Welcome to 2024. I was going to kick off this year’s blogging with a 2023 reading round-up, or a post on reviews of Street Sailing my debut poetry collection, or a long-fermented essay on John William’s Butcher’s Crossing, or a piece on a trip to Belgrade. As with many planned blogs, I’ve yet to get around to any of these.

Maybe one of them will see the light of day soon. In the meantime, for your delight and delectation, here are three new poems recently shared via Black Bough Poetry’s Top Tweet Tuesday and one via The Broken Spine, sharing poems on that - much under represented in poetry – lunar object, The Moon.

Happy New Year!

M4 at night

Rain falls from pitch-black skies.
Underneath; migrating, red-eyed herds insist 
upon stampeding backwards.

The next train 

Rough fabric rows of vacant canvas, await 
future ghosts to frame as transitory subjects.

Moonset 

If we woke, one night, to see it fall 
– the moon – unhinged by our lack 
of gravity. Would that send scales tumbling
at last? Hushed like squabbling siblings, 
abruptly silenced by mother crashing out 

the door, finally having heard enough. Might we 
wonder then what’s going on? Think WTF? The sky 
is holed, our anchor-rock is lost. Those waveless 
seas, once filled with hope, now washed-out,
nameless lunar plains.

Tranquillity, Serenity, Nectar, done. Clouds 
and Crises shaking empty heads. Clinging on 
for comfort to ‘I told you so’. Hubristic satisfaction 
leaving only bitterness behind. Planetary
exit wound suspended in unsilvered night.

Our shining satellite reduced to aching void. 
Would such a desperate act of warning do 
the trick? After famine, war, virus, fire and 
drought fell short? Politicians and pundits 
sweating at the end, forced 

to explain away the moon. Even then, 
showily disputing the scientists’ account
of its passing in a suicidal orbit. ‘Oh no, no’, 
they will insist, ‘this is fine, we shouldn’t
move so fast, we must…