Category Poetry

If music be the food of love then poetry may just be the language of emotion. Home for my own words and those of others who in some way inspire, inform, entertain or educate me.

Not Saving But Drowning

Everybody heard him, the dead migrantBut still they say, moaning:Our compassion’s much further out than you thoughtAnd not saving but drowning. With apologies to Stevie Smith.

Still Life

Shackled by time slippers shuffledStooped to the high-backed seatQueen throned, grey crown ruffledPrince and Princess at her feet  The Prince takes a marbled handBut a child’s touch cannot reach beyondTheir birth to a foreign land To retrieve lost memories fond In…

Please make your selection…

Guinness, lager, shandy, coke(You can go your own way)Wisecracks, quips and sexist jokes(Go your own way)“This chair taken? No feel free!”(You can call it another lonely day)“Your shout Dave I need a pee.” Please make your selection… Fleetwood Mac then…

Vespula vulgaris

Cherry blossom and Coreley church

Paper lantern queenYour subjects crawl on their kneesNo sting in the sun. For me the soundtrack of the first lockdown was the bumblebees feasting on the nectar in the blossom of our cherry trees. It’s a different kind of buzz…

Autumn

Colour-eating cloudWest wind-stacked silver strataFading green to black I love the easy discipline of Haiku. Just three lines: the first of five syllables; the second of seven; and the third back to five. It’s the sort of poetry you can…

Social distancing

Sheila is 85 years old. Sheila has dementia. Shelia lives at Ridgeway Lodge care home. At night she curls herself into ball and sleeps under a single sheet. Like an ammonite in a museum cupboard. Visitors need a PIN number…

Granite City

He didn’t have anywhere in particular to go. No time to be anywhere in particular. So he walked. Walked past the chain stores in the centre of town. Past the charity shops in the gaps. Past the empty shops on…

SODA FOR MILK

Where were you when the child was crying, mourning a loss not yet hers, but near, an inevitability? Were you safely tucked away in a cocoon of comfort, one where ignorance could be a justifiable excuse for your indifference? Etchings…

Nature’s Alarm Clock

I’m woken by the Dawn Chorus. Not yet the full orchestra. A solitary blackbird playing oboe (chirping is too unrefined a word for it) from the uppermost branch of the wind-stooped apple tree and the dot-dot-dot-dash-dash refrain of a wood…