Grasshopper
You made a myth of a whitewashed wall,
Jarring ambassador in green…
Handles
I never considered handles before this, never wondered who’d held my borrowed basket last filled it, gripped it tight, placed it back neat or abandoned by checkout, unsettling us in its eerie. Didn’t ask, didn’t wonder what those hands did, who they touched waved slapped caressed, ever so tender. Did they stare at the milk…
This is the Southern Service
…there on the edge of the flat stretching roof
Stood a magpie, a gull and a pigeon
Neatly spaced –
The cast from some terrible joke.
word gnats
Vanishing sky
I had a Charlie Brown moment this morning.
Up early, I glanced out of the window and was struck dumb by the sky.
Blackfriars Beach
mid-stream on a shit-spattered barge,
cormorants unfold themselves as crosses,
anchored to a Thames, expectant
The Impossibility of Worthington lakes
Let’s say I was there.
For work.
In a hotel near three reservoirs for Wigan.
Let’s say I slipped out back on an unexpected walk,
on a circular path…
On the listening ridge
I’m back. It’s been a while. The woods behind my parents’ house on Tickenham Ridge haven’t changed hugely in the last few months – the seasons have cycled through and for now the hill is a shining riot of green in a dozen shades.
An hour earlier I was in these woods in company with my two boys, my sister, brother-in-law, two nephews and my Dad, but this time I am alone and things feel different.
Make a break for the trees: Crystal Palace’s Stambourne Woodland Walk
It gives me hope a place like this. A small brown sign outside the Queen’s Hotel, Church Road the only local clue. Stambourne Woods this way, down that gravel drive and through the gate. On the house next door another sign gives red framed warning of a moose who isn’t there. This sliver of…
Lyrical by the sea: Clevedon’s Poet’s Walk
Clevedon: the most boring seaside town in all England; filled with dusty, fusty little sepia-tinted shops, selling dull stuff like lacework, horse brasses and pink and blue vintage porcelain salt-and-pepper sets in the shape of Edwardian ladies.
At least that’s what I used to think…
To the top of Tickenham
Tickenham, North Somerset is a long village strung along the B3130 road to Clevedon. On the surface, it’s nothing special, a fairly non-descript ribbon development – the kind of place you either live in or pass through on the way to somewhere else.
Whirling
Magpie Tales blog invited people to submit a poem or vignette based on this picture. Here’s mine: The moment never stops, its memory left breathlessly hanging, catching witnesses endlessly off-guard Bewildered in half-sight they hear the blood noise spatter before an uncertainty of silence, A chaos of imbalance twists into canvas Polishing a darkened crimson history until it shines A formless…
Tuesday night rantish
A rant.
Grrr vs Ahhh during the London Olympics.
The Revenant
Magpie Tales blog invited people to submit a poem or vignette based on this picture. She’ll get you in the end, Stretched out and unaware, Or watchfully expectant, She’ll come, she always does. Unable to resist, you’ll slip Down gradually, gratefully, Allowing sky blue water To do its work. Hag-like at times, she crouches, Opening…
Visual inspiration from The Mag
Is there anything beneath your surface?
Maybe you’re all surface?
Hello…Hello…Hell No,
No ripples on your vacant face
Poems from booktitles
Just entered a Guardian blog challenge to try to make poems from book titles. My effort’s below. Here’s the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/oct/06/compose-a-poem-from-book-titles The Poetry of book titles As I walked out one midsummer morning Neither here nor there Dreams of leaving Linger awhile Landscape and memory, Like water for chocolate, Different Seasons Clinging to the wreckage…
Bookshelf invitation – Magpie Tales
Magpie tales blog asked people to write a poem, or vignette based on this picture: To make it tougher, I gave myself thirty minutes. Here’s my response. Every book is unfinished. The secret’s out. There’s something lacking within, And they squat on the shelves going nowhere. Abandoned on the edge of the road. Mere objects…
The Narroways
In you went on foot, down two tight lanes,
ambling, sloping through the allotments,
each earth pocket nailed down like a promise,
with bramble and beanstalk to mark the bounds:
A hundred little empires of roll-ups and potatoes.
Arriving at Whitby
And coming down from high moors
I caught a whiff of Whitby,
Through bitching rain, a coastal squall,
Came a smalltown smell so subtle almost dreamt
The Green Man – after Wallace Stevens
My attempt to sound a little like Wallace Stevens, with a poem about a mythic Green Man.
