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 […]

Lithophile

Dawdling spring starts to lift winter’s dreich and brumy veil from saturated inky hills, revealing cobalt palimpsests on elephantine grey. Outcrops of land-slid indigo form walls dividing pitch and roll, cross ragged seams of paths and tracks through brown and ochre soil riddled with lumps of flint and shale. In the distance, a sliver of […]