The field of daisies,
brightening up the view of the palace,
pushed up by generations.
Category: Poetry
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Further Reductions
Urban spaces –
they do their best to define us
as we do our best to push through the visual noise,
through the cultural pollution of busy streets,
through life thrust at us easily and cheaply –
consumed, discarded, unlived… -
Without a shadow of doubt
As you walk without a shadow of doubt, you enter the valley of the shadow of death. You will fear no evil, for you will be that evil, never seeing itself or the world, but seeing your reflection upon the face of the world.
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Danger Of Death
I think it is vitally important to learn from history.
George Santayana once said that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
I can add that one of the first things we learn from the past is that those who repeat it are doomed. -
Bare interface
As the tide goes out
and the interface between the land and the sea is laid bare,
the soggy mud reflects the majestic sky
so clearly,
so deeply,
so poignantly…
Tears well up in my eyes.
I feel at one with the mud,
but not with the sky. -
Abandoned
Forgotten rooms, abandoned spaces, full of rubbish. Rubbish that drives you mad. Leave it there in the dark. Leave it there to rot – ugly feelings, broken relationships, things you had to forget in order to forgive… Lock the door and throw away the key. Phew… Isnt’t it better? You can start with a clean slate, clear conscience, honest gaze. Aren’t you nice? You can be happy now. You can be whole and pure. You can flower, a beautiful snow-drop, untouched by the rotting rubbish. Oh, but it gets in through the roots, it fills your fruit with poison of all that festered there, in the dark, in the abandoned spaces. You try desperately: keeping your thoughts pure and your living clean… but the poison coursing through your veins makes you into a deadly nightshade. All that you touch withers and dies, it turns into rubbish. Rubbish that drives you mad. You build them up, layer upon layer, abandoned spaces, forgotten rooms. How many layers now? How many more can you build, before you realise that you can never start over, never be clean, never become a snow-drop… before you scream, shrill and ugly, through tears and despair, bending over the withered remains of another broken relationship. And there is no way back, no way to clean out the spaces that feed your roots, for they are the forgotten rooms, the rooms that you locked and threw away the key.
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Ode to Spring
Forming a watercolour from a sketch –
new blooms and leaves are springing up on trees.
At five o’clock the pigeons squall and kvetch –
one wants to grab them by the neck and squeeze.
Deciduous adults drop woolly socks,
teenagers sprout knees and belly-buttons,
their clothes bloom into heterodox;
the streets are full of lambs that dress as muttons.
The warming sun incites the happy shirkers
as winds are loosing their winter punch.
The lawns fill with blooming office workers
and rubbish left from their picnic lunch.
The fuel-poor stop heating and start eating,
with fuller stomachs hearts begin to sing.
As life begins anew, the sheep are bleating.
The spring has come. Hooray for blooming spring.
