Kissing Beneath Wood Smoke and Stars

Those first kisses beneath wood smoke and starswill stay with us forever, exploding with capriciouspiquancy that still lingers, effervescent in our mouths.The drought had broken like an ocean wave,a tang of North Sea air, ice-cold and delicious,and all we wanted was to drown in our embrace,heartbeats echoing, rhythmic and auspicious,lost in wood smoke kisses, stars […]

This gift of poetry

is as precious as the new year’s rainreplaced by silent prayers of frosttempering trees with a white crust it’s as welcome as a new dawnof impossible colours, deep skywashed to breath-taking lucidity it’s the joy of low winter sunlighting up a butter-yellow aconitestill clenched fist-tight it’s the trees’ chill breathof leaf mulch, pine and barkand […]

Nellie

She was the waft of lavendergrowing by the front door,a squirt of lily of the valley,and the breezy scent of washing day. She was a little cockney sparrergreeting everyone by their moniker,trilling songs from the good old daysas she polished and flicked dust away. She was the rumble of her shopping trolleyon the broken pavements, […]

Dreamless

It’s a dream that never comes to me: there is no blossoming chestnut tree, no garden of rioting summer blooms, not even a house with empty rooms. My childhood garden has no calm, no mother to rock me in her arms. Because it was so long ago, I search for it with heart of woe. […]

November Morning

Tattered trees pose, stark in their tracery, leaves all fallen sopping to the ground without a sound. A thin veil of amber hints at a struggling sun behind the mist, a sensual bounty across town and country. Warning of the coming chill, frost and fog cover every hill, the muffled silence broken only by the […]