Friday, 8 March 2019

How paint an English summer sunset ?

Not a boring monochrome disc
but clear sky blue for a baby boy
and grey clouds fringed with little girl pink.
Then an explosion of lucent orange
flaring to flaming furnace red.
When will some drivers ever learn
signalling's meant to show
not what they're actually doing now
but where they INTEND to go.

Thursday, 28 February 2019

Anybody young who wants to be a politician
should be barred from politics as a national threat.

Wednesday, 20 February 2019

I do my bit for evolution
by killing flies within my reaches
so that those that aren't so stupid
propagate the species.

Friday, 8 February 2019

Pauses

He sat on the kerb, his feet in the road -
not someone I wanted to talk to -
but through his tiredness, sadness showed
so I paused to ask if he was alright.

He lifted his head but glancing at me
served only to act as reminder
mine wasn't the face he wanted to see
and I couldn't help, whatever his plight.

He got to his feet and looked all around.
I asked where he wanted to walk to.
He paused. Then he spoke. It seemed that the sound
echoed deep from the darkness of night.

"My wife has just died. I don't know where she is.
So now I'm just trying to find her."
I paused. Was he mad? Or was some insight his?
He turned. "Well, good luck." His wave seared my sight.

Monday, 4 February 2019

Sissinghurst

The failing summer evening sunshine
struggled across the hazel hedges
which walled the grassy alcove where
a straggled arc of listeners
focused a poet there.

The man stood to recite his verses
(published in his latest volume)
and used the cliché 'poetry sings'.
But while he sang of humankind
a thrush sang thrushy things.

Soon it was joined by blackbirds, robins
shouting their manhood to the heavens.
Sound without sense to human ears
but clear and fresh and ringing true
as daylight disappears.

Boldly the thrush confronts the audience
flaunting rhetorical repetition.
Although it can't make its poetry scan,
unfazed by the human competition
the bird outsings the man.

But as the stain of night's black pigment
spreads through the sky, the thrush must finish.
Without humanity's spoken word
it cannot think beyond its kind.
The man outlasts the bird.

Wednesday, 16 January 2019

'A place for everything and everything in its place'
At least that way you minimise mistakes
like trying to eat with the daisy grubber
and cleaning the toilet with the bath back scrubber.