weeds and wildflowers unfurling and greening cracks in the pavement, graveyards and verges. It cocks its head and blinks its eye at a trembling of finches in the sky with flashes of yellow and bursts of twittering. Nature always finds a way: midsummer’s insects are only […]
Invisible Friends
A summer-born child, I lived in my head, I drew, wrote, sang and read, peopling worlds with invisible friends to fill the space where reality ends. Now I feel winter creep into my bones and my poetic graffiti covers the stones, written in lichen of saffron and green; childhood’s buried where it can’t be seen. […]
In Bleeding Heart Yard…
pulses quicken at fog-muffled footsteps on the cobbles. Along the soot-soaked lanes, pawn shops and tenements topple, and blackened windows weep tears of grime. They see it all: every good deed and every murderous crime, pickpockets, pimps and paupers, desperate drabs and abused daughters. The dross of life oozes, sobbing and mumbling from the murky […]
Rescued from Mist and Fog
Unearthly shapes drifted like ghosts, crawled from the sea along the coast, crept along ditches, streams and rivers, unravelling with damp clouds of shivers. They entwined their foggy limbs with mine, misting my sight and nibbling my skin, dissolving my bones as they made a start on feet and legs, then up to my heart. […]
writing in north norfolk 