I grew up to the sound- track of waves all around this tiny little island where trees offer cool shade and fruit of the brightest colours the one setback was the sharks that lurked in the water and fed on my family bled it dry drop by drop until it was just me in the […]
Tag: Tuesday Poetics
Early Morning Visit from the Owl
In the early hours of morning, my heart swooped from birch to willow when an owl called at the window, a fluty, chilly shiver. Through the tilted slats of the blind, the honeyed amber flash of eyes and fluttering ‘You-ooh-ooh’ drew me to the frost-kissed pane, froze my breath in a cloud of ‘Oh!’ as […]
Star Birth
How much gas does a mother need? Forget the air – there’s none in space. Energy and gravity played their part, pulling together at the heart of the conception, a passionate ménage à trois. A single push excruciatingly long, squeezing an interstellar nebula into a brand-new star, a twinkle in its mother’s eye, a cosmic […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Question of Tears
‘From where does the thundercloud come with its black sacks of tears?’- Neruda Black sacks of tears arrived on my doorstep today; I thought they’d been delivered by the coalman, until I opened them, and some teardrops got away, attaching themselves to leaves and gutters, dripping on my shoulder, soaking my jacket like a sobbing […]
Portrait in Chalk and Charcoal
He leans into the pavement, close enough to kiss the cold hardness of it, squinting through a dusting of charcoal. There’s a smear on his cheek that points to his ear, red with cold. He has coalminer’s fingers and a cough that rattles his ribs. The jacket across his shoulders has seen better days, but […]
Making Pastry
Oh, the anticipation and the reality of warm-kitchen days when hands touched over a huge bowl or fingers gripped together round a wooden spoon in snowstorms of flour and avalanches of butter eggs and sugar both tied up in aprons red-cheeked and bright-eyed mixing and stirring – baking and burning pies and tarts to tempt […]
Kafka’s Cage
“I am a cage, in search of a bird” – from The Blue Octavo Notebooks Emptiness echoes off my pretty bars, as polished and shiny as they are and, every day when you pass by, you will hear me heave a sigh. I am a cage trapped here below, gazing into an expanse of blue, […]
Waiting for Sleep to Come
Each night I walk observing graves tended and untended, order and disorder. My head- stone is blotched with moss and lichen, my brief story blotted out. I shimmer in the silver moon- light, skim long grass and weeds dusted with dandelion and thistle seeds between lych gate and porch, where closely-mown grass scorched over summer. […]
